10 years

Today is the 10-year anniversary of my first-ever concert. I was a late bloomer due to strict parenting, not a lack of interest!

Since then, I’ve tried to make up for lost time and am up to 126, which I averages out to just over one concert per month. Wait. Somehow, that doesn’t seem right. I think I failed at the math somewhere. Or maybe counting partially viewed festival shows — which may or may not be legal in these sorts of tallies — is throwing things off.

Anyway, on July 17, 2001, I saw The Wallflowers at Foxwoods Casino, a two-hour drive from home. I’d finally gotten permission from my mother just three days before the show to attend and nervously called the box office to see if there were any tickets left. (Buying concert tickets on the phone! How quaint!)

Because I didn’t yet have a driver’s license and was under 18, my mother had to drive me there and accompany me the whole time in the casino. Our seats were toward the back of the theater, so I brought binoculars and trained them on what would be Jakob Dylan’s lovely blue eyes, if he had opened them once during the entire show. (He’s since improved on that front.)

I’ve seen the band… a lot since that first show, and none of the experience was blogged or otherwise journaled back then, so most of the details are fuzzy. This was part of the (Breach) tour and was the only show I ever saw with guitarist Michael Ward, who quit the band months later. He led a cover of Blur’s “Song 2” during the encore break. They opened with “Three Marlenas.”

Two girls in front of me were holding photo albums of them with the band and flipping through them excitedly before and after the show. I couldn’t believe they’d actually met the band and secretly wondered what sorts of nefarious things they’d done in order to achieve that.

What I remember most about that night is that after the show ended, I insisted on getting in front of every single sign inside the casino that announced the show and having my poor mother take pictures. Of course, we listened to (Breach) on repeat during the home.

My history with The Wallflowers began in 1997, when I taped “One Headlight” and “The Difference” off the radio and ripped out Jakob’s picture as “sexiest musician” in People to tape it to my bedroom door, shyly admitting to my family that, he “uh, has nice-colored eyes.”

Since that first concert, there were 22 more, in 10 different states. It’s hard to talk about how my experience with them over the years “transcended music” in a way that isn’t eyeroll-inducing, so I’ll spare everyone the details. But whether or not they’re hip (they’re not, I know), whether or not they ever get back together (who knows?) and whether or not I listen to them as much as I used to (I don’t, actually), this band will always be special.

I love that they were my first show.