A Good Year In Music (2015)

(Rolling Stones during ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ @ TCF Stadium 6/3/15)

Well 2015 is winding down, New Years Eve is fast approaching, and I have been thinking about all of the cool concerts I was fortunate enough to see this year.  Some bands I have seen a million times, some bands I have never seen and some are bucket-list guys.  There was one stand-out fantastic show and one stand-out crappy show…but mostly a year filled with awesome music.  I have ramped up my live concerts in the last couple of years mainly due to age concerns…my age and the advancing ages of all my musical heroes.  I always regretted skipping AC/DC the last time they came around (twice) during the ‘Black Ice’ tour in 2008 and 2009.  It has now been almost 15 years since the last time I saw them in 2001, and until they announced they will be here next February I was starting to wonder if I would ever see them again.  And I made that mistake with Ray Manzarek as well…I skipped his last show here in Minnesota few years ago and then he died.  After I let those shows go by unattended I started thinking about age.  And time…it is relentless.  It is moving faster and faster the older we get and all my favorite bands are retiring or dying.  Ten years from now I may have nothing to see.

 

So I decided that I had to try and see every single band or artist that I like when they came to town in case it is the last time.  That’s the thing about ‘the last time’.  You never know when the last time is until it’s over with.  Was the summer Rolling Stones concert the last time I will ever see the world’s greatest rock and roll band?  Or what about Motley Crue?  Three times now I have gone to see their ‘last show ever in Minnesota’, but the bastards keep coming back and I have to keep going.  Or the freaking Who…I paid out big bucks ($17) when I was in high school to see their ‘final tour’ in 1982, and yet I have tickets to see them coming up next May.  Or the Rush concert last spring…they kind of hinted that was their last tour.  You just never know.

 

Looking at the list below, here are some of observations:  I would have to say my favorite show of the year was the Rolling Stones and my worst show was Gordon Lightfoot (as detailed in my 7/30/15 blog-post ‘The Good, the Bad and the Awesome’).  My favorite venue for quality of shows, sound, staff, the bar, and convenience (it’s just down the road from my house) is the Medina Ballroom.  My worst venue is the Dakota.  I suppose seeing a mellow performer like Jorma Kaukonen is okay in that small, intimate, upscale expensive environment, but seeing a rocking band like the Subdudes and having to sit down instead of dancing is counter-productive and annoying.  The Medina can have that problem too, but usually for the hard rock bands they remove the tables and make the whole place General Admission.

 

I have to give special mention to two other concerts.  First of all, the Dead & Company show.  I do not know why some people are so insanely opposed to this.  Jerry can’t be in the band, he’s dead.  Does that mean everyone else in the band should refrain from making anymore music?  I pay money to see good music, and this was good music.  I do not know anything about John Mayer, but he is an awesome guitarist and I would definitely go again.  I liked this Dead even better than last summer’s Chicago version.  I am not a fan of Trey’s (or Phil’s) voice, so this new version was the best post-Jerry show I have seen.  I scored a pit ticket for the Dead by calling AXS instead of toiling with their website and it worked great!  I got right in and scored a coveted General Admission pit ticket.  The front third of the floor was GA, the back two-thirds assigned seats.  Doors at 7 pm and music at 8 pm, and they said people with GA could start lining up as early as 5pm.  I figured the hell with that…it was freezing out and I did not need to be up front. 

 

So I got there at 7:15 pm but there was still a massive line as the doors had not been opened yet.  I was not going to wait in that line so I walked up to the front to ask one of the guards when they were opening up.  She said “Right now” and grabbed me and I was the first one in the building!  So I ran downstairs and holy sh*t the floor was empty…I walked right up and got front row center on the rail!  I could not believe it.  Then two nice girls got next to me and I told them that for all 100 of my Dead concerts I had been front row only once…in Louisville.  They asked when that was and I told them spring tour ’89.  They both laughed and said that was the year they were both born.  It was a pretty good mixed crowd between young and old, with all the young ones having been introduced to the Dead through their parents.  It was a pleasant crowd and I had no problem leaving to go get a drink or pee and getting back to my front/center spot.  One of the girls went into a seizure-like thing though during ‘Space’ with her head bouncing off the railing as she collapsed, so me and the other girl had to help her to the back.  Other than that it was a great night, fantastic show.

 

The other honorable mention goes to Alice Cooper/Motley Crue’s final ass-kicking show here in Minnesota last week.  I did not care that this was the third final show in Minnesota that I had seen on this tour and I did not care that the setlist was the same as last August.  I just love seeing these two bands in concert.  Alice Cooper was his usual great self playing all his hits while being electrocuted and stabbed and beheaded, and Motley Crue was just as loud and brash as ever with a monster set full of explosions and flames and great tunes.  It also helped that I went in solo on an $18 ticket and managed to walk right up to a 5^th row aisle seat right on the side of the stage.  I could feel the heat and the concussions from all of the explosions, and I had Nikki Sixx in my face all night.  He even threw me a guitar pick.  Great concert, great night, and I will miss seeing those guys live.

 

Another thing I noticed on the list is that all but one of the concerts was in Minnesota.  The only out-of-state show was in Chicago.  That is a far cry from my earlier days when every other month I was traveling with Mitch or Ted or Freak or B-Dog or Arnie or Brad or Penny or Dirty Dan to San Francisco or New York or New Orleans or someplace to see the Radiators.  Or going to see major music festivals like Jazz Fest in New Orleans or the Austin City Limits Festival in Texas or Summerfest in Milwaukee.  Or before that touring with the Grateful Dead all over the country.  Now that I have a couple of small kids my traveling days have come to almost a complete halt.  I miss those adventures, but I would not trade what I have now for anything.

