Back then, Kathy's parents lived just south of Silicon Valley. We had a visit planned that summer and just before we left, Kathy found out that one of the semi-final games of the Women's World Cup was being held at Stanford while we were there. Best of all, the US had just beaten Germany in the quarter finals, so the game would feature the US team against Brazil. She bought three tickets so her sister could go with us and off we flew to California.

As it turns out her sister chose not to go with us, so her mom did instead. On July 4th, we drove over to Palo Alto, fought through the traffic and headed up and up and up into the stands. You might notice the ticket says Row 80. Yeah... 80! We were waaaaaay up at the top of the stands, but at least we were at mid-field.

I thought the game was pretty exciting, though the New York Times described it the next day as "largely uninspired." Maybe it wasn't the greatest game ever, but it was great to just be able to see that team play... Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers, Brandi Chastain, Brianna Scurry. A US women's soccer team full of household names? How strange. Was this how it would be in the new century?

Obviously, the US won the game—Wikipedia tells me it was 2-0—and went on to play China in the final six days later. They won that game, too, when Brandi Chastain scored the winning goal and famously ripped off her shirt in celebration. 1999.

There's not much to go on here. Some mysterious concert at a place called the State Theatre. What could it be? I seem to remember a State Theatre in Albany... did I see a band there? Hmm.

After some thought, it occurred to me that this was a place in Portland (Maine). It was a beautiful old theater on Congress Street that had fallen into disrepair. By the time I moved to Maine in 1989, the place had been subdivided into smaller theaters and was showing porn flicks. Sometime in the early 90s, the theater was purchased by a group of investors and restored to some likeness of its former glory. Which brings me to this stub.

Soon after the theater reopened, we had our first chance to see a show there. Los Lobos were coming to town! What a time to see them, too! They'd just definitively removed themselves from their La Bamba pigeonhole with the release of Kiko. Wow. Kiko. At once rootsy and wildly experimental, it would define their sound for the next couple albums.

Like many of these older concerts, I know I enjoyed it, but I don't remember much of the show itself. I do remember being impressed that a five-member band (or was it six) could be so tight. They could go off on wild tangents and all come back together in perfect sync in a single beat. Many of the Alt bands I was seeing at the time almost reveled in their sloppy wildness (The Replacements and The Pogues come to mind). Los Lobos could be wild without being sloppy. Good Stuff. I'd love to see them again.

Last year, I wrote a weblog post about my discovery of R.E.M. A few months after my eyes were opened, I found out R.E.M. was coming to DC. Actually, I found out the night before the concert. I spent the next day at school trying to convince anyone to go with me to the concert. Despite having all the zeal of a new convert, I didn't have much luck. That afternoon, I was working in the yearbook office—yes, I was on the yearbook staff—still singing the praises of R.E.M. when another staff member came in the room asking "is someone talking about R.E.M. in here?" Bingo. Kelly's older brother had returned from college bearing new music. She was hooked, too. That night, off we went to George Washington University's Smith Center.

We arrived fully expecting the place to be packed, but I guess I wasn't the only one having a hard time convincing friends to come. Smith Center isn't that big (Wikipedia says it holds 5,000) and the general-admission crowd didn't nearly fill the floor, let alone the seats. I'd guess there were no more than about 1000 people there.

The opening band that night was The dB's. They were introduced as "the best band nobody's heard of." They were full of wild energy and jangly guitars and I loved every minute of it. Their "big" album Like This had just come out and it really seemed like they were finally going to break out. Alas, that wasn't to be, but their performance won me over into their small band of loyal fans.

As for R.E.M., can I barely remember their set, but for a feeling I had. I felt like I was watching a door open into a secret new world. Concerts can be like this? It was so different than the slick, organized production that the Billy Joel concert had been. It wasn't really anything new; I'd imagine it's the same feeling people had watching punk for the first time. It sure felt new to me, though. This was gonna be big.

Rick Springfield? Really? How did he fit into my new alternative WHFS musical world? Well, he didn't. The summer after high school graduation, my sister found out about this special concert sponsored by Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) and a local radio station. It was super-cheap ($5) and was meant to celebrate the year's graduates, or something of the sort. The headliner was Rick Springfield. Even $5 was too much to pay to see him, as far as I was concerned. But we heard the opening band was supposed to be 'Til Tuesday. Five bucks for Aimee Mann and "Voices Carry" sounded great.

