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

Sean Manning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2007

In The Show I’ll Never Forget, writer Sean Manning has gathered an amazing array of unforgettable concert memories from a veritable A-list of acclaimed novelists, poets, biographers, cultural critics, and songwriters. Their candid, first-person recollections reveal as much about the writers’ lives at the time as they do about the venues where the shows occurred or the artists onstage. Ishmael Reed on Miles Davis Luc Sante on Public Image Ltd. Heidi Julavits on Rush Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer on Metric Diana Ossana on Led Zeppelin Maggie Estep on Einsturzende Neubauten Dani Shapiro on Bruce Springsteen Gary Giddins on Titans of the Tenor! Nick Flynn on Mink DeVille Susan Straight on The Funk Festival Rick Moody on the The Lounge Lizards Jennifer Egan on Patti Smith Harvey Pekar on Joe Maneri Thurston Moore on Glen Branca, Rudolph Grey, and Wharton Tiers Chuck Klosterman on Prince Sigrid Nunez on Woodstock Jerry Stahl on David Bowie Charles R. Cross on Nirvana Marc Nesbitt on The Beastie Boys And many more . . . No matter where your musical taste falls, these often funny, occasionally sad, always thought-provoking essays-all written especially for The Show I’ll Never Forget-are sure to connect with anyone who loves, or has ever loved, live music.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this uneven but engaging collection of essays, 50 writers recall their most memorable concert experience, spanning about 50 years of popular music history. Manning does a great job of collecting a diverse range of writers and musicians for this project, and his sequencing has the intuitive logic of a well considered set list. Though the book is chronological, the parallel movements of different musical eras are allowed to bump up against each other in fascinating ways, such as when the smooth showmanship of Billy Joel gives way to the raw violence of X in 1979. The pieces in this collection are most successful when they combine personal anecdotes with specific and original recollections of the band being profiled. Tracy Chevalier's essay about seeing Queen in 1977 is a perfect evocation of experiencing live music for the first time, as she describes "the familiarity and yet also the strange rawness of the songs." While the overall pace of the collection is slowed by "you had to be there" essays about a Bruce Springsteen show, Woodstock and other events, there are enough high points to satisfy a dedicated live music aficionado. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The authors of these musings on favorite concerts include the well known (Ishmael Reed, Harvey Pekar, etc.) and the less known, all offering deepish thoughts about performers and performances. Chuck Klosterman remembers the night Prince played the Fargodome in North Dakota--surely a night when pop cultural worlds collided--while spouses Robert Burke Warren and Holly George-Warren compare notes in separate pieces about a 1989 Van Morrison show. Heidi Julavits lauds proto-headbangers Rush; novelist Reed, the discreeter charms of Miles Davis in 1955 in Buffalo, N.Y.--an event that, along with a trip to Paris, "would determine the course of [Reed's] life" (he eventually "dropped out of high school and went to work at a library"). For comparing and contrasting the perceived impacts of the Rolling Stones in 1965, Public Image Ltd. in 1981, and Nirvana in 1991, it would be hard to beat this book. And then there's Max Alan Collins on Kevin Spacey at the House of Blues in Chicago in 2004. Kevin Spacey? Collins is so mysterious. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; First Edition edition (January 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306815087
• ISBN-13: 978-0306815089
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,054,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not so much "remember when" as "remember us"..., March 22, 2007

By 

Erica Bell (Washington State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience (Paperback)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Show I'll Never Forget" Does Not Disappoint, May 25, 2007

By 

Mark Bezerman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience (Paperback)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Encore Please!, September 7, 2007

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience (Paperback)

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 Beastie Boys. Part of the appeal is the personal connection -- I'm pretty much the same age as Nesbit, had the same high-school experience, and similarly, had zero chance (in those days) of seeing live go-go. But what really elevates the piece is his humor and ability to describe the audience' stunned and confused reaction to a then-unknown Public Enemy, including this line, which had tears of laughter rolling down my face: "Flavor Flav made his entrance, dancing in weird spastic steps like a marionette monkey while screaming rhyming gibberish that was supposed to rile the crowd, inform them of how in effect Public Enemy was, and issue bizarre threats to unnamed enemies who wished to defeat them -- all at the same time.

There are a few duds here and there, but on the whole, if live music was or is important to you -- this book is worth your time. As for me, I'm off to get that zine/blog thing off the ground.