 

I also noticed that a good majority of the bigger shows I went to solo.  I am totally cool with that.  A younger me would have never dreamed of going to a concert by myself…uh, loser.  But now I almost prefer it.  I go to a concert to see music, not to talk.  Also, when I am solo at a large venue like an arena or stadium I have the option of buying a cheap ticket and then sneaking my way down to the front and finding an open expensive seat.  That works just about every time when I am solo, but is much harder with a friend.  Don’t get me wrong I like going to concerts with friends, but I have no problem going solo if nobody else wants to go.

 

The best show that I did not see last year was the Foo Fighters on January 10^th at the LA. Forum.  On January 7^th, the night before heading to Los Angeles from Jan 8-11^th for a funeral, I decided for the heck of it to go to ticketmaster.com and see what music was playing for the 3 nights I was going to be there.  I happened to login at exactly 9:00 pm and suddenly a Foo Fighters concert popped up on the screen.  Huh.  I was ignorant and had never seen them before but I know they are huge so I decided to try for one ticket.  Huh again…12^th row in the lower level on the front-side of the stage.  Perfect.  Wait, only $50?  Oh, it was a benefit show and all tickets were $50.  I did not know much about the Foo, but I thought tickets were hard to get for their show.  This was easy.  I had 8 minutes to complete the purchase.  I called my brother in Los Angeles to see if the family was doing anything that night…if not, I could go.  He did not answer.  I called my mom in Portland…I got her voicemail too.  Hmm.  It was a great ticket but I did not want to be stuck with the ticket if I couldn’t go.  Nobody called me back, time expired and the ticket was gone.  I immediately started to feel pangs of regret.  I tried again right away to get another ticket just to make sure they were still available in case my brother or mom called back.  The wait-time for tickets was now 45 minutes!  It was 9:10 pm.  They must have went on sale at 9 pm and they were now basically sold out!  Weird, I thought. 

 

Turns out it was a surprise unannounced concert for Dave Grohl’s 46^th birthday party, complete with special guests Paul Stanley, Jack Black, Slash, Alice Cooper, Zakk Wylde, Perry Farrell, Trombone Shorty, David Lee Roth and Lemmy Kilmister.  Tons of my musical heroes doing all my favorite songs.  And as it turns out I could have went.  By that third night in town all the family activities were done, so the night of the Foo concert I was sitting on a bed in a hotel room just down the street from the Forum with my Uncle Jim swilling a bottle of scotch watching Sports Center.  It is now and will remain one of my life’s all-time biggest musical regrets.  After telling my friend Penny McCartney about what I had done she was shocked at my stupidity for not buying the $50 ticket.  “You realize of course that people will pay $1,000 for a ticket to see these surprise Foo concerts.  It would have been the concert of a lifetime.”  I think she was genuinely mad at me, and for good reason.  Ughhh.  Here is what I missed:

http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/foo-fighters/2015/the-forum-inglewood-ca-5bcab724.html

Anyways, here is what I DID manage to see last year:

 

1/16/15 – Fleetwood Mac @ Xcel Center – St. Paul, MN

1/17/15 – Sesame Street Live @ State Theatre – Minneapolis, MN
2/6 & 2/7/15 – New Orleans Suspects @ Bunkers – Minneapolis, MN
2/26/15 – Gov’t Mule @ State Theatre
3/13/15 – Robby Krieger @ Medina Ballroom – Medina, MN
3/29/15 – Stevie Wonder @ Target Center – Minneapolis, MN
4/11/15 – Jorma Kaukonen @ The Dakota – Minneapolis, MN
4/12/15 – Disney’s Frozen On Ice @ Target Center
4/19/15 – Sixx A.M. @ Mill City Nights – Minneapolis, MN
5/12/15 – Rush @ Xcel Center
5/16/15 – Billy Joel @ Target Center
6/3/15 – Rolling Stones @ TCF Stadium – Minneapolis, MN
6/20/15 – Gordon Lightfoot @ State Theatre
6/27/15 – Dr. John @ CHS Field – St. Paul, MN
7/3/15 – Grateful Dead @ Soldier Field – Chicago, IL
7/10 & 7/11/15 – Raw Oyster Cult @ Bunkers
8/5/15 – Motley Crue @ Xcel Center
8/21/15 – Mofro/Big Head Todd @ Hilde Performance Center – Plymouth, MN
8/22/15 – Foo Fighters @ Xcel Center
8/27/15 – Def Leppard/Styx/Tesla @ State Fair – St. Paul, MN
9/18 & 9/19/15 – Honey Island Swamp Band @ Whiskey Junction – Minneapolis, MN
9/20/15 – Uncle Acid @ Mill City Nights
9/29/15 – Mark Knopfler @ Orpheum Theatre – Minneapolis, MN
10/9/15 – Leon Russell @ Medina Ballroom
10/16/15 – Ringo Starr @ State Theatre
10/25/15 – Arlo Guthrie @ O’Shaughnessy Auditorium – St. Paul, MN
10/29, 10/30 & 10/31/15 – Raw Oyster Cult @ Bunkers
11/10/15 – The Subdudes @ The Dakota
11/14/15 – Eric Burdon @ Medina Ballroom
11/21/15 – Dead & Company @ Target Center
12/8/15 – Motley Crue @ Target Center
12/31/15 – Hairball @ Medina Ballroom

 

Looking ahead to 2016, I have tickets lined up for the following…I can’t wait!

