So far in life my biggest claim to fame is that I once got to go backstage at a Mighty Mighty Bosstones concert in Atlanta. I know ladies, try to keep it in your pants. It was a really great experience. Well, honestly, there really wasn’t much to it. There the band was, sitting on a dingy old couch chilling out before the show doing much of nothjing. But for an old ska-core kid like myself, it was still pretty neat!
“Hey baby I just want to take you home,” the Ouija Beegees song ‘Twilight Zone‘ starts out. “Get high and watch the Twilight Zone.” — and who doesn’t, I guess? Or at least you can let the song take you there.
Dude, I used to love concert photography. Back in the day when I worked as an editor at Creative Loafing Atlanta (RIP), I used to go photograph shows weekly, sometimes more. It wasn’t really in my job description as “Digital Editor” or whatever, and I made salary so they didn’t really pay me to do it, but I got to see a lot of really cool shows for free and got to meet and hang with some pretty cool people.
That’s one of my biggest peeves about now living at the end of the road in Alaska — there’s not very many touring bands coming through. Probably because there is no “touring through.” You get to Homer, and you either stay or you turn around. I prefer to stay.
When I was 17 years old I learned a pretty neat trick. It turns out Jagermeister and Coca Cola are pretty much exactly the same color, and a bottle of Jager pours nicely into a 20 oz. Coke bottle. That’s what I did in the parking lot at the Lakewood Amphitheater outside of Atlanta, Georgia before heading into the 2002 Vans Warped Tour.
Beyond that, I really can’t tell you a lot of specifics about that day or who all played (I went too Warped Tour again the next year, and I’ve seen a lot of those same bands play at different times in my life, so things kind of blur together). But I do remember two things:
I’m old and still have a bunch of CDs, mostly from back in the day (which, for me, is probably 1996-2012 or so). This is the first installment of what might be a semi-regular thing where I open my CD briefcase and take a look at what’s on a given page.