Live music is great. But performances can attract large crowds, which involve fighting through a sea of elbows until you feel like a mess of scrambled eggs beaten by an ever-changing rotation of shoulders. And when concerts are held in truly enormous venues, most of the seats feature a spectator-to-performer distance of approximately two miles, so the human you paid to see appears the size of a carpenter ant.
It takes a true music lover to extract joy from witnessing performers at such distances. Despite my lifelong distaste for crowds, I have a history of being coerced to attend large music events.
Dragged to my first concert at the tender age of 14, I didn’t know who Tiny Tim was. My brother, 18 at the time, was a fan. The performer became a superstar in the 1970s by growing his hair long and singing falsetto while playing the ukulele. From our seats in the balcony of the Grand Rapids Civic Auditorium, Tiny Tim looked like an ant. I have no recollection of the performance’s musicality, but I’m sure it included his signature song “Tiptoe through the Tulips.”
In the early 1980s, my group of friends in northern Nevada dragged me to a dinner concert featuring the Oak Ridge Boys, a nationally popular country group. I remember the venue better than the performance. It was a giant dinner theater at one of the casinos in South Lake Tahoe, and the audience was seated around at least 100, eight-seat tables arranged in amphitheater format. The “boys” looked like ants with long hair.
Roughly the same group of friends a year later organized a trip to see the Beach Boys in Reno. I made my best effort to be dragged along, but it was not to be. A dozen of us had gathered in someone’s living room to car pool when I suddenly felt dizzy — and woke up the next morning. They told me I had slumped over and passed out with a high fever. They had carried me into a bedroom and left for the concert. They were glad I was still alive when they returned after midnight.
One afternoon in May 1984, I was working in my basement office in the Marquette University School of Journalism when two fellow grad students rushed in and told me I had to come with them. They had heard tickets still were available for a concert they desperately needed to witness, and they drafted me as their bodyguard. As we walked downtown to Milwaukee Auditorium, the two girls chatted excitedly about their favorite songs by The Clash, a band I had never heard of. I shelled out $25 cash to witness a band that I learned to love.
That was my first (and only) standing-room-only concert experience. By final count, 3,625 of us were packed in like olives in a jar to marinate in a rock-and-roll brine. I didn’t know it at the time, but Frank Sinatra performed — to 10,728 people — at the same time in an adjacent venue. I had wondered why there were so many older folks dressed up for prom walking the sidewalks next to young punk rockers in leather. A rumor later circulated that Sinatra was peeved about the amplified noise that leaked over into his venue.
A different pair of women dragged me 350 miles in a tiny hatchback Toyota to see The Monkees (three of them, anyway) perform at Red Rocks Amphitheater in 1986. They at least gave me a few days notice and right of refusal. We drove much of Friday night and crashed on the floor of a friend’s apartment in Denver. The outdoor venue was amazing, the performance enjoyable.
The concert experience I most cherish involved being drafted on a moment’s notice. One evening in the late ‘80s, a coworker called out from across the otherwise empty Durango Herald newsroom and asked if I had any evening plans. He said he was going to a live performance a few blocks away and I might enjoy it. We walked to a bar, paid a a couple of bucks each and were pointed toward the back, where 20 metal folding chairs were lined up facing a single chair next to a guitar amp. We listened two hours to a guy I had never heard of, Taj Mahal, sing the blues and play awesome electric guitar. It was a very personal concert.
A few months later, I attended another small show, in a 60-seat church in Pagosa Springs, by Dan Fogelberg. A local teenager had died. Fogelberg lived nearby and performed at the funeral, just him and his acoustic guitar. A somber concert.
A couple of summers ago, my wife and I saw comedian Nate Bargatze perform in Grand Rapids’ 12,000-seat Van Andel Arena. I couldn’t see him quite as clearly as I could Fogelberg or Mahal. From our seats he appeared to be the size of, not a big carpenter ant, but a little red ant. So we spent two hours watching him and his fellow comedians on gigantic television screens, on which they looked the size of grasshoppers.
Large concerts are just too crowded and too far away for my taste.
So when a friend of my wife invited us to see Bruno Mars at Ford Field this spring, with an expected audience of around 70,000, I politely declined. My wife is excited to see the guy sing and dance. I hope she and her friend have an awesome experience. That afternoon, I plan a solo nature photo safari in a nearby nature park. I hope to capture some scenic images — and maybe some closeup shots of ants.