Where was your first concert show?
Searching for an old photo brought me to a box that had that envelope I had forgotten about: ahh there were those ticket stubs! Preserved with the rare trinkets because there wasn’t a Compact Disc case to save them in like the rest, rare stubs along with some old sports tickets. There were a lot of live shows those 40 years ago (so many without a saved ticked stub)- just bits of memories now stuck in fading synapses. “All we have are our memories -they define our lives” .. I heard somewhere.
Dad had remembered Gene Harris alright, as he’d talked with him that night, recalling a gig he’d seen Gene at many years ago. And much like that other iconic Count Basie night, his memory is sharp with certain performances that long ago, but like we all, more specific memories --even more recently made-- are foggy to recall as the years get on. We had seen quite a few gigs here in those 80s and 90s between Jazz Works and Chapultepec (sadly now both venues gone)—he’d buy me a Pepsi at the ‘Pec just so we could grab a close booth (first row or table now gratefully a forever habit). I was sure we saw Horace Silver too though he couldn’t recall, and this lack of proof had been agonizing me since the great song came up in family conversation. Aha! There’s that ticket!
The very first live concert stage for me was Roberta Flack. I can recall seeing her way down there proscenium and vividly ingesting the magical place of the Red Rocks: young eyes it was immense and glorious, and the early 70s vibe was chill and wafted into a smoky evening of marijuana and classic outdoor amphitheatre. Almost 7, my sister almost 10, with our newly-formed family fresh into a Colorado home, our dad hauled us up there for our first concert experience. It was a pinnacle place for many decades of watching it closely or going whenever I could possibly afford it. Special events savored few but as timeless as the place. There is no ticket stub here, just a shared family question and fun discussion with 4 people: do you remember that Roberta Flack concert at Red Rocks in... 1973?
The show was just as vague for him as all that secondary purple haze then and my youth (and my mother and sister can only remember the name, Roberta Flack), so dad and I went up there this May 2022 and saw the museum wall just to verify dates. There in the yearly placards was a complete itinerary of the sacred place. Seeing context in place, the recollections come back and some experiences get remembered, sort of. Only in gathered snippets of empirical, recollective power from those touchstones that spark the thoughts - be it paper ticket or a rock theater.
Someday I’m sure it will all be forgotten anyway, just like those hundreds of stubs I saw in the beer-soaked ground on the walks back to the car, every event. Forever lost mementos just like people and their memories. Now the digital scan is buried and purged and the token mementos, well, hmmm. Vamp out now on the sanguine caress of amphitheatre sandstone. We have all seen many stages in life, both literally and figuratively, as we all too are players for a time, searing the acts into tattooed visions when the script is memorable. Like a good photograph locked in a shoebox on a safe closet shelf, ready to be savored again in some other space and time.
