062985 Phil Collins, Toronto, ON

In 1985 I was seventeen years old, a high school dropout living with my girlfriend and trying to make a living by moving furniture for a pittance when I could find the work.  Though I was working in downtown Toronto, renting a room north of the city in Newmarket was the only housing I could afford.  To say I was on a tight budget would be an astounding understatement.

So when we left the house on June 29th, 1985 to go to Exhibition Stadium to try and catch Phil Collins in concert public transportation ate up most of my budget.  Between the Go Bus and the subway it cost $14.40 to get us both into the city and back.  I probably had about $25 in my pocket to start with, which would have been all the money I had in the world until my next paycheque.

Down at Exhibition Stadium (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore) I tried my hand at finding a pair of miraculously cheap tickets to the show.  Though I was still pretty new at the concert-going game I had seen my share of scalper ticket dumps already.  With images of Ozzy tickets going for $1 apiece outside Maple Leaf Gardens still fresh in my mind I scoured the sidewalk outside of the venue with nothing but a ten dollar bill and high hopes.

As the sun receded towards Mississauga my hopes dwindled.  When we heard the crowd inside roar at the first notes of I Don’t Care Anymore with our feet sorely still pounding the pavement outside we knew we had lost the battle.  

Undaunted, I led my girlfriend up a ramp and we found one of the stadium entrances with a metal door drawn tightly down.  We sat down in the shadows with our backs resting up against the concrete wall.  We could hear the music perfectly (or at least as perfectly as the horrendously sounding venue could offer) with the stage just behind us.  A few songs in Collins played his hit from Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now).  I reached out and held my girl’s hand.

This was the mid-80’s, and raised as I was on Top-40 AM radio Phil Collins was my Led Zeppelin.  Like so many in my era every breakup coincided with a Phil Collins hit, for each of life’s dramas he had a song that was just perfect, a song that made us all ask “How does he know what I’m feeling?!?”

While I thank ye music gods that my musical tastes have developed over time, I am so thankful for the ignorance that afforded me the bliss of that evening.  It was so endearingly romantic, the two of us hand in hand alone in the dark as Phil Collins sang from just a few hundred feet away: Give Me Just One More Night, This Must Be Love, In The Air Tonight.

Clearly the man was playing just for the two of us.  

He even played a song called Hand In Hand before closing out the show with Take Me Home, just as we sat hand in hand, just as I was about to take my lady home.

The gate abruptly opened with a loud clang, shocking us out of our reverie.  I jumped up and pulled my girlfriend along, working against the early-leaving crowd into the venue.  The security guard gave us a nod and we rushed in and found some seats only to catch the quasi-encore which was nothing but Phil Collins’ new video playing on the big screen.  

I found a ticket stub on the ground to keep as a souvenir and we joined the paying customers leaving the building.  We spent the next ninety minutes or so making our way back to Newmarket on a series of pubic transit vehicles, excitedly going over the evening.  I remember being bummed at the time that we didn’t get in, but thankful that I still had $10 in my pocket.  

Now, two lifetimes later, of course I’m so thankful that we didn’t get in, so thankful we had the night we had.  Funny how life’s like that sometimes.