We headed down to DAR Constitution Hall—the same place my high school graduation had been a month earlier—got in our seats, and waited. Right on time, the lights dimmed and out out came... Rick Springfield. Wha? Where was Aimee? We didn't made it through more than a song or two before we headed home. I don't think we ever figured out whether 'Til Tuesday were ever really on the bill. Ah, youth.

Ah, The Pogues. Clearly I had moved on to something a little different than Billy Joel by this time. My Billy Joel fandom ended in large part because I switched from listening to top-40 radio to "alternative" radio. Sometime in about 1984, I discovered WHFS, a legendary alternative station in the DC area, and my musical tastes were changed for good. I've written before about how R.E.M. kicked it all off. They were the spark, but HFS was the rocket fuel. I remember one particular night hearing Alison Moyet, Sade, Strawberry Switchblade, and Kirsty MacColl all for the first time on HFS. What does this have to do with The Pogues? I'm getting to that...

You see, I rushed right out and bought whatever music I could find by Alison, Sade, Strawberry Switchblade and Kirsty. That'd be Alf, nothing (Sade's album wasn't out in the US yet and there were no imports to be found), a 12" single of "Since Yesterday," and a 12" single of Kirsty's cover of Billy Bragg's "A New England." Kirsty is probably best known in the US for her song "They Don't Know," which was covered by Tracey Ullman, and for (drum roll...) "Fairytale of New York," her duet with Shane MacGowan that appeared on The Pogues' album If I Should Fall From Grace With God.

Because of some recording-contract ridiculousness, Kirsty MacColl was pretty much unable to release a new album for most of the 80s. I always kept an eye out for her, though, so when I saw a blurb in a music magazine saying she was recording an album with The Pogues, I thought I should check them out. The next time I was in a record store, I bought their album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash. Like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures before it and Pixies' Surfer Rosa after, I'd flipped past it many times in the record racks before deciding to buy. The Pogues' wild mix of Punk and Celtic Folk was something new at a time when I was getting a little jaded by the whole Alt scene.

By the time I saw The Pogues in 1989, their masterpiece If I Should Fall From Grace With God was all over college radio and they were pretty well known in the US. It was also pretty well known that the quality of their shows varied depending on Shane MacGowan's lucidity. It would be a couple more years before he'd be thrown out of the band for his drug and alcohol abuse, but going to a Pogues show was a bit of a crap shoot. We lucked out. He was obviously neither clean nor sober, but he careened his way through the performance with Punk aplomb. A great show.

If I remember right, proto-Queercore musician Phranc opened the show, mostly to slack-jawed disbelief.

My biggest memories of the concert have nothing to do with the performance, though. The first was the smell. I'd smelled pot before—though naively had no clue what it was—but this was a full-on assault of pot smoke. Pete's mom clued me in. Clearly Nancy Reagan's advice didn't resonate with Billy Joel fans. The other big memory is of the last song played over the PA before the concert began. As the band came on stage, they kinda danced their way to their instruments to the sound of Sam Cooke's Chain Gang. The Pretenders' Back on the Chain Gang had just come out and I remember afterwards trying to describe the song to friends: "no, not The Pretenders' one. The old one, from the 60s" I guess it would have helped if I'd known who Sam Cooke was at the time.

I managed to find that envelope full of stubs and took a couple hours to scan them all. Starting today and continuing until I run out of stubs, interest, or motivation (whichever comes first), I'll post one ticket stub every day and try my best to remember the corresponding event. The stubs are in no particular order and absolutely none will be omitted for reasons of propriety or changing muscial taste.

Thanks to the snow, we got to the concert late. I think the opening band had already played, but CvB was just going on as we arrived. As for the concert itself, I don't remember much. Camper Van Beethoven was on what would be their last tour before breaking up just a couple months later. Key Lime Pie had come out the year before and I remember fearing they wouldn't play enough of their older stuff (but they did—including Take the Skinheads Bowling!). I have absolutely no idea where we stayed that night. Maybe at Pete H's place down on Lark Street in Albany? Good times...