 

1/15 & 1/16/16 – The Radiators @ Tipitinas – New Orleans, LA

1/25/16 – Black Sabbath @ Target Center
1/29/16 – Blue Oyster Cult/Jefferson Starship @ Medina Ballroom
2/14/16 -- AC/DC @ Xcel Center
2/23/16 – Warren Haynes Band @ Fitzgerald Theatre – St. Paul, MN
2/28/16 – Disney On Ice @ Target Center
2/29/16 – Bruce Springsteen @ Xcel Center
4/9/16 – Marvel Universe Live @ Target Center
5/1/16 – The Who @ Target Center

Getting Busted In The Dorms (The Aftermath)

In the last blog entry I told you about my dorm room getting raided on May 30^th, 1986.  How my roommate Mark and I got busted for growing 18 pot plants, as well as for theft due to the cops finding our ‘Stolen Goods Report’ carefully detailing all of the stuff we had shoplifted over the school year.  After being on the lam for about a week, Mark’s girlfriend Mindy made an arrangement with the cops for us to turn ourselves in on the condition that we would not be immediately jailed.  After meeting with the friendly female detective in charge of our case, our next step was to go to court.

 

I got charged with possession of marijuana which was a misdemeanor, and theft of goods totaling less than $400 which was also a misdemeanor.  Mark was actually facing much more trouble than me, because he had been ‘winning’ the stealing competition.  The wheelchair he had stolen was worth close to $400, and with the addition of the dozens of other littler items he had stolen his total was well over the $400 felony threshold.  He would have been facing felony theft charges except for the incredible coolness of our understanding detective.  Recognizing that we were a couple of idiot college students with a future if we stayed out of trouble, not a pair of lifelong master criminals, she charged Mark with something like 25 counts of misdemeanor theft.  Instead of totaling all of the goods and charging him with a felony, she broke it down to a misdemeanor theft charge for each individual item.  Apparently a ton of misdemeanors is better than even just one felony.

 

In addition to that bit of kindness, the detective made recommendations to the court that we do no jail time, that we complete a large number of community service hours, and that after our probationary period our records would be wiped clean.  No adult criminal record.  Holy crap.  Would it fly?  The judge sat up in his bench for about 10 minutes reading over our case.  I anxiously watched his face.  Sometimes he furrowed his brow in disgust, sometimes it wrinkled with laughter, and then his brow raised in surprise.  Really?  The cops were recommending community service and then a clean record?  He conferred with our public defender and with the prosecutor for a bit and then he finally brought forth his judgment.  We pleaded guilty to all of our misdemeanors, and in turn he sentenced me to 150 hours of community service for my 2 charges, and Mark to 200 hours of community service for his pile of charges.  We would be on probation for 1 year, and then if we remained out of trouble during that time the charges would be wiped from our records.  The University of Minnesota had also put us on probation, so we were currently on probation from the State of Minnesota, the U of M, and the State of Wisconsin (see the ‘Busted In Trempealeau, Parts I-IV’ blog posts dated 9/9/11-9/16/11).

 

So no jail time, but now we had to deal with what seemed like a million hours of working for free.  They let us both leave to go to our parents’ homes in Waukesha, WI for the summer, but in the fall when we returned to college we would have to start knocking off our community service hours.  So that September we went back to the cop shop and were shown a list of places that we could work at.  We told them where we lived and our school schedules and what days and times were best for us, and they picked the places for us to work.  Mark ended up being assigned to the police station doing filing work, while I got sentenced to a crazy holy place.  I cannot remember the name of it, but it was in a street-level office building on E. Hennepin Avenue near the St. Anthony Main area.  The location was great because it was only a few blocks from my apartment off 4^th street, and it was right across the street from my favorite place in the whole world, Surdyk’s Liquor.

 

The first time I went in to start working my hours, I stopped by Surdyk’s beforehand to pick up some wine for later that night.  They were simply appalled and many eyebrows were raised when I walked in carrying a bag full of the devil’s elixir.  The place was a fundamental super-religious sect that took the bible extremely seriously.  Their world had no room or tolerance for booze and they made sure I was aware of that with a lecture on the evils of alcohol.  I promised to never drink again and then my training commenced.  Mostly I would just be stuffing envelopes with fliers to send to their members to raise money.  They also made money by selling cassette tapes of their teachings.  They had a huge old cassette duplicator thing that was as a big as a stacked washer/dryer and sometimes they would let me make tapes.  That was fun because I was way into making Grateful Dead tapes at the time.  I thought about bringing some in so I could mass produce like 20 copies of a show at a time, but I was pretty sure they would frown upon anything related to the Grateful Dead.

 

One time I went in there with a slight limp.  I cannot remember why, probably a sprained ankle playing soccer.  So one of the guys asked me what was wrong and I told them that my right leg is slightly longer than my left (which is true) so I limp sometimes.  Before I knew what was happening he had grabbed me and thrown me up on a table and told me to lie down.  Then he called everyone in the building over to the table and they started chanting and ‘laying hands’ on me.  What the f*ck?!  I was a little freaked out at first but I decided to go with it.  While about 5 or 6 of these people laid their hands on various parts of my body and chanted, the head weirdo started tugging on my left leg while beseeching the lord to:  “Make this boy’s leg grow in the name of Jesus!”  After three or four times yelling at Jesus he started to look worried and I felt bad, so I suddenly jerked my left leg forward just a little bit.  “Sweet precious lord it’s a miracle!!” they all shouted over and over again.  After yelling for awhile and some high fives around the table, they all dissipated back to whatever they were doing and left me alone to stuff envelopes.

