Listen, I know there’s a thousand reasons not to go to the gig. Nobody’s as good as I am at lamenting all the reasons to stay home: it’s a weeknight, I’m tired, traffic will be bad, parking is a nightmare, the trains never run on time, (and my personal favorite) OTHER PEOPLE WILL BE THERE.
Now that our list of complete nonsense is out of our system, let me reiterate: go to the gig. Buy a ticket after you’ve listened to a new band or heard a new album from a band that you love. Buy a ticket after you see someone talking about a song on social media or it comes on in the car on your ride home. Google that band you loved in high school, find out which tour stop is closest to you and then buy the ticket and go to the gig.
I went to concerts a lot when I was younger, mostly because I was surrounded by other people who loved the same kinds of music I did and they were more than happy to spend the last dollars in their bank account supporting music we all loved. Once upon a time I lived in a world where we would hop trains to New York City, or drive from a tiny town in western New York to Rochester or Toronto to see the musicians we worshipped. Now I make excuses not to take the Orange Line to Metro Center to see a band whose entire discography I own on vinyl and have loved since before I could legally drive. And frankly, I’m ashamed.
Therefore, on Friday, I got in my car after work and drove to Baltimore to see The Used. Yes, The Used. Don’t act like that’s shocking; deep inside this opinionated, silver fox, new wave exterior is an early-noughties emo kid screaming that she’s not okay, she promises, whatever that even means. After spending an incredibly stressful day a week ago attempting to get My Chemical Romance tickets (and I was successful, no thanks to Ticketmaster’s ridiculous system) I started looking for other bands that I’d loved during high school and college. The first thing I found was a date for The Used in the next major city over from D.C. So I went.
I’ve read lots of writing around sense memory; if you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, I’m sure you’ve done an exercise on this. When you smell a certain scent, or hear someone’s laugh, it triggers a memory. Now imagine the complete avalanche of memory that befalls a person immersed in the sounds of their childhood, their formative years, coming at them fast and loud not only from the band playing on stage but a cacophony of voices around them, all on the verge of total nostalgic meltdown. I would like to tell you, dear reader, that I did not stand on a sticky floor, covered in someone else’s beer, and cry while this band played all the songs straight off my high school radio station’s hot clock. But I don’t like to lie to you when I can help it.
The high school radio station was called The Fishbowl because it was glass on two sides and in the same hallway as the Main Office so people regularly walked by and gawked at you while you were live on air. I once got the In Love and Death CD stuck in my car stereo. There was a time when fans divided themselves into camps because of perceived feuds between lead singers based on stories that we read about in Alternative Press magazine. The doors of my college bedroom closet were plastered with photos ripped from their pages.
Let’s be real here, though - I didn’t cry because of magazines or radio stations. I cried because of the boys who broke my heart, and the friends who are gone now. I was overwhelmed thinking about the shows where I got into a fight in the parking lot, or got my head busted open in an overly-aggressive pit. Those songs are tied to the saddest and most triumphant moments of my young adulthood: the day I was the last of my friends left on campus, the day we graduated, the night Kaity fell on stage, the morning we managed to sneak into all of the playgrounds in the school district, my first tattoo, my first trans-atlantic flight, my first drink, the first time we buried someone our own age, and the first and last time I let someone raise a hand to me.
The gig is catharsis now. You’re not old at the gig, you’re just you. You’re not your job or your kids or your mortgage or your recent bloodwork; you’re not your bank balance or your gas mileage or your diet. Go to the gig alone; go with a gang of friends. Wear what you want, get fall-down drunk, stay sober, leave early, stand in the back, crowd surf, and sing loud. But go to the gig.
And I’ll see you there.