––what are your lasting memories?

TG: That I knew this wasn’t in any way cool, no matter which show it was that came first. That Air Supply had cool lasers. That I really liked that song “Sunset People” by Donna Summer. That I own both Donna Summer’s and Air Supply’s greatest hits CDs, but have no memory of ever listening to them, which makes me think they date back to a time when Columbia House allowed me to steal CDs from them using several different aliases. That the first really cool concert I went to wasn’t for another five years, at least, and, in looking back, I don’t know how cool Depeche Mode really was, but I sure did like their hair. That my mother was highly irresponsible in letting us go to a Donna Summer concert, what with the lasting effects disco has on young children.

RM: Well, besides the music, Andy threw up during the encore. The guy seated next to him, a stranger, gave him some pot to smoke which must have had PCP in it or something. We also drank quite a bit, even though we were underage. Anyway, Andy threw up, and the people around us scattered. He seemed okay after that, however.

ES: At the end of Tori's great underated I WANT TO KILL THIS WAITRESS, my date, John Hodgkinson, let loose his piercing patented two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle. His distinctive––and deafening––siren whistle is CLEARLY AUDIBLE on Tori's 'live' UNDER THE PINK CD version of I WANT TO KILL THIS WAITRESS... just hearing John's joyful high-C whistle-pitch, preserved forever, brings back the whole night to me...It was John's most memorable concert-moment as well, followed by him yelling "I love you" to Joni Mitchell onstage and her yelling back to him; "What?"


Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel We're So Famous, editor of Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, and co-founder of Post Road, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.