 

They seemed like pretty happy people which I am all for, but I received a few lectures during my times there about the dark path I had chosen.  Whatever happened to separation of church and state?  I found it very hard to believe I was sentenced by the state to work for this wacked out church place.  I resented the lectures and having their views thrust on me, but mostly I just let it go and tried not to rock the boat because as it turned out they were also a very trusting people.  This worked to my advantage because they let me be in charge of my work log.  I would go in on say a Friday for the first time in two weeks, and log that I had been there that Monday and Wednesday, and 3 days the prior week as well.  I would go in for 2 hours and log about 20 hours.  Nobody seemed to catch on or care when I came or went, so out of the 150 hours of my sentence I probably put in about 20 or 25 at most.  Mark was jealous and a little bit pissed off because he certainly had to do his full 200 hours…he was not going to get away with fudging the numbers at the police station.

 

I finished my community service hours in a couple months, and after a year when the probation ended it was all over.  It was scary at times but I learned a few things.  I learned not to steal things.  I learned not to grow pot in dorm rooms.  I learned that Thomas Jefferson’s separation of church and state theory does not apply to stupid college sophomores.  And I learned that not all cops are created equal.  Some of them are people too and can be pretty cool.  Probably most of them, but I would not know because I try to avoid them.  I have not always succeed as you may have read in past entries, and maybe in some future ones as well.

 

Cops and Dorm Rooms Don't Mix (Story #2...Weed/Theft)

It was the spring of 1986.  I was a sophomore at the University of Minnesota and this was my second year of living on campus at the Pioneer Hall dormitory in Minneapolis.  I lived with my high school best friend Mark Smith.  Instead of sharing a normal single dorm room, we had a sweet suite, one of the few in the building.  We each had a small bedroom equipped with a bed, a dresser, a closet and a door leading to a good-sized living room area in the middle.  The living room had our desks, a fridge, the TV and a real couch perched on top of beer-case couch that we had made from the leftovers of our numerous beer parties.  It was a double-decker couch, much like the one Emmet had thought up in ‘The Lego Movie’.  There were no pets allowed in the dorm but we had a 5-foot Ball Python named Damian, a stray cat for part of the year, a dog for a little while, a hermit crab named Jzero, some chameleons that roamed free and a small garter snake named Floyd.  (Poor Floyd met an untimely demise one night when he escaped into the hallway where somebody accidentally stepped on him enough to injure him but not to kill him.  We never bothered locking our door so the person put Floyd back in his 5-gallon tank where he lived with Jzero.  When we got home we were saddened to discover that Jzero had eaten Floyd’s head clean off.)  Anyways, it was a great room but it was getting near the end of my second year there and we were thinking it might be time to move out and get actual big-boy apartments.

 

One day I got mysteriously called down to the dorm director’s office.  Uh oh…this cannot be good.  When I got there he looked sad, and not sure how to go about saying what he had to say.  He explained that it had been a tumultuous year for Mark and I with numerous warnings about parties and pot and noise and whatnot.  He then hesitantly went on to say that with the thin walls, people hear things…things that we do not want them to hear.  I mistakenly thought I was just getting a lecture about our loud parties bothering people.  He even went on to say that we should not be surprised if one day soon the cops showed up…and that we had better be extra super careful and clean up our act.  Fine, okay, fine…we will keep the noise down I thought to myself.  There was less than a month left in the school year, and then we would definitely be moving out for good I decided.

 

What I stupidly did not realize was that this kind man was trying to warn me that the cops were actually planning a full-blown raid on our dorm room and that we should empty it of any incriminating evidence.  Now that I think about, he all but told me exactly that, but I chose not get the message.  That past winter I had scored a grow-light from a friend named Humper who lived in a frat.  He owed me money and he gave me the light as payment instead.  So naturally we cleared all the stuff out of the closet in my bedroom and used it to grow pot.  We had 18 pot plants crammed in there which made it a bit difficult for me to sleep because we kept the bright light on 24 hours/day.  But it would be worth it as we thought of the sweet harvest we had envisioned for ourselves at the end of the school year.  In addition to the plants, Mark also had a sheet of paper acid (100 hits) that we would eat on the weekends or give to friends.

 

It was on Friday, May 30^th, 1986 when Mark and I jumped on a Greyhound for the 5-hour bus ride to our hometown of Waukesha, WI.  We left that Friday morning and planned on coming back Sunday night.  Mark had tickets for the Aerosmith concert at Alpine Valley that night, and I was looking forward to spending the weekend with my girlfriend Lona who was a senior at Waukesha North.  I was at Lona’s parents house Friday night when I got a frantic call from Mark’s girlfriend Mindy in Minneapolis…the cops had raided our place that day!  I was panicked…what the hell were we going to do?  I could not even tell Mark about it because he was at the concert.  This was way before cell phones or email so the sketchy reports I was getting from friends in Minneapolis were of little use.  All I could find out was that they cops were there the entire afternoon and had completely destroyed our place.

