––what made you want to go?

TG: When you’re nine, want is a relative thing. What I recall is that my mother had four free tickets to the concert(s) at the Concord Pavilion – an outdoor concert venue not far from our home in Walnut Creek – two in the grass, two on the floor and that originally my older siblings, Lee and Karen (at the time 18 and 16), we’re going to take the floor seats and then they were going to give the grass seats to their friends. Well, that just wasn’t going to fly. At age nine, I knew well enough that these were prime tickets and that the opportunity to see a legendary act like Donna Summer – or Air Supply – wouldn’t come along again in this lifetime, so I think I cried until my mom made Lee and Karen take me and Linda, then 11, to the show with them.

RM: I'd been a big fan of Zappa's for about six months, especially a fan of the salacious, tragicomic stuff that was found on APOSTROPHE and OVER-NIGHT SENSATION. I was fourteen at the time, which is sort of the perfect age for Frank Zappa, at least the Frank Zappa of that period. (However, I still like a lot of his music, even though I am now 45.) Also, I'd never been to a concert and was eager to experience the medium.

ES: My brother. He and his friends took me to see Elton John in South Carolina; it was such a non-memory––Elton danced on the piano; someone in our party threw up, but I forget who–– that for the purposes of these questions i'd like to fast-forward to my First Concert DATE. This was Tori Amos, before she became so big they made her play stadiums. What made me want to go? My date and I were both total Tori fans–– and (read below) because of the concert in question, my then-date now-husband even wound up 'appearing' on a Tori CD...

––where was the concert held?

TG: The Concord Pavilion, an outdoor venue in the Bay Area.

RM: The Palladium, which later became a night club. Sort of a medium-sized venue, I think, like the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side.

ES: Saunders Hall in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA. Just Tori & her piano and a crowd of 200 or so packed into the theater's wood church-pew style seats...The all-wood arena made a wonderful thumping mega-sound when we all stomped our feet in Tori-love...