I’ve mentioned about how my friend Dave and I used to scalp tickets to concerts and get great seats. So one time I had U2 tickets from the Unforgettable Fire tour, and Dave couldn’t go for some reason. So after casting around for possibilities, I ended up going with my brother in law Tom.
Now, Tom and I had a sort of love-hate relationship that mellowed over the years. He was a Mets and Red Sox fan (who had a hell of a time choosing in 1986, but he chose well.) He also had very different musical tastes as far as rock went, and I’m man enough to say he opened my eyes to many bands I might not have given a chance to.
He was not a big U2 fan (hell, neither was I) but he liked some of their stuff so he decided to go.
We drove down to the good old Brendan Byrne arena, parked at the outer periphery of the lot, and made our way inside. I had floor seats, I think fifth row center, and they were great. They had some opening act that I can’t recall, and the pre-show lull descended on the place.
Then U2 came storming out and the place went nuts. Everybody jumped up out of their seats.
And stood on them.
I hate this. I have a bad sense of balance and hate standing on seats. But if you don’t, not only can’t you see the stage… what you do see is other people’s asses at face-level. So up on the seats we went.
They played a good long time, including two encores. As they started their third encore, we decided it would be a good idea to cut out to get a jump on the inevitable traffic jam when the show ended. So we left the arena and headed out to the lot.
And realized we’d forgotten exactly where we parked.
I knew that we were at the outer edge of the lot, so we walked straight out to the end and turned right, skirting the outer edge. We figured we’d run into the car eventually, right?
Only the parking lot didn’t completely surround the arena. It only covered maybe 3/4 of the periphery. The other 1/4?
Swamp.
Yeah, we walked through a swamp in Jersey. (Take that, Springsteen!) It sucked, and the worst part of it was that it wasn’t the first time I’d done it. (At another concert scalping attempt we’d decided to walk the periphery looking for scalpers and swamped it then, too.)
We continued walking through the lot on the other side of the swamp and finally found the car, by which point the show had let out and we’d not beaten crowd after all. Worse, in looking back at the arena I realized that if we had turned left at the periphery instead of right we would have found the car in like 20 feet.
Oh well, it was a good show anyway.