 

I started going over in my mind all the things that they would find.  The pot…the acid…and oh no, the ‘Stolen Goods Report’.  Oh god I hoped Mark had hidden that or took it with him.  Yes, this is embarrassing to admit, but like stupid sophomore college idiots we had gotten into shoplifting.  It was mostly little things like blank cassette tapes and record albums from the local record shop, but Mark also had swiped a wheel chair from the hospital a couple blocks away.  We had both gotten incredibly proficient at riding that thing all over the dorm on just the two back wheels and it was a lot of fun.  Eventually the shoplifting had become somewhat of a competition between Mark and I, so we decided to keep track in a journal of what we had each taken.  So in the ‘Stolen Goods Report’ we had carefully and painstakingly documented every single item we took, when, from where, and how much the item cost.  We had one column for Mark, and one for me.  The idea was to tally up at the end of the year to see who had gotten the most.  I got no sleep that Friday night and when I finally got a hold of Mark the next day he told me that he think he left the notebook in his room.  We were scared shitless, dreading whatever was waiting for us when we got back to Minneapolis.

 

As it turns out, the cops initially had only been there to bust us for the pot and the acid.  They drove a big police van onto the sidewalk and backed it right up to the front door of the lobby in the picture above.  Then they hauled out all 18 pot plants and loaded them onto the van.  From accounts of friends who were there, it was a very hot day and the overweight cops were sweating bullets climbing up and down the three flights of stairs lugging all of our stuff.  Then the tedious work began…looking for the acid which was by now only a half sheet, a piece of paper maybe 2” by 3”.  Between us Mark and I owned literally hundreds and hundreds of cassette tapes (mostly Grateful Dead concerts) and many more albums and books and stuff for them to look through.  While looking for the acid one of the cops happened to spot a notebook sitting on Mark’s desk with ‘STOLEN GOODS REPORT’ proudly written in large block letters on the cover.  Oh my god those cops must have gotten the biggest laugh when they opened that thing up and passed it around.  Yes, every single theft we had ever committed that year written down in great detail for them.  I have never stolen anything in my life since then.

 

Luckily we were out of town when the raid went down which kept us out of jail.  But now what?  We got back Sunday night and stayed at Mindy’s house.  We waited until 2 am and then snuck back into the dorm and up to our 3^rd floor room to assess the damage.  It was horrific.  Every single cassette and album had been opened up a dumped out.  Our beds turned over, all of our dresser drawers taken out and dumped.  The dorm room fridge was open, tipped over on its side, and all the contents strewn about the floor.  Other than the Stolen Goods Report (which was not there so of course the cops had found it) the thing we had been most worried about was Mark’s acid.  Pot was one thing, but acid was a major felony.  As I surveyed the carnage, Mark ran over to the fridge, tipped it back upright and HOLY SH*T!  There was the acid!  Mark kept the paper acid in the fridge to keep it fresh.  The cops had emptied every single beer can, old piece of pizza, ketchup packet and whatever else was in there…they had completely emptied it clean except the acid.  Mark yelled to me and I came running over and I looked to where he was pointing.  There alone in the fridge proudly sat the little sheet of acid.  PHEWWW!  We grabbed the acid, some clean clothes, our schoolbooks and got the hell out of there.

 

With the acid problem off the table, now we just had to face the music of the pot plants and the stolen stuff.  We stayed at Mindy’s apartment for about a week trying to figure out what to do.  We had so many questions.  Were the cops looking for us?  Were they staking out the dorm or our classes or friends?  Who had turned us in?  Were we facing serious jail time?  We still had another week of school and finals to get through, but we did not go to the dorm for fear of being caught and we were equally nervous about going to our classes.  We were officially ‘on the lam’.  We could not afford a lawyer so we had Mindy make an anonymous call to the cops from a pay phone.  She told them that we were in town and we wanted to know what was next.  The head detective was a nice lady and said that a warrant had not been issued yet, but would be soon unless we came in to talk to her.  We had Mindy call her back with a time to meet and with the condition that we would not be tossed into jail.  She agreed.  We would be booked, but not jailed.

 

So we nervously went down to the cop-shop and were led to her office.  She was an incredibly nice lady who had done her homework on us.  We were both good students who were smart in school but f*cking dumbasses otherwise.  She showed us the evidence room where the 18 plants were slowly dying and she said she felt bad about that.  Then she laughingly pulled out the Stolen Good Report, plopped it on the table in front of us and shook her head at how easy we had made her job.  But then she grabbed Mark’s shirt with two hands, jokingly shook him around and said:  “Off the record…WHERE WAS THE ACID?!  I was there all day opening every single goddamn cassette tape looking for that sh*t!  Was it in the snake cage?  I opened the cover to the wooden box, took one look inside and slammed it shut.  You could have had a pound of heroin, I was not going in there.”  Now it was our turn to laugh.  Still grinning Mark explained to her that it was in the fridge…that it was the only thing left in there after they had emptied it.  “Dammit!!” she yelled.  But she got it over it.  They had plenty to bust us with.  Apparently the dorm RA had heard us talking about drugs in our room and that was enough for the cops to get a warrant and raid us.  If only I had heeded the dorm director’s ominous warning about the impending raid.

 

This has gotten long enough so I will save the rest.  I will explain in the next blog entry how our court dates went, our punishment, and how we got through all of that mess.  Until then remember, don’t do drugs and stay in school.

