Have you ever been part of a pop culture moment that didn’t mean much to you, only to later find out that others would have killed to be in your position?
The one that stands out for me happened in 1993, when I saw Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. in concert together. This was back when they were still friends, before Biggie’s first album dropped. Biggie only had a single out at the time, and he was opening for the Brand New Heavies. Tupac came out on stage with him and performed a few songs.
I wasn’t much of a Tupac fan, and to this day I’m not really a fan of his music. Biggie, I can understand why people like him, and I like some of his songs, but really, I was never a huge fan of his either. My clearest memory of the show was my girlfriend about to fight a couple of girls who kept shoving her to get closer to the stage when Tupac appeared.
When I mention that story to some hip hop fans now, they act as if being there would have been the most awesome thing ever, and I can see why, with all the drama that followed. But at the time, I was like “meh,” and it still isn’t that big of a deal for me.
Probably not a watershed moment, but apparently I saw the original line-up of the Allman Brothers and have almost no memory of their performance. :smack:
(I was there to see The Chambers Brothers and remember exactly nothing about the Allman Brothers’ set, except that Little Richard ran onto the stage and started ranting about something or other before they hustled him off.)
I saw Fall Out Boy play in 2003 on a makeshift stage in a gym. Actually the stage was set up such I was standing behind it for the whole concert. I then met Pete Wentz and got his signature. It was actually a really nice concert and I have liked a few of their hit songs since then but I never got really into the band.
I saw them twice. They were the opening acts at two different concerts – Chicago and Mountain. I remember being disappointed the second time because it was the same act I’d already seen.
I would have seen them a third time, but the concert started two hours late (and they went to a lame local band as the opening act) and my ride decided to go home. :smack:
I’ve also seen them with Berry but no Duane, and without either.
Back in the day we went to see a band with a funny name, playing downtown in a loft, across from city hall. New fangled punk-rock, sort of. I think tickets were about $10 including a ticket for a free beer at a pub across the street.
A few short years later, that same band was playing to an audience from all over the North East at the Dome. It was a BIG event for our city!
And that band, ladies and gentlemen was …The Police!
I saw David Bowie back in about 1970 or '71 (I can’t even remember accurately) when he was that guy who had a big hit with Space Oddity a year or two ago and then pretty much faced out of public consciousness. It was an open air concert thing, but very small scale. IIRC the headliners were May Blitz (if you ever heard of them), and Bowie was just one of several smaller acts on the bill. As I recall the whole performance was pretty understated. There were no flamboyant clothes or obvious makeup, and I think (though I can’t swear) that he and his band were seated through all or most of their set. I do remember him apologizing, because, he said, the monitors were not working and they couldn’t hear themselves playing. I do not recall any of the songs the played. I wasn’t paying that much attention.
I couple of years later he was a huge star (and I was a huge fan), and he has been ever since.
My senior year of high school, my girlfriend and I thought we were going to Carowinds to see the Power Station. Somehow we got the date wrong and actually wound up seeing some other act perform, whose name I now neither remember nor am interested in researching. However, they wound up with some big hits in the early 90s, IIRC.
I saw Springsteen play in a small venue at my college. a few years before “Born to Run”. He wasn’t well known at all but there was small rumblings that he was the next Dylan. My friend and I walked out of the concert. Bruce was so mumbly we couldn’t understand a word he sang & all the songs had three times more words than they needed. He seemed pretentious & it was a turn off.
He got better & I became a great fan, and I haven’t been able to make it to one of his shows since.
Not performance-related, but I was a worker-bee at a big reunion of past and current players of an NFL team. I am not what you’d call a sports fan. I had the opportunity to get many, many autographs, had I cared to pursue them. I think I had a few of the players sign a T-shirt and/or a program, and I’m not even sure what happened to either of those items. I wish I had known someone for whom those autographs would have meant a lot, because I would have gladly passed them along.
When I was a child, my parents took me to see a popular San Francisco act called Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. I hated it – I found it creepy and disturbing (they made a rose bleed! – shudder) Of course a few years later they started performing as Penn and Teller, and the rest is history.
I’ve mentioned before that for the past 20 years, I had the opportunity to attend the NCAA Final Four and/or the Super Bowl if I’d asked nicely, but since I had absolutely no interest, I always let the tickets go to someone who would appreciate them.
It was 1982 and my senior year of High School. I went to the L.A. Sports Arena to see the J. Geils Band. The opening act bored me. It was an Irish band that I had never heard of called U2.
Kind of niche, but I’ve met a number people who’ve expressed jealousy at the fact that I saw Neutral Milk Hotel on two different tours back in the 1990s. The first time there couldn’t have been two dozen people in the room. I was there to see the second band on the bill. The second time, the venue was packed because they had a major college radio hit with “Holland 1945.” Even then, the bar only held a few hundred, so there weren’t that many there.
My wife has better claims for this thread. Not only was she with me for both of the above, but she managed to see a World Series seventh game and Cal Ripken’s 3000th hit. In neither case was she thrilled to be present.
I was maybe 18, 19, spending the summer working in the US and my boss’ wife offered to take me to a *Metallica *concert. Which was seven shades of awesome in and of itself, mind you.
But there was this weird band opening, didn’t much care for their sound and as for the lyrics, super lazy stuff. Mostly they repeated the same thing over and over again. Nu metal bullshit, man. No soul to that crap whatsoever. After one or two songs I just elbowed my way back out of the pit to go take a piss, grab some drinks and just hang around in the shade, waiting for the real act to begin.
I still want to dopeslap my younger self for missing out on *System of a Down *before they’d really made it big.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but… a couple of weeks ago a friend of my daughter’s was visiting, and he said, “WOW! You’ve got a first edition of the Simarillion!”
Yeah, I got it when it first came out… never thought that much about it.
I rolled my eyes through a Marilyn Manson set as he opened for Nine Inch Nails during the Downward Spiral tour before he became the official scary-to-parents artist of the late 90s.
I was quite bored with Queens of the Stone Age when they opened for The Smashing Pumpkins at the Roxy in LA in 2000.
The only ones I’ve ever had anyone envious about were seeing (and meeting after one show) The Replacements a few times as well as R.E.M. and The Pixies (all in the '80s). I saw U2 on both The Joshua Tree and Zoo TV (Achtung Baby) tours, but those weren’t that rare, I suppose.