One of my retirement projects has been scanning in old photos and digitizing them. I will write more (hopefully) later about how I have been using Claude to help me with this. There is so much anti-AI sentiment right now, a lot of that seems to be geared toward people using AI “creatively” to create written words or images or videos. 99% of my usage (aside from a generative AI plugin inside of Lightroom to clean up photos) is using command line Claude to help with digital files and coding - like building my website and my high school a “classmates” website.
Anyway along the way I discovered a photo album that I created from High School and in addition to all the dance photos there was a set of concert tickets and a list of the concerts that I have seen. (I scanned them on a flat bed scanner and Claude - cropped and straightened individual images of the tickets). I thought it would be fun to write up a post about concerts.
My very first concert was in October 1984 at Utah State University where I saw Chicago with Blake Casselman. I remember being blown away by the energy of a live show and how much fun it was to see a live band play. Before leaving to serve an LDS Mission in Dec of 1986 - I saw a great series of classic new wave 80s concerts : Howard Jones, Tears for Fears, Sting, Oingo Boingo, INXS, Eurythmics, James Taylor, R.E.M. and Billy Joel. Many of those were at Park West - an outside venue in at a Park City ski resort - Tears for Fears was particularly epic - Everybody Wants to Rule the World with 10,000 people singing along is pretty great. Sting was touring Dream of the Blue Turtles, his first solo album after The Police broke up. He had a fantastic band made of jazz players - Branford Marsalis on sax, Kenny Kirkland on piano, Darryl Jones on bass and Omar Hakim on drums. And on the encore Stewart Copeland came out and played with the band. And I was on the front row. The Eurythmics show was also memorable because a drunk girl behind me ripped my button up shirt off my back and I went home shirtless.
INXS at the Salt Palace was another epic concert - I drove down with Shelly and Nan and we were once again on the front row. Inspired my Michael Hutchence I started growing my hair out - much to my mom’s consternation.
In the 1990s until now the groups that I have seen the most are James Taylor, Coldplay, and Phish. Probably the concert that sticks out the most was finally getting to see U2 on the 30 year Joshua Tree Reunion tour.
The best venue for sure is The Gorge out in central Washington - which is a huge hillside that sits above the Columbia River. I saw Coldplay there with Sofi in 2009 :
I also think the Coldplay puts on probably the “best feeling” concert because they have so many songs that you can sing along to and in their later arena shows they have a very cool integrated light aspect where everyone gets a bracelet that can light up in different colors. Some concert video footage here.
It’s been fun looking back on all the concerts we went to; and remembering a few of the special one-off events I got to see because of Amazon : Brandi Carlile, Ziggy Marley, Bon Jovi, Foo Fighters and David Gray to name a few. One of the travesty of the digital era is that we don’t have physical tickets any more. But I do have photos - a few more :
