I was listening to the Silversun Pickups this time of last year and they only recently seem to be gaining any mainstream popularity. One local station keeps playing “Lazy Eye” and then saying, “That was “Lazy Eye,” by the Silversun Pickups, from their new album Carnavas.”
Yeah, new if new is a year old.
I don’t even LIKE them that much, but I’ve been listening to them a little for over a year.
I’ve known I was a smart ass much longer than anyone else I know.
I saw X live, back when they were still an opening band. They rocked.
Sadly, most of the stuff I’ve been into has never really become popular - the one exception being R.E.M. I remember playing their I.R.S. albums for friends back in the 80s and getting reactions like “Turn that shit off! That guy’s voice is horrible!”. Similarly with The Cure, I guess.
And while The Pixies aren’t exactly huge and were never exactly unknown, I (also) saw them back during their first go-round in the 80s - no arena venues or prices, either.
They did!?!?! OMG, where the hell was I? Please tell me I wasn’t somewhere listening to Otis and the fucking Elevators while this was going on. Please.
Recently, a friend congratulated me on realizing how amazingly talented the actress Jaime Pressley is, before anyone else did. From the first time I saw her in “Poison Ivy - The New Seduction”, I realized that out of everyone in that craptacular piece of garbage, she was the only one trying her best to rise above the material she was given. This quickly followed with an episode of the short-lived hairball known as “Nightman”, where she played a grown woman with the mind of a child. Playing someone mentally limited takes great intelligence and insight into the character, a la Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”. It was nice to see I was right about her. 
They played Mabel’s a couple of times and, what was that place on the corner? Damn! Otis and the Elevators…God! Haven’t thought of them for ages!
Man, could I go for a fish sandwich from Deluxe!
Dang. I was going to post that I’ve been into them since their cover of Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”, but you’ve got me beat by a mile.
I’d kill to have that demo!
Other than that, I’ve been into Kids in the Hall since the show first aired on CBC.
I am such a loser. I don’t think I ever saw JA at Mabel’s. I certainly hope I didn’t actually see them and not remember.
I wanted cheese fries from Doc’s really bad the last time I was there, but it’s gone…now it’s a coffee bar. Damn Gen Y and their coffee.
Burgers & fries at Murphy’s are still the best, though.
I really enjoyed the personals in the Reader while in HS back in the mid-70s! 
The cool thing about getting older is if you hang onto your clothes as they go out of style, at some point you’ll transform from clueless to trendsetter.
Well, not really, but an old fart can dream!
My wife just bought me a shirt yesterday to go with a pair of plaid shorts I own, saying “Plaid shorts are in now.” The shorts in question have to be 12 years old!
And if anyone can say they saw The Blue Light Specials at Mabels, I’ll buy you a Coke!
Guess jeans. I’d seen an ad in Seveteen magazine (Anna Nicole Smith’s breakthru modeling job, as a matter of fact) and coveted them. So I took all the clothes I’d received for Christmas and traded them in to be able to buy the exorbantly expensive $50 jeans. I was the first in my high school to have them, no one even knew what they were. Just a few months later, Guess was a huge national trend…
What qualifies GAPs Khakis as their invention?
Nirvana. When “Nevermind” exploded and they were suddenly No. 1 on the charts, we were delighted but flabbergasted. Nirvana was on the radio?? Nirvana was number one on the radio?!?!
For that matter, Bowling for Soup. They were from my college town and played the same house parites and local venues my band did, and everybody knew everybody. Same with the Toadies, now that I think about it.
To a lesser extent, White Zombie.
I’ve had my tongue pierced since '93.
Ditto. Some friends of mine opened for them in the dinky, dank 7th Street Entry in Mpls (where my band later played).
I was sick of Cheap Trick long before their first album and when they got big I’d think about the girls who would’ve slept with me for the seats I used to complain about because we were too close to the stage.
Embarrassingly, I was one of the first people to dress up and carry on at The Rocky Horror Picture Show outside of New York
I was really into Fabulous Fifties furniture and lounge music. I had a whole apartment. One could argue that those things were never polpular I suppose.
I saw the Blues Brothers live before they went on tour and recorded their first album.
I was one of the first people (if not THE first) to play Sarah McLachlan on the radio in the United States. I got an import of her first album Touch before it was released in the US. My husband saw her first tour (I unfortunately missed it) but I did see the tours after that, including one where, earlier in the day before the show, she played solo acoustic guitar at a Best Buy.
Ditto Tori Amos. I got a promo of her album Y Kant Tori Read when it was first released. I thought it was pretty much crap, but I did like and played “The Etienne Trilogy.” I knew about her first solo album, Little Earthquakes (which I loved), long before it was released in the US, and saw her first tour at a tiny club in Chicago called Schubas.
Ditto Enya (if we’re talking solo and not with Clannad). I had a promo of her first solo album The Celts and built a show around it.
Ditto Jewel. Two fellas on a music mailing list I was on lived in San Diego and they’d talk about this singer who played the clubs and lived in her car. They’d record the club shows and pass them around the mailing list. I saw her perform (the only time I have) at a coffee house in Chicago right after her first album was released and before she had her hit.
I was a Genesis fan about a decade before they hit it big.
I was a Black Sabbath fan before Ozzie’s antics made them famous.
In 1978 I was a huge fan of an album called Open Fire by (Ronnie) Montrose. It’s an instrumental album and I played that thing to death, especially the song “Town Without Pity” which was getting a lot of airplay. When I heard Montrose was coming to Kansas City (where I lived then) I had to go. I was surprised when I heard there were going to be two opening acts. I’d never heard of either of the bands but I was there to see Montrose so who cared. I ended up liking both bands and bought their albums the next day. They were Van Halen and Journey.
As mentioned in another thread, I saw Dido at a small club in Chicago before the Eminem song came out.
I could list tons more but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment that became popular to an extent that the general public would probably have heard of them.
I was a Parrot-Head years before they existed. My best friend’s brother lived next door to Jimmy Buffett in Key West. He sent us a copy of “White Sport Coat” the week it was released, and I’ve been a fan ever since. To me, “Margaritaville” is Later Buffett.
I saw Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different at a science fiction con in fall 1971 (or possibly spring of 1972), before it debuted in American theaters and long before the show appeared on US television. My jaw fell to the floor at how wonderful it was and I was an instant convert.
I went to the very first concert that Kraftwerk gave in America. I knew who they were before that, but first is as early as you can get.