Tonight, I was meandering on Twitter (I really shouldn't, the place is kind of a pit...), but every once in a while there's a tweet that gets you thinking. One of the people I follow mentioned him having tickets to an upcoming show of his favorite band--KANSAS. I thought it would be fun to send him a picture of a concert ticket from almost forty years ago.
I found the ripped stub among other old concert tickets I've saved from my childhood. I took a picture, shared it in a tweet.
There's so much of my childhood in that picture of that stub. In the late 1970s to the early 1990s concerts were a big part of my life. I even wore a RUSH concert-T in one of my high school yearbook pictures, my junior year, I think. In order to see our favorite bands, we had to wait months, even years for them to come to town. You had to actually camp out at the Salt Palace ticket office days in advance to guarantee even getting inside the venue to see the show.
That was the first part of the adventure.
Then, once you got a ticket, you figured out where you were sitting, the closer to the stage, the better--obviously. Hard to pack in a decent camera to take pictures, and there was no way you could actually video part of the show. A seat super close to the stage became a status symbol, to be admired by all your other rocker friends. I can't remember exactly if Section 23, Row E, Seat 6 was good, but if I recall, it wasn't that bad.
KANSAS was my first concert. I believe it was the Audio-Visions tour. Great show. It was the first of many that followed. Heck--when a show cost less than ten bucks, you saw a lot of them.
Seeing the ticket, holding it, turning it over...those tickets meant a lot of a geeky skinny undersized teenager who loved the music of the era. And if you were lucky enough to see an act live, you left with the memories, and a ripped concert ticket stub that you can write about forty years later.
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