Cops and Dorm Rooms Don't Mix (Story #1...Blow)

I lived at the Pioneer Hall dormitory on campus at the University of Minnesota for my first two years of college, from September of 1984 through May of 1986.  While there I had a few run-ins with the cops.  One notable time was during my first year there.  Our dorm was attached by an underground tunnel to the dorm next door called Frontier Hall, and we shared a basement cafeteria with them.  One night I was in my friend Ron Bronson’s room in Frontier Hall with Ron, his roommate Paul, Rinehart Simpson who lived across the hall, and one or two other guys.  Paul was a rich kid from Colorado who had an expensive high school cocaine habit.  He had pretty much quit doing blow when he got to college, but occasionally he would still splurge and have some fun.  This was one of those nights.  While we were all sitting around smoking pot he suddenly pulled out a 12”x12” Van Halen carnival mirror and dumped a gram of coke on it.  Yay!  Coke is a pretty crappy drug for many reasons but it was fun every once in awhile, especially if you did not have to pay for it.

 

We had been having a heated discussion about the breakup of Pink Floyd and which one is ‘Pink’…Roger Waters or David Gilmour. I love Gilmour, but I have always been more in the Rogers Waters camp.  I was going to help prove my case by having the group listen to a kickass Roger Waters bootleg cassette I had of a recent concert at Madison Square Garden.  In the dorms we had been warned many times about smoking pot so we were very careful about SLT’ing (Shut/Lock/Towel the bottom of) the door whenever we smoked.  I removed the towel covering the bottom of Ron’s door and left to run over to my dorm room and get the Waters tape.  Ron’s room was the very last room at the end of a hallway, and on the third floor.  I walked the length of the hallway and turned left to get on the elevator to go down to the basement tunnel to my dorm.  As I turned the corner I literally ran smack into the dorm’s Resident Assistant (RA) and a cop!  After bouncing off his belly, the RA gave me a sad but stern look and wordlessly they made the turn heading for what I was sure was Ron’s room.  Despite our precautions, the RA must have smelled the pot and called the cops.

 

My first thought was huge relief that I was no longer in that room.  My second thought was “Oh sh*t, the coke!”  Pot was bad enough, but if my friends opened the door thinking it was just me coming back and they had the mirror sitting out it would be big trouble.  As soon as the cop/RA turned the corner I ran past the elevator to the adjacent stairwell and ran down the three flights of stairs as fast as I could.  When I got down to the lobby a few precious seconds later I grabbed one of the two lobby phones and called Ron’s room.  He picked up and said “Hi.” and in the background I could hear loud knocking on their door.  “Cops, ditch everything!  Cops ditch everything!!” I yelled.  Then in order to make my point and hopefully get him moving instantly, I slammed the receiver down loudly as I hung up.  I walked over to my dorm, drank a beer in my room and hoped for the best.

 

I waited about a half-hour and then called the room.  Ron answered, gave a weak laugh and said:  “God, thank you man, come over.”  When I got there the gang was hanging out talking about what happened, while Paul was sitting on the corner of his bed looking in the Van Halen mirror and making strange faces with his mouth.  Ron told me that the second I hung up he motioned for everyone to hide the drugs.  Somebody stashed the weed under a mattress while Paul grabbed the mirror.  He did not want to dump $100 worth of drugs on the floor, but he did not want to risk being caught with it either.  So he quickly huffed the entire pile of coke into his mouth!  Then he licked the mirror clean and slid it under a pile of junk.  When everything looked cool Ron answered the door and let the cop and the RA in.

 

Luckily they did not search the place, but they had smelled the weed and my friends got a written warning from the RA and a stern lecture from the cop about the evils of marijuana…how it is leading them down a dark path, that the next time they will bring a warrant and search the rooms and they will all end up in jail.  The cop questioned each guy in there if they were smoking pot and if there was any in the room.  Everyone denied it vehemently, but when they got to poor Paul he could barely talk.  Not only was he nervous and getting all jacked up from the instant ingestion of an entire gram of cocaine, but his mouth was completely insanely numb from it.  Imagine getting a dozen shots of Novocain in your upper/lower gums and your tongue.  He was all mush-mouthed and doing his best to keep from drooling while answering the cop’s questions.  “No thir…I havth nod been thmoking weed.”  The cop looked at him curiously and asked what was wrong with him, but Paul told him he had a really bad cold and the cop left him alone.

 

All’s well that ends well, but remember kids…don’t do drugs, and stay in school.

The Good, the Bad and the Awesome

Well as the title suggests, we will start off with the ‘good’.  Early last Spring the four remaining living members of the Grateful Dead announced they were going to do three final farewell shows in Chicago on July 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th of 2015 at Soldier Field.  This seemed fitting as it was the site for the final shows the Dead did in 1995 before Jerry Garcia died a month later.  I had been at those two final shows in ’95, and I decided I had to see at least one of the three final ever Dead shows.  With Saturday being the 4^th of July to spend with the family and Sunday the 5^th being my wife Nadia’s birthday, that only left me with Friday the 3^rd. 

 

We were going to be in Wisconsin anyways that Thursday through Sunday at Nadia’s brothers cabin in the Wisconsin Dells, so my plan was to drive the 3.5 hours on Friday down from the cabin to Chicago, and then drive back late after the show.  But after months of looking I could not for the life of me find a reasonable ticket.  I was not going to spend hundreds of dollars to sit behind the stage, so I decided not to go.  But then my buddy Travelin’ Dave from Milwaukee told me he flew out to San Francisco for the two Dead shows the weekend before and there were tons of tickets available all over the parking lot.  Okay, that’s good news, so I decided to go to Chicago without a ticket and find one in the lot.

