Have you ever forgot you saw an "important" act?

In 1985 I was doing a summer school program near Salzburg, Austria. As part of the experience we got two tickets to the Salzburg music festival. I knew a little bit about classical music was disappointed that my tickets I got through the lottery wasn’t the big stuff like opera or Herbert Von Karajan but rather I would be in a small venue just going to see a solo singer perform with a pianist.

10 or 15 years later, I was much more in the classical music and dug our the old program. It turned out I had seen Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau....

 

1975

Singapore Silk was being promoted.

 

Sometimes, I wish I could forget.

 

My friends did a 3hr drive in college to see the same Sonic Youth/Neil Young performance on a week night.

They bailed before Neil Young started.

 

The Ritz NYC. March 27, 1981.

 

Yes you're right. Not Felt Forum though.

 

Yes that could be it. A sort of 'label tour'
A&M. I remember the acts now you mention them, and I've definitely seen Supertramp.

 

I saw Queens of the Stone Age on their first club tour. For headliners, they didn't have very much material, so the set was ecked out with Mondo Generator songs and Nick Oliveri screaming like a banshee down the mic. It was pretty tedious to be honest - most unlikely act ever to have number 1 albums on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Y’know....blacking out and forgetting are not exactly the same.

 

I was fortunate to see Tom Waits twice, once in 1999 and once in 2006.

My sister scored really good seats for the 1999 show and we agreed that it was one of the greatest shows that either of us had seen.

For the 2006 show the demand was so great that I scored a single ticket, another friend a single, and my Tom Waits fan sister, another single ticket.

We met up before the show but sat no where near each other.

After the show we ran into character actor John C Reily in an attempt to get a good photo of the now vacant stage.

Recently I had to convince my sister that she saw Tom Waits twice. She remembered the bartender BEFORE the show and seeing John Reiley afterwards but attributed it to a different act.

Tom Waits certainly wasn't "bad" in 2006 but the 1999 show was magical like a seven year old on Christmas morning.

 

I often forget i saw the Bee Gees in their pre-disco days.
Also The Sweet in their heyday, dunno why as it was a memorable show.[or so i thought.]

 

In 1978, I saw the Flamin' Groovies - Radio Bergman opened up. I guess they have a pretty avid cult following.
In 1991, I saw Iggy Pop and his opening act was Alice In Chains. Never really followed them but it might have been a big deal to some people to have seen them in that era.

 

I saw Radiohead around the time of OK Computer and I can barely remember a thing about it. I went with friends who were more into the band than I was. I liked The Bends but that's where it ends for me. The thing I remember more than anything is Thom Yorke getting into a spat with a girl in the audience. He announced Creep like "We'd better play this song I suppose or there might be a riot" and the girl shouted "You DON'T HAVE TO play it!" to which Thom angrily replied "I want to play the song, I like the song!". He got pretty narked. Other than that the nights a sort of blank and if someone asked if I'd seen the band I'm sure I'd initially answer No until I later remembered that I had.

 

Saw an unknown Dutch singing duo in Amsterdam once by accident and wasn't impressed. It was at a festival or something and soon forgot about it. Then a couple of months later they scored an absolute massive hit with this song and it dawned on me that these were the two I saw performing for an audience of 50 bored people.

 

This all feeds my belief that, for all that it matters to the ME OF RIGHT NOW that I had a given concert going experience 10 or more years ago---that is, the specific impact of the memory of the shows I did actually see is so slight or non existent---that I may as well "start remembering" that I did attend shows in the distant past that I actually didn't, because for the me of today, it's an emotional intellectual equivalent and I can at least stop beating myself up over having "missed" some experience with some artist, when I know that even if I HAD had the experience then, it wouldn't matter now.

The above might not make sense, but it does to me!

 

Boy, that sort of "I'm an even more sincere fan of the band than the band itself" acting out makes me mad! I had a similar experience seeing T-Bone Burnett in a club in the DC area, CRIMINAL UNDER MY OWN HAT tour, in which, seemingly spontaneously, he started telling some Rolling Thunder story and in context began playing "Idiot Wind", sort of starting, stopping, teasing, telling more stories, sort of wondering out loud "should I play the whole thing?" and some stan-fan kept pulling the annoying "noooo play your own songs T-Bone we love your own songs you don't have to cover Dylan noooo!" and talking T-Bone out, apparently, of what would have been a totally fun thing of hearing him cover Idiot Wind. I mean, maybe he never would have done it anyway, but it sure seemed like he was talked out of it in real time by a "real fan".

 

I don't think the words "don't remember" means what many of you think it means.

 

Oh man this made me remember that I saw Jessica Simpson live in concert. There’s my answer!

 

If it was literal no-one would have anything to post.

 

For along time I'd forgotten I'd seen PETER HAMMILL at THE BOTTOM LINE BACK circa 1985-86....I do remember it was a great show though!!

 

I went to see Black Sabbath and for a while forgot that Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green was also there.

 

My band shared a bill with Dinosaur Jr. in the 80s. I didn’t remember it until someone showed me the ad.

 

Ha, I remembered another one: My friend was on a Beth Hart kick recently, and he spun a bunch of her songs on his playlist while hanging out at my house. I commented that if she ever came around here, maybe I should check her out. He answered "You already did, in '98 when she opened for Ratdog in Raleigh". It had totally slipped my mind for what must've been years....but once he triggered my memory, I actually did recall seeing her and thinking it was a pretty entertaining set

 

Yes, but it’s those opening acts I remember that mattered most. For instance, I saw UFO ...actually only the last couple of songs as we arrived late... opening for Jethro Tull in early ‘75 at the Myriad in Okla. City. They were touring in support of the Phenomenon album, but I was totally unfamiliar with them at the time. UFO with guitar wunderkind Michael Schenker left a major impression even though I’d missed the name of the band. The two songs I can still recall hearing live were Doctor, Doctor and Rock Bottom. Our seats weren’t great, but It taught me not to arrive late as some opening acts are really worth it.

Van Halen supporting Black Sabbath in 1978. In retrospect, I wasn’t that impressed with Van Halen, but saw them twice in a week as I had good seats to two different Sabbath shows in different cities (Myriad in OKC and front row seats at Reunion Arena in Dallas). In all seriousness, I almost wish I’d forgotten Van Halen.

Joe Bonamassa, way down the bill at an all day outdoor concert in the Metroplex (Dallas/Ft. Worth). This was in 2002 as I recall. His power trio performed before Foreignor, Ted Nugent and Billy Squire. And there may be other performers I’m forgetting. His set was so good that my wife and I researched his tours and started attending every gig he played in North Texas and Oklahoma. We got to know Joe and the group quite well and continued to follow his rise from struggling artist booking club gigs to arena super-stardom as the foremost ambassadors of blues internationally.

Looking back on it, there are probably several opening acts that went on to better things, but left little or no impression as I was only interested in hearing the features performer(s). On a couple of occasions there were openers which were so bad that I made a mental note to remember not to see them again. Heads, Hands and Feet as support for Procol Harum in 1972, for instance.

To refresh my memory I’m going to research concerts I recall attending to see if there actually were opening acts. It’s entirely possible some performers left little or no impression. Then again, we occasionally arrived late to shows to avoid the door lines. Maybe something will strike a chord.


Cat

 

Radio Bergman? The Swedish Radio Birdman tribute act?