Saw: X, Stray Cats, The Bangles, U2 in a small club in Madison Wisc. Saw Bob Marley and the Whalers, the Police in a different small venue in Mad-Town.
Went to see Dave Brubeck in 1972 when I was one of the youngest person in the venue.
Became a vegetarian when I was in college in the late '70’s.
(ooh third page)
I’ve never even heard of them (Flight of the Conchords). 
I was there for X and U2 (Merlyn’s?). Also saw REM in a barn and Violent Femmes dozens of times, a couple for free including one on the Memorial Union Terrace.
Yeah I was at Merlyns(loved that place)…did we dance? 
Green Day performed in my dorm about 2 years before they released Dookie.
They rocked and were really cool guys.
I saw Cherry Poppin’ Daddies before Zoot Suit Riot, which many people probably don’t realize is a greatest hits album.
Fark.com discovered T.a.T.u. before their album was translated into English–I have a few of their Russian videos that I pulled down from an FTP site before they had a hit in the US. I suppose that’s kind of like the t-shirt: “I was into 'NSync when they were underground”.
I remember in August 1981, when this weird, wonderful thing called MTV appeared on the cable box. I( think a good chunk of the world was into it, too, only a few months after that, so it doesn’t really satisfy the OP requirement of “WAY before…”.)
God, I am dating myself with this one…
Paul Revere and the Raiders played for a homecoming dance in the fall of 1963 at my small Oregon high school. They were known in the Northwest, but not beyond. Later, Dick Clark would make them the house band on one of his TV shows, and they sold many, many records.
To quote Allmusic.com “during their three biggest years (1966-69) got as much radio play as any group of that decade, sold records in numbers second only to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and received nearly as much coverage in the music press of the period (which included a lot of teen fan magazines) as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.”
I was the first person on the SDMB to recommend Regina Spektor. I heard a review of her album on NPR (so I wasn’t that far ahead of the curve), bought her CD, shared it with my sister, who spread it to all her friends. It’s nice to see her successful.
This thread reminds me of one of my favourite songs
LCD Soundsystem - Losing My Edge
sample lyric-
"I was there in 1968.
I was there at the first Can show in Cologne.
I’m losing my edge.
I’m losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks.
I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.
I’m losing my edge.
To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin.
I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties."
I first got to know Sam Stone on local dial-up BBSes using a 1200, and then later a 2400 baud external modem. Some of our peers were connecting at 300, so it was pretty speedy! This was 1989, and after some user meets and a short flight in the close quarters of a C-150, the rest is history.
You’re ahead of me, but only just. I first read a Discworld book in 87, which was just as Equal Rites was released in paperback. Pratchett didn’t really start to become especially popular until the early 90s.
On a semi-related note, she’s not amazingly famous yet, though she has a growing fanbase, but I knew fantasy author Trudi Canavan before she got published - about 15 years before. I’ve known her since we were teenagers.
The best I’ve got is being into anime back when the Anime Club at a major university was just 10 people swapping fan-subtitled bootlegs.
I grew up loving the works of M.C. Escher, who has since become somewhat of a pop culture icon.
Some of my co-workers recommended a new fantasy novel to me, so I went out and bought it, and thus have the fairly rare original US silver-covered printing of A Game of Thrones.
Kung Fu movies and Hong Kong stars.
I was a rabid fan of Jackie Chan, Jon Woo, Jet Li, Yuen Wo Ping, the Yuen brothers, long before the general public stateside. I had to comb import shops for crappy VHS prints and bootlegs, and scope out midnight film festivals, while the general public was only noticing the new kid on the block Van Damme.
Oh you mean you’re revealing how old you are…that is NOT how I read it originally
Not sure if this counts, but…
Back before voice-over-IP, in-game chat systems, and all that jazz became popular, I was a major user of TeamSpeak.
To the point where, for the longest time, my testimonial was one of the ones listed on their front page. In the top five, if I remember correctly.
(I shoulda saved the page, dangit!)