The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience

A few years ago I had an idea for a project/blog/zine thing that would involve getting friends of mine to write about their most memorable live music experiences. Since live music was a huge part of our lives from ages 12 on, it seemed like a cool way to reconnect with the past and each other. Of course, school, a baby girl, moving, and all those kinds of things got in the way and that project never got off the ground (yet). So it was a little disconcerting (in a cool way) to stumble across this book in the library, which is basically an anthology with the exact same premise. Editor Sean Manning has assembled brief essays from fifty writers, covering shows ranging from 1955 (Miles Davis) to 2005 (Metric), by writers ranging from the relatively well known to the relatively obscure, with a few musicians (Thurston Moore being the most famous) added to the mix. Most of the pieces are about shows inside the U.S. (with one each in Belfast, Vancouver, and Madrid), with 19 from New York City alone! Despite the wide range, none of the bands covered are one's I've ever seen live myself, and only three of the shows were ones I really wish I could have been to (Black Flag in '79, The Pogues in '86, and The Beastie Boys in '87). In any event, I dipped in and out of the book and found most of what I read exceedingly compelling. Writing about music is hard, and most people fail to capture the essence of what makes our favorite music so vitals. Here, most of the contributors focus on the event, capturing the full experience, rather than trying to lamely recount how masterful a particular performance was. What is really nice is that a number of the pieces are about how a show was memorable for how bad it was (such as Lynn Tillman's account of phoned-in set by the bored Rolling Stones in '65 or Luc Sante's account of seeing P.I.L. at the Ritz in '81). Along the same lines is Jon Raymond's evocative account of a 1989 Bon Jovi concert to which he'd gotten free tickets, gotten tanked with his Replacements/Husker-Du-listening teenage friends, and gotten kicked out of almost immediately. And then there are plenty of just flat-out well written essays. Pop culture maven Chuck Klosterman kind of phones in his first Prince concert -- but even when phoned in, Klosterman is wittier than 99% of writers out there. There's David Gates on being a white dude going to see James Brown play Boston Garden the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. There's Diana Ossana breaking out of a three-year depression after being cajoled to a '73 Led Zepplin show. There's teenage Tracey Chevalier's introduction to the theater of the arena concert (and adult life in general) at a '77 Capital Center show by Queen. There's Susan Straight in the midst of 100,000 at the L.A. Coliseum for the 1979 Funk Festival with Parliament. But probably my favorite piece is Marc Nesbit's account of an '87 show at the Capital Center featuring Junkyard (a legendary go-go band), Public Enemy, and the

I bought this book looking to hear about great concerts that happened before I was born ... the ones you always hear about in that Man-I-Wish-I-Was-There sort of way. Out of the 50 concert-going experiences, there were probably only 5 that I did not enjoy reading. The rest was either good, really good or amazing re-readable material. For the most part, it doesn't get into the concert itself, with the workings of the set lists or whatnot ... rather it gives the emotional and background aspects of the concert goer before during and after. There were quite a lot of ultimate nirvana moments -- that moment where nothing could feel better, and those feelings jump right off the page and hit you. You become absorbed into the writer's story, placing yourself with the other people places and emotions. A great read. For anyone who knows about music, wants to know about music, enjoys collections of short writings from various authors ... this is a great book. That's another thing, you get so many different writing styles and voices, it's a great book. anyone should buy it -- except for a couple of passages, nothing that should keep this away from young readers, either.

Shows that stick in our minds, decades after the fact, are so interwoven with who and where we were at the time--and why we couldn't breathe-- that it's hard to tease apart each element. That's why words like these from John Albert, musing on his then-15 year old self (and Black Flag) in the late 70's ring so true: "I love punk rock but know it is a fantasy. We are not in England. I am not poor. It is not raining. I can relate to the rebellion and anger in the music, and sometimes try to imagine we are in London, but it's difficult. The sun is too bright and there is silence all around. Each night, I sit on the curb outside my parents' house and listen to the sound of cars passing in the distance. There is a growing panic inside me. I can't shake the thought that somewhere else there is something profound and exciting happening--and I'm missing it all." Hoo boy. A theatre kid who just made the varsity cut, shows up at a Kinks show in a tux for the last time. A closet Prince fan comes to worship blindly at the Elfin Temple in--of all places--Fargo. A college girl dodges bullets at a Funk show starring George Clinton, who, after James Brown (also profiled here), must have been "the hardest working man in show business". And Jerry Stahl, newly off junk and still jumpy, gets a congratulatory hug from David Bowie (I always knew he was cool). You'll find yourself there amongst the geeks and stoners, the disaffected and the conforming, the used-dental floss that's that wretched in-between time when being alive doesn't seem so fun anymore. There aren't many shows later than Beck here, but that's because it takes a while for adulthood to process the neural storm that is the past. I found myself warmed all over by this book, and musical taste be damned. Listen to Robert Polito: "Earlier that evening, in one of those flukes that promises more than the moment can deliver, we ran into The Pogues, at least some of them, across the street at Fenway Park. The Red Sox were playing the Toronto Bluejays..." I can't think of a better definition of being young than "a fluke that promises more than it can deliver". The music itself isn't so much an afterthought as the aural soup through which we navigate those years. But if you're interested, there are reviews of shows by the Stones, the Beatles, Led Zep, Miles Davis, the very young Beasties, Metric, Public Image, Van Morrison, the Mekons, Lou Reed, White Stripes (okay, I was wrong about Beck), a wonderful Ishmael Reed review of a Miles Davis show from the 50's, and lots of others for people who still think music can set our experiences UNIQUELY apart from the drek that is "everybody else". For those who know it's all a part of being human, bring your lighter.

Unforgettable concert memories have been revealed in numerous sources, from magazine articles to biographies and the works of literary writers: here they're gathered under one cover to prove a powerful collection of insights from those who observed Patti Smith, Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, Rush, and more in concert. The musical genres are diverse here and range from rock to classical, but these insightful, sometimes funny, thought-provoking essays have all been written especially for THE SHOW I'LL NEVER FORGET and are vivid recollections for both general-interest public libraries and specialty music collections alike.

A very simple premise for a book. The author asked fifty writers: 'What was the best concert you ever saw?' The results vary, as you would expect. The book grabbled me when flipping through I saw that one authors favorite show was one put on by Kevin Spacey. Kevin Spacey? A Concert? Yes. Keven Spacey's an actor, not even a first line actor -- until you see him in 'The Usual Suspects.' Turns out that he is also a singer, using his own voice in the Bobby Darin bio. Max Collins writes a great report of Kevin Spacey singing Bobby Darin. The other fifty articles vary. Some are on artists I simply don't care about. Some are funny, some are very sad. They are all told in the first person -- 'This is a show I went to see, and it affected me.' A very enjoyable read to anyone who follows the music scene.