I was fortunate to have an aunt and uncle only a couple years older than me and that opened up my world to live music. Officially my first concert was The Monkees’ 20th Anniversary Tour at the Douglas County Fair in August 1986 and I almost feel like this should count since in spite of it being a county fair it occurred during the height of MTV-stoked Monkeemania 2.0 and it was an endless sea of people as a result.

If Im being stricter about it, my first real concert experience was INXS on the Kick tour in June 1988 (opener: Steel Pulse). Having little-to-no allowance and few concert options in Omaha (let alone ones my parents would agree to let me attend, even with my aunt and uncle as de facto chaperones) the idea of attending a concert, any concert at all became more than enough the point. I was hooked. I could probably have enjoyed any show you dropped me off at around that time, regardless of band or genre. I wanted to attend more shows. Badly.

Fast forward to the next spring. Bon Jovi was touring their New Jersey album and a stop in Omaha was slated. I gave my uncle the last $20 from my Christmas money and hoped for the best, reason being this was the pre-Ticketmaster era where you had to physically call record stores to find out which seats they had in stock from which rows and then hope you could drive over there before someone else beat you to them. I was hardly the world’s biggest Bon Jovi fan but that didn’t really matter. This was a Concert. And a big one at that. That’s what mattered.

A week or so later, my uncle calls me after school and says, “we’re thinking about doing R.E.M. instead. What do you think?”

I pretended to seriously deliberate on this for a moment long enough to make it seem like I was a wizened music snob before replying “sure, let’s do that.” I knew that I loved that cover and I knew that at my Jr. High dances “End of the World As We Know It” would blow the floor up into a rager in that crucial last half hour. And again, most importantly this was a concert. And it would also be a big one, if not quite as bombastic as what Bon Jovi had in mind. Little did I know how completely different my life would have been if we’d just settled on the Bon Jovi show instead.