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This is it.
The ticket that started it all, the night that altered the course, arguably the focus of my life, the show that slapped me out of infancy and thrust me into a teenaged life of dry ice, feedback, Marshall stacks and 500-watt hanging light cans and ushered me into an adulthood of soft-seat theatres and vast stadiums, travel, hotels, and concerts of all stripes in countless venues spanning the very planet we live on. And it all started with The Headpins opening up for Loverboy at the Moncton Coliseum on August 19th, 1983; my first concert.
I got there early, though I wasn’t yet the seasoned General Admission concert kid that I would soon become – one who would be in line all afternoon ready to sprint down the concrete stairs and straight to the rail as soon as my ticket got punched. Those days were not too far ahead of me but for this one I didn’t know enough to run.
No matter, I ended up watching the show from a thousand different vantage points, including very, very close to the rail, front and centre.
The Headpins opened the show and they blew me away. This would have been my first time seeing Spandex and I swear I thought Darby Mills was wearing body paint in lieu of pants. The Headpins have some great riffs and I will heartily argue that the guitar soloing easily stands the test of time. So melodic, so thoughtful, so wailin’. As a remarkable bam-bam-bam of added bonuses I ended the set with a trio of souvenirs and all of them free (I doubt there was even a merch table – concert t-shirts weren’t yet ubiquitous, even at arena shows): a Headpins-stamped and concert-used drumstick that I magically plucked out of mid-air, Darby’s white stage towel that I had to fight just a little bit to obtain, and the Sharpie-written setlist from Darby’s monitor, which I got just by asking a roadie*.
When Loverboy hit the stage I lost my mind. I couldn’t believe they were standing right there on the stage; I couldn’t believe I was seeing the band with my very own eyes. I might as well have been seeing The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix up there, so smitten I was with the band at the time. My adolescent AM radio-inspired disco leanings had recently given way to rock, particularly Rush and Loverboy. I knew every lyric on both the self-titled debut and the follow up album Get Lucky and I spent the entire show either singing along or picking my jaw up off the floor after every guitar solo.
I was still a half-decade or so from starting to learn to play the guitar myself but like every other testosterone-fuelled boy my age I was already very taken with the instrument and Paul Dean did not disappoint. Though I knew nothing about guitar playing at the time I knew in my heart and soul that I was seeing one of the best guitarists in the world that night. Each solo was an effortless romp of lyrical brilliance, every bend was flashy and thick with vibrato, every power chord bled pure rock and roll, or so my 15-year old novice concert brain told me. And while of course my inexperience was misleading, it feels good to relisten to Paul Dean even at this stage in my life and realize that he was indeed a fine guitar player.
When the band left Paul standing alone onstage to dazzle us with his mid-set feature solo I was over-the-moon in ecstatics. I’m sure I annoyed everyone standing near me.
And speaking of that I stood everywhere. I have pictures in my mind of the band onstage way down there on the floor as I stood high up in the bleachers. I remember the band being just feet away as I thrashed for space on the floor. I can see myself watching the band from the back of the floor with room to rage and pump my little fists in the air.
But most vividly I remember walking out of the show sweaty and breathless with adrenaline and excitement, swearing to all who would listen that I was going to go to every concert the world had to offer for the rest of my life.
It was a promise both unpractical and naive, but one I have kept religiously for forty years now.
*I took my three prizes to school the next day and showed them off like they were the Holy Grail, the Shroud of Turin and a handwritten letter from God, which to me they were. They (along with all of my other life-prizes) were inside a pair of suitcases that I ended up leaving for way too long at someone’s apartment in Fredericton. I eventually got one of the suitcases back a few years later in a miraculously unlikely bout of serendipity that nobody would ever believe, so I won’t bother telling the story here.
The suitcase containing the towel, drumstick and the concert setlist (and countless other treasures, many long-forgotten) has never been seen again, but I haven’t yet given up hope.
[edit to add:] I recently discovered an astounding artifact which forces me to realign the “facts” presented in this asterisk. It turns out that the suitcase I remarkably recovered** must have contained the Headpins setlist after all because I just found it in an old file folder marked “autographs” (the file also contained various items signed by celebs such as Paul Shaffer, Metallica, Saga, Bobby McFerrin, and Bill Frisell). It’s amazing to think that this setlist – written in marker on graph paper – is from the very first set of live music I ever saw. It’s the page that started it all.
Amazing.
**Okay, okay…I’ll tell you. I was staying here and there in Fredericton dating a girl and I convinced her to move to Toronto with me. I forget how she got there (probably the bus) but I know I hitch-hiked. By this time I had been out of my parent’s house for a year or so bouncing around and I could pack everything I owned into three bags, though it was still too much to hitch-hike with. I left two suitcases (or was it three?) at my girl’s friend’s apartment and said I’d be back. I wasn’t. At least two, maybe even three or four years went by – an eternity in student housing – and I still had not gone back to retrieve my stuff.
Anyway, Toronto (okay, Newmarket) finally fell through and eventually the girl did too and I was back living in Moncton. I went to Fredericton for the weekend with a couple of buddies from work and while we were there I decided to check in on my suitcases. It was purely a lark, I had no inkling that they would be there.
So I knock on the side door of this old house and a lady answers. I ask if whoever still lives there and was told no, she didn’t. Anyway, I explained about leaving my bags and the lady looked at me in shock. “You’re kidding,” she gasped. She called out to her husband over her shoulder, “Honey, come here! Someone is here about the suitcase!” She turned back to me. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, and she was right.
“This suitcase was left here when we moved in,” she explained, pointing to one of my suitcases which was sitting right there next to the door. “We held on to it and held on to it thinking someone would come and get it but it had been so long that we finally decided to get rid of it.” Just then her husband’s head popped up behind her. “You’re here for the suitcase?” he asked, astonished. “Really?!?!”
“I told him to take it to the dump and he was going to take it today,” she said. “I was just leaving in five minutes!” the husband gasped, shaking his head.
Wow. I asked about the other suitcase(s) and was told no, this was the only one that had been left. Still though.
Amazing.
(Being completely honest, I’ve lately had some brain tremors about those artifacts. Did I get them at this concert or did I get them when I saw The Headpins headlining at the Coliseum three months later? With just a dozen songs and no encore written on the setlist I’m prone to think that it’s from an opening set and not a full headlining concert. Plus I distinctly recall their headlining show ending with Led Zeppelin’s Rock & Roll, which isn’t listed on this setlist. However [and this is a pretty iffy “however”] I recall showing off the towel and drumstick around school the next day so I couldn’t have got them from a concert that took place in August. Heck, maybe I lucked into souvenirs at both shows? I tell you, sometimes memory [or the lack of it] can really confuse things.)
Todd Man Out 