 

As I was pulling into the B&B where Travelin’ was staying with his girlfriend, out of the blue my friend Dave Thompson called me up from Virginia and asked if I was in Chicago and if I needed a ticket.  He knew a guy in Chicago with an extra.  $215 face value.  Yes I said!  More than I wanted to pay (I only had $260 in cash), but at least I would be in to the show.  Then he texted me and said it was free!  What?!  So I figured the guy with the extra ticket was rich and was just being really cool.  After many anxious texts and failed phone calls and voicemails with his friend, I finally managed to find the guy out in the lot only an hour before show time.  And thank god because there were NO extra tickets to be found.  I would have been shut out.  I only saw one guy selling tickets in the lot and he looked like a criminal.  And right after I saw him I ran into a friend from Minneapolis who was incredibly bummed out because he had just spent a ton of money on two tickets from somebody in the lot and the tickets were fake.  He got turned away at the door.

 

So I finally find Thompson’s guy with an hour to spare and he hands me the ticket and a beer and said the ticket was on Thompson!  Dave…you are so f*cking cool.  It was a great seat, next to a hot 24-year old chick who was there with her dad.  They were both totally cool and we talked and shared Dead stories.  The show was a blast and surpassed all of my expectations.  I warmed up to Trey Anastasio after a bit, and then started to really enjoy his guitar.  I was never a Phish fan and only have been to one half of one Phish show so I know nothing about Trey, but he was good.  The 1^st set was well done and the energy of the 70,000 people was a living, contagious entity.  It was starting to feel a little like old times. 

 

‘Mason’s Children’ to open the 2^nd set was the second of four songs I had never heard the real Dead play (Passenger, Mason’s Children, New Potato Caboose and Ripple).  The ‘Scarlet/Fire’ that came next was crowd-pleasingly awesome.  That eventually led into ‘Drums’ which was fun to watch as they broadcast it up close on the insanely massive screen behind us, but it was a bit weird as everyone turned their backs to the stage to watch the screen.  The jam after ‘Playin In The Band’ was incredibly long and rather pointless since they had just got done with a long ‘Drums/Space’.  It was basically all seven guys making uncoordinated noise for way too long, and after awhile I really missed Jerry who would have guided that mess into something cool.  I said to the hot chick “What the hell are they doing?” and this being her first Dead show she had no idea what they were doing.  Finally Bob steered it into ‘Let It Grow’ which was cool, and then a sweet ‘Help/Slip/Franklins’ to end the set.  Then the ‘Ripple’ encore to end the show was total goosebumps, with Bobby singing and playing acoustic guitar.

 

It was a good concert, but it could never touch that good ol’ Grateful-Jerry feeling you got when Jerry was on stage taking care of our souls.  It did reaffirm my love of the Grateful Dead’s music however, the soundtrack to much of my life.  I had a few goosebump moments (during ‘The Music Never Stopped’, and of course ‘Ripple’).  I had no illusions that I was seeing a Grateful Dead show when really I was just seeing the best Dead cover band of all time…but the music was good and it was a great night.  If those same seven guys ever toured I would go see them (but not for $215). 

 

I have my commemorative ticket, as well as the stuff they handed you at the door which was a rose, a backstage-pass type of thing and a program.  And since I had some extra money thanks to Dave I also scored a signed/numbered 7/3/15 poster (#987/1000) which I have framed along with the ticket and pass.  It was a good time and I had a blast and I owe it all to Thompson.  I am almost glad I did not go to the final show on Sunday as I am sure there were a lot of tears.  I listened to it on Sirius radio in my car and I was tearing up throughout the show.  I was very nostalgic, thinking back on the exactly 100 times I had seen them in the past and all the good times/friends/travels/memories/loves the Grateful Dead had brought me.  Overall, it was a ‘good’ experience and I will go see these guys play again in whatever configuration they come up with.

 

Now we go back a couple weeks to the ‘bad’.  With two small kids Nadia and I only get out with each other a few times a year, so we have to pick and choose our nights carefully.  We had not gone out since the previous fall so when I saw Gordon Lightfoot tickets go on sale a few months ago I asked Nadia if she was up for that.  It was on Saturday, 6/20/15, just a day before our 7-year anniversary.  She was not a big fan, but I had grown up listening to his records and still love everything on the ‘Sundown’ album so I talked her into it.  I scored a pair of great 15^th row aisle seats dead center on the floor of the State Theatre in Minneapolis.  I had never seen him but always wanted to, so I was super excited.

 

When we got inside I ordered a double-scotch for me and a bag of Skittles for Nadia.  $23 with the tip.  Okay, it would be a one-drink night.  No problem.  We settled in to our kickass seats and right on time at 8pm the band strolled on stage and started playing.  Soon a little old man shuffled slowly up to the center mic with a guitar and started playing and ‘singing’.  What?  Was that possibly Gordon?  It did not look like the guy that was on any of the album covers I had ever seen.  This was just a little old guy with long, greasy, slicked-back hair.  And the voice.  Ouch.  It was inaudible, barely above an old-man whisper.  Was this for real?  A quick check of my cell phone revealed he was born in 1938.  Holy crap he was going on 77 years old!

