Well, it happened by pure accident, but I was going through a bin of old stuff the other day, and came across old ticket stubs…and there it was…the stub from the first concert I had ever been to.
It was laminated…and black. Did you know that heat will destroy tickets? Of course you do…1995 Kurt did not. I wanted to keep the ticket forever (and have), so I decided to laminate it. Bad idea. Now, it’s just a charred piece of paper…but it is laminated.
My first concert ever…The Offspring...and it was (at that point)…THE GREATEST TIME OF MY LIFE.
Okay…not technically my first concert…my parents took me to see Peter, Paul, and Mary when I was, like, 12…but I knew none of the songs except “Puff the Magic Dragon“…oh, and I saw “The Crystals” at Vernon Hills Days (they sang “And then he kissed me”…which I only really knew from “Adventures in Babysitting”). So…let’s not count that.
Oh…my punk/skater wanna-be self was so excited for my first concert…The Offspring…I had every song from the “Smash” album memorized…I was so excited to yell all the bad words in “Bad Habit”.
So, there it was…17 year old Kurt…his friends Ted, Chris, and 2 other friends of Chris that I didn’t know…we piled into Ted’s mom’s minivan…and Ted drove us down to the concert. 5 17 year olds being let loose into Chicago…headed to the Aragon Ballroom (affectionately known to all of us, except for my parents, as the Brawlroom).
No GPS…just a crude set of directions…and a dream.
Upon walking into the Brawlroom…I immediately remember buying 2 Offspring shirts. At the time, they were only $10…one had a purple zombie monster biting his own arm on the front, with the tour dates on the back…and the other had a green ogre/zombie toting a pistol while driving a purple car…with on the back of it the most vile song lyric my mom had ever heard. It was from “Bad Habit”…and it said “Stupid Dumb**** G****n* M**********r”…Yes…but with no edit. It was a shirt that I never could wear to high school without a flannel over it.
Headed upstairs to the stage area…and there it was…just a bit empty room…with balconies…and a stage in front of us. I remember it being massive…I bet if I went back, it’d seem much smaller.
I had never smelled weed before…but that night, the 2nd-hand contact high was immense. When I got home that night, I blew my nose, and even though I hadn’t touched (and was scared to even think about) the stuff…everything out of my nose came out black (which I thought was pretty awesome).
That night…No Use For a Name (one of my favorite bands for a good 2 year span, and I’ll still listen to) opened…followed by Quicksand…and then The Offspring. I had never moshed…and we moshed…and crowd-surfed. Probably crowd-surfed too much…I was that guy who kept tapping people on the shoulder and saying “get me up”. Yes, you don’t enjoy your concert experience, do my bidding, and make a ladder with your hands so I can climb on top of people.
It was so much fun. I remember being absolutely exhausted from standing/jumping/moshing, that during “Come Out and Play”, I was actually sitting in the balcony area taking a break…then “Bad Habit” came on, and like The Flash, I went flying down the stairs, and jumped back into the pit headfirst.
I left soaked with sweat…ears ringing…eye a bit sore from a renegade elbow…a tad light-headed…my legs were sore and ached from 2 hours of moshing.
I’ll never forget my first.
