The six gigs and eight bands that I saw in 2023 doesn't seem like a whole bunch, but it's 5 gigs and 7 bands more than I saw in 2022 and infinitely more than 2021. Even better, most of these shows were pretty good, or at least I was so excited about going to a show that I liked them regardless.

Concerts - 6
Bands - 8

The Magnetic Fields w/Lomelda ( Read more... )

Well, after a 2021 with zero concerts, in 2022 I moved all the way up to... one concert. As previously noted, that one concert was ( Read more... )

Way back in 2014, I marked the tenth anniversary of my concert year in review posts by choosing my show of the year for 2003-2013. Now that I've got these posts for literally my entire life, I thought it might be fun to pick for every year. It also gives me a post to anchor all my concert lists from, so that's nice. And while I'm pulling this ( Read more... )

Since February, I've been systematically doing a Concert Year in Review summary for all the years prior to the start of this journal in 2003. At this point, I've summarized very all the way back to my first year of college in 1996. As I've noted before, my childhood in North Dakota didn't feature a ton of concerts, so rather than walking my way ( Read more... )

At this point, I have written up a concert year in review for every year from 1997 forward. 1996 was the year I graduated from high school and went to college. I only went to two shows that I can recall that year, but it turns out that one of them would be the musical group I've seen the most times in my life, and other was the first band I ever ( Read more... )

Given that I had four shows in 1998, you could reasonably ask why I'm continuing back in time. The answer, of course, is that I have a nasty case of completism. Beyond that, both of the shows I went to in 1997 were really good and deserve to be remembered. Here we go ( Read more... )

My infamous lists for movies started in May 1998. The concert list followed close behind it, so this is the last year that I can be confident that I'm not missing anything dramatic. Oh, I may be missing some openers and dates, but I'm sure that the 4 gigs and 6+ bands I do have listed actually happened and that I'm not missing any headliners ( Read more... )

The farther back in time I go, the shorter these lists get. In 1999, my lists record 8 gigs and 11+ bands. It's certainly more than 11 bands because I only recorded a single band for Studio-A-Rama and none for Folk/International, and that's clearly not accurate. Alas, it's as good as we're going to get. Here are the bands my lists remember ( Read more... )

If there is a positive correlation between the number of concerts one attends in a year and how cool you are, 2000 was the first year that I could have made any vague claim on being cooler. I went to 23 gigs that year. On that list I'm counting a live performance by Eric Idle, which arguably is more like theater but I counted William Shatner as a ( Read more... )

My retroactive look back at the concert year in review continues with 2001. 2001 was before I consistently kept track of dates for gigs. Most of these gigs wouldn't have a ticket stub that would justify me digging around in my big bag of tickets to find the date, but I was able to nail down when the U2 and Bob Dylan shows are via the awesome ( Read more... )