 

That sort of explained the insanely bad vocals, but it did not explain why he still thinks he should be touring.  I looked over at Nadia who was gamely pretending to be enjoying herself.  I shook my head and put her at ease by telling her that this was horrible.  She looked relieved, like she thought that I thought that this was good.  I kept hoping maybe he would clear his throat and his voice would come back, or he just needed a couple songs to warm up.  But no…his voice remained consistently painfully embarrassingly non-existent throughout the entire concert.  After 45 minutes he took a much needed set-break.  15 minutes later he shuffled back on stage and continued the torture for another 45 minutes. 

 

His band was good, but his voice was just awful.  I knew every word to almost every song, but I could barely recognize the songs.  I love Gordon Lightfoot and his music, but the ancient man who was croaking out my favorite songs bore no resemblance to the man who first sang them.  It was by far the worst concert I have ever paid any money for.  This was not an isolated incident for him because I have since read similar reviews of his shows around the country.  I feel bad for him, but I just hope somebody he will listen to will tell him that he has to stop touring and retire.  It was a ‘bad’ performance and nobody should ever pay money to see him again.

 

Now we go back another couple weeks to the freaking ‘awesome’.  Last spring mysterious billboards started popping up in certain cities around the country with the familiar Rolling Stone tongue logo and a saying next to it like ‘Start Me Up’ or ‘You Get What You Need’.  Minneapolis was one of those cities and I was overjoyed.  I had only seen the Stones twice before, and for various reasons I had not seen them since 1997.  The show was announced to be at TCF Bank Stadium on Tuesday, 6/3/15 and I scored a fairly good seat for $150.  I marked my calendar and eagerly awaited the return of the greatest rock and roll band of all time.

 

The day of the concert it was raining so I brought a raincoat and parked a mile away near my old apartment in Dinkytown to avoid traffic and paying for parking.  I had my bike in the back of the car and rode in the misty rain to the stadium and locked my bike to a rack against the stadium.  I was wearing my 50^th Anniversary Stones shirt (thanks Penny!) and my ‘Stones/Sesame Street/Some Girls’ boxer shorts and I was ready to rock!  Grace Potter opened and she was great.  The first time I had seen her was a few years ago in a half-full bar called the Cabooze, and now she was opening for the Stones in a football stadium.  I talked to her at the Cabooze and she signed a couple of her cd’s for me as my buddy Mitch and I went backstage to smoke up her band.  Extremely nice guys, and Grace is as cool as she is hot so I was happy to see her making it big-time.  She did a great set and the mist had ended by the time her set did and the skies cleared up.

 

My purchased seat was in the upper level on the side of the stage but I never went up there.  Instead I found a 5^th row aisle seat directly below on the lower level right out in front of the stage.  I sat there for Grace, and then had to move back to the 7^th row for the Stones.  For some strange reason I had 10 seats all to myself in an expensive section close to the stage.  Through the next couple of hours they slowly filled in with a few people, but I managed to have the two seats on the aisle all to myself for the entire show.  That is one of the perks of going to a concert by myself…I usually manage to find a great seat close to the stage.

 

The excitement and tension was building until the lights finally went down and out came the Rolling f*cking Stones with ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and it was on.  It was a massive stage of course and they continued to assault us with classics like ‘It’s Only Rock n Roll’ and rarities like ‘Bitch’ for over two hours.  Mick Jagger was all of 71 years old, but he sang and acted like he was in his 20’s.  His voice was perfect and he is obviously in great shape as he danced and pranced the entire concert.  Compared to Gordon Lightfoot who is only 5 years older, Mick is a god.  Gordon can barely walk or talk whereas Mick hardly ever stops moving.  The stage was as wide as a football field and there was a walkway out from the stage out to the middle of the field.  Mick left no part of the stage or the walkway untouched as he continuously ran all over, making as many people as possible feel as if they were in the front row.  Keith Richards, Ron Wood and the rest of the band rocked, but Mick was clearly the life of the party.

 

One of the highlights was when Mick slowed down for a bit, donned an acoustic guitar and went into ‘Moonlight Mile’…so beautiful.  Later Grace Potter was invited onstage to sing a powerful ‘Gimme Shelter’ with Mick and she nailed it, and she even inadvertently flashed us her boobs a few times which was nice.  Two songs later things got eerily intense when the familiar bongos started the intro to ‘Sympathy For The Devil’.  Smoke and flames licked up from the stage and massive screens while Mick slowly emerged from hell wearing a devilish black and red outfit.  The encore started with a wonderful ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ complete with a huge local choir split in half on either side of the stage, and ended fittingly with ‘Satisfaction’ and fireworks. 

The great seats were a big part of it, but god what a crazy ‘awesome’ concert.  Expectations tend to get lower the older your heroes get, but the Rolling Stones erased any doubt that they are still a viable touring band with an incredible performance that blew me away.  I will never not see them if they ever come around again.  Check out the Stone’s 6/3/15 set list:

1)      Jumping Jack Flash

2)      It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It)

3)      All Down The Line

4)      Tumbling Dice

5)      Doom And Gloom

6)      Bitch

7)      Moonlight Mile

8)      Out Of Control

9)      Honky Tonk Women

10)  Before They Make Me Run

11)  Happy

12)  Midnight Rambler

13)  Miss You

14)  Gimme Shelter

15)  Start Me Up

16)  Sympathy For The Devil

17)  Brown Sugar

Encore

18)  You Can’t Always Get What You Want

19)  (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction