Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like all short story collections, the beauty of a book like this is that you can skip the essays that don't interest you. Memories of the actual concert itself is almost always very vague, but what makes many of the stories interesting is the description of the location, era, and overall music scene at the time. Many of the stories are written extraordinarily well...

I (thankfully) borrowed it from the library. If you need to read any of this book, do the same.
First, most of the memories are not about the specifics of the concerts themselves.
That could be OK, but then you would like the writing to be well done and original to merit allowing writers to write whatever they want tangentially related to the theme.
But, by and large they are NOT well-written, and not any better (or worse, to be fair) than anything else that exists in the written world of the "everyone's a writer" blog-age.
I am sure that at least 2/3 of anyone reading this now and who was interested in this kind of book knows enough about music and writing to do at least an equal job to these folks.

So, I assumed that these were just random people who got a shot from a friend to be in a book.
Well, no, it turns out these are authors, poets, musicians: writers of all types.
Not that I claim to be so well-read in any realm, but I only recognized about 4 names. I bet people who are a little younger or older than me might know 3 or 4 more, but then they make recognize 1 or 2 fewer than me.
I read the Chuck Klosterman one because sometimes he is as good as a Lester Bangs, and at least is entertaining. The only other one I would "recommend" of the ones I read before giving up was the Bruce Springsteen one. Like most of the others, it is barely about the concert; the interesting part is the author's flukey random participation at a noteworthy Bruce-related audition.
Buyer beware!

First story I read by Heidi Julavits on Rush was basically a hatchet job. Full of inaccuracies and falsehoods. Thankfully I didn't buy this (library book).