Oh, man. - That Aerosmith tour in High School where I brought the totally hot girl and we were sitting at Bennigan's for dinner after a two hour drive and she had her period and she was mortified and I provided cover as she got to my van and bought her a new pair of jeans and these marvelous purple panties and then we totally made out while Sweet Emotion was playing and I ended up dating her for like a week and got her back down to those purple panties but I didn't have a condom so I didn't sleep with her and she dumped me the next day. - The Metallica Black Album tour where I drove another hot girl and her three friends the same two hours to the same venue and got to second base while her friends weren't watching. And we didn't end up dating and it totally sucked because she was completely hung up on this other dude but both of her friends tried to date me but they were bandersnatches. Which is too bad because one of them was actually kind of cool. We're facebook friends. - Twelve hours to see Lollapalooza '92 and the first one to buy a ticket was my girlfriend at the time who was only my girlfriend at the time because she played with my hair and it was too bad she was such a psycho 'cuz I gave her her money back. And then we drove clear out to Dallas and people were burning plastic on the lawn and there was this nasty smoke everywhere and they discovered you can use blankets as trampolines but they launched these chicks into the air and didn't catch them and they went to the hospital. And I was watching Tool with this awesome chick and bitching about how much Babes in Toyland sucked and didn't figure out until six months later she was the drummer from Babes in Toyland. And halfway there I wished I'd brought the girlfriend but I didn't and my buddy hooked up with this totally hot chick that we came out to visit two more times but I stopped talking to Amanda and then four years later she overdosed on heroin. - Six hours to see Jesus Jones and Stereo MCs in Denver and then we decided to head back rather than crash at my aunt's so we drove all the way back and my buddy drank a 2l of coke because he thought it would keep him awake but instead he ralphed it all up all over his own passenger seat and in the middle of the night on a straight road the mirages work both ways and I watched the blinking light of a train crossing for 70 miles. - 22 hours to see Ministry in San Diego and I let a dude from Ensanada stay in my room and he turned into Mexico's biggest ska producer a few years later. Some guys with a broadcast camera came by and videoed all of us and interviewed us and somewhere I'm on Hard & Heavy Volume 12 or something if you can find it. Al Jourgensen was so drunk he had to start Scarecrow twice and I got a pick from Sepultura that I still have and I kept in touch with that girl and went out to hang out with her the next day even though she wasn't that cute. We kept calling for like six months after. Then I spent new year's alone in Phoenix and spent the last of my money on a burger at Fuddrucker's and got about two meals' worth of condiments out of it. - Seeing the Sundays in Santa Fe and people are moshing to Wild Horses and the lead singer is horrified because what are we doing? They're not that kind of band! And she didn't understand this is New Mexico, bitch, we're here to break things. - Jane's Addiction Ritual tour and Dave Navarro did a 22 minute guitar solo on Three Days and someone pulled a fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed the crowd with it and we all thought it was tear gas and panicked for the exits and I got to make out with the girl who brought me even though we'd broken up, I think. That's off the top of my head. That's before I graduated high school. I could go on but it'd be self-indulgent. - Oh shit but the girl with the purple underwear? Yeah after we'd broken up she sold me a ticket to Division Bell 'cuz she knew I had a van and I gouged her friends on gas, got to 2nd base with one of them and then paid her back by doing $70 worth of work on her car which was enough to pull the valve cover off, rotate the engine and check timing and say "yep! Belt is slipped! You need a new engine!" and leave it all there fucked up in her driveway. Pink Floyd was pretty good, too. First time I'd ever been to a show big enough that it fucked up traffic. She ended up dating a buddy of mine for like two years. He's still fucked up about it 20 years later. I guess I got off lucky.
A friend and I stopped at a Waffle House near Atlanta on our way to a show Combichrist was opening for. We were talking about getting there late, because neither of us wanted to see Combichrist, and then just started making fun of them. Then Andy LaPlegua come up and introduced himself. He was very polite, we were very embarrassed. We still skipped his set.And I was watching Tool with this awesome chick and bitching about how much Babes in Toyland sucked and didn't figure out until six months later she was the drummer from Babes in Toyland
I was mixing at some goth club now long gone and doing the sound-check for the opener. It was a Thursday or whatever so nobody big. They played a few songs and I noted they weren't very "gothy" - they sounded a lot more like Love-era Cult with a female singer. "Oh, you want goth?" she said and they launched into a ridiculous version of Lucretia My Reflection. I goaded them on and said "Play This Corrosion!" and that chick channeled Wayne Hussey doing an impression of Peter Murphy doing an impression of Andrew Eldritch. It was amazing. Meanwhile the headliner, whose name I have forgotten, was getting less and less and less into it. We finished up and I relinquished the stage to the headliner and their FOH guy. They proceeded to launch into a version of This Corrosion that the South Park goth kids would have been embarrassed to have played. Nasty habit of mine was to mix the shit out of the opener if I thought the headliner were a bunch of choads. That girl and her Cult-like buddies got a hell of a mix that night. Club was empty three songs into the headliner's set.