The Shows They'll Never Forget

You have a real range of contributors. How did you find them?
Like I said, most of them came through referrals from other contributors. That or through the help of my incredible editor, Ben Schafer. Otherwise, Googling...a lot of Googling. Again, many of the contributors had their own websites. Of those that didn't, a few of them taught, so I was able to find an e-mail for them on their college's staff directory. Otherwise, I'd Google the name of the author I was looking for and the word "agent," and once I'd found the agent's name, I'd go to this Web site everyonewhosanyone.com, which has literally the e-mail for every literary agent, and query the writer that way.

As I write in the introduction, I asked contributors whose work I admired. Actually, in the intro, I write I "chose" them, but "asked" is the better word, since, once they said yes, it's not like I had to think about it. Ultimately, I saw this as an excuse to get in touch with writers I loved and find out a little more about them. That's why the distinction between "best" and "most memorable." Because "best," obviously, puts the emphasis on the concert, what happened onstage, whereas "most memorable" is all about the circumstances surrounding the show. Who you were going out with. What you were doing to pay the bills. What kind of car you were driving. I don't know the exact number, but I'd guess in well over half the stories it's mentioned what make and model car was used to get there.

All I cared about was getting the people I wanted. I didn't care what show they wrote about. So to have gotten nearly every big time act over the last half-century -- Hendrix, The Beatles, The Stones, David Bowie, Prince -- that just happened on its own. Same with the fact that it's exactly fifty years between the first story -- Miles Davis in 1955 -- and the last -- Metric in 2005.

Do any other concerts stand out to you other than R.E.M., which you wrote about?
One of the first concerts I ever saw, if not the very first, was in middle school when I went with my dad to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Pittsburgh. He'd scored the tickets through work. He'd also gotten passes to some gala the night before featuring a concert by Tony Bennett, who was one of my dad's favorites. I expected to be bored out of my mind, just like I was whenever my dad put his greatest hits cassette on in the car, but TB tore it up, validating my theory that the less hopes you have for a concert, the better it's likely to be. That sounds pretty obvious, I know, but it's not so easy when you're paying out the ass for tickets and going to such lengths to get them -- you know, when here it is three months in advance and you've got ten windows open on the Ticketmaster Web site and are on the phone with a friend who's doing the same and you guys are trying to decide, in the allotted two minutes, whether you should get those seats with the obstructed view in the second level or keep trying for something better. In the book, it's often the shows the contributors got dragged to against their will and/or better judgment -- the first time Bruce Bauman saw Television, Diana Ossana with Led Zeppelin, Maggie Estep with Einsturzende Neubauten -- that proved the most transformative.

What music are you really into right now?
With all the year-end lists that've come out recently, I'm just trying to catch up on all the stuff I missed in 2006. The Strokes album has a couple great tracks. The middle-third of that Dylan album is solid. TV on the Radio is as good as everybody said. After Luc Sante's essay on PiL, as well as all the press the "Metal Box" vinyl reissue got, I asked for that on CD for Christmas and have been playing it pretty much non-stop ever since. That's one of the things I love most about the book. That it might introduce readers to a band they'd never heard of before -- Neubauten, say, or Redd Kross -- and compel them to track down their stuff. Same thing with the contributors. My hope is that after liking, for instance, Marc Bojanowski's
essay on Beck, you'll flip back to the contributors' notes, see that he's also the author of a novel called The Dog Fighter -- which is brilliant, by the way -- then go give that a read.

Any plans for a follow up book? Because you know I was stunned by Pete
Yorn's performance at CBGB this fall...
With all the wonderful stories I've been hearing lately while doing publicity, there's certainly no shortage of material for a sequel. I was doing a radio interview the other day and this girl called in saying she'd seen U2 back in the mid-eighties in some small college town in Minnesota, I
think it was. A friend of hers's brother was the bartender at the hotel where the band was staying. After the show, they were hanging out in the bar and asked this guy where was the place to party. Since, again, it was a small college town, the hotel bar was about it, but the bartender, in college himself, knew of a sorority party that was going on that night and gave the band directions. The bartender right away called his sister to give her and her friend, the caller, the heads up. They figured there wasn't a chance in hell the band would show up, but they went anyway, and as they were walking from where they'd parked to the sorority house, they saw, coming in the opposite direction, Bono, The Edge, Adam, and Larry -- all dressed in togas. Apparently, Bono spent most of the night playing John Lennon songs on an acoustic guitar. Of course he did.

What are you up to now?
Counting the hours till Prince's Super Bowl halftime performance.

Image via the author.