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The Show I will never forget - 50 writers relivet their most memorable concertgoing experience
The Show I'll Never Forget
50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience

by Sean Manning

This diverse collection is subtitled "50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concert Going Experience," which pretty much tells it all. The musicians range from The Beatles to Beck, from David Bowie to Kevin Spacey (yes, the actor) pretending to be Bobby Darin. The venues range from Madison Square Garden to somebody’s living room (no, really). The Show I'll Never Forget offers a great opportunity to gift your musical friends, crossing as it does the lines of gender, race and genre with smatterings of blues, bluegrass, jazz and heavy metal.

Some of these tales are less about the music and more about the writer’s often skewed memories of society and subculture. You've probably never heard of Redd Cross, a group now-bandleader Carl Newman recalls with fondness, because even though “they were playing to almost nobody…they remembered what rock ’n’ roll meant.” Award-winning writer Nick Flynn’s brief encounter with Mink Deville lands him in jail, in what passes for fact but could be a drug-inflamed fantasy inspired by Deville’s “weird hybrid of punk dischord.”

But some segments are about the music, pure and simple, such as popular music expert Holly George-Warren’s paean to Van Morrison: “The music had taken hold of him, the years had slipped away. His eyes closed, he swayed as he sang, his distinctive phrasing imbued with emotion.”

Woodstock 1968 is among the fifty musical events highlighted, its iconic splendor reduced to a few pages of classic recollections from author (The Last of Her Kind) Sigrid Nunez who rode to Yasgur’s Farm on the back of a motorcycle driven by a stoned Viet Nam vet. Nunez and her acid-head friends had come mainly to hear Jimi Hendrix, but by the time he took the stage early Monday morning “we were long gone…we’d been rained on one too many times…we looked like mud people.” Even her biker buddies craved a hot bath. Back at Barnard College, Nunez found that having been at “our generation’s biggest party” was quite a distinction. For a while. Now, she laments, having been at Woodstock just means you’re old.

Art critic Linda Yablonsky blends a soulful evening with Nina Simone, “a woman alone in a man’s world,” with musings about the death of her father, a singer who encouraged her to get into entertainment. Author Rebecca Brown saw The Beatles in Spain when she was just nine: “The Beatles were more than just a new kind of music. They were also a calling, a stance, a reason and a way to try to live.”

In a slice of black history that resonates across the years, James Brown was scheduled to give a concert in Boston less than 24 hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Ignoring the question “How good an idea was it to be a young white kid among thousands of justly angry black people?” novelist (Jernigan, Preston Falls) David Gates attended the concert. He believes it was Brown’s powerful cool, his repeated exhortations to the crowd not to dishonor King’s memory by destroying their own communities, that kept a seething mob inside the confines of the Boston Garden rocking to “Please, Please, Please” instead of rioting outside.



Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at © Barbara Bamberger Scott, 2007
n 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.