Thursday, April 27, 2017

Musical Memery...

For the past few days when I've logged into Facebook to see what friends are up to, there've been more and more people participating in a "10 bands" thing. As good as my memory is, it's hard for me to remember bands that I haven't seen:
  • First couple years after moving to DC, my one housemate was buddies with the staff at the old 930 club. Meant we saw bands a couple nights per week for 18 months - all for the price of bar-tab and tips.
  • After I moved out of there, I had a job with SGI that had me on the road most of the 22mo that I worked there. Saw bands in venues all over the US.
  • Somewhere late in my tenure with SGI, I met several event promoters in DC. In exchange for hosting their websites for them (I had an old SPARCserver co-located at a local ISP), I got into pretty much any show I'd want to see for free. As a result, much of my 20s was spent in rock bars, small nightclubs, larger indoor venues and the very occasional pavillion and arena shows. Only stadium shows I went to were festivals (several Lollapaloozas and couple Ozzfests - including the 2000 one in San Jose).
So, it's hard for me to pick bands I haven't seen ...that probably aren't immediately obvious. It's only further complicated by the fact that, in recent years, I've been making more of an effort to try to get out and see live acts, again. And the acts I'm seeing now are radically different than the ones of my pre-40s.