Happy Thanksgiving Everybody. What do you have to be thankful for this year?
If you are like me, you have traveled home for the holiday and are sleeping in your childhood bed, surrounded by your childhood things, as well as all the crap that moved from dorm room/fraternity house/keg holding apt and then back home after college. Part of that mess is the holy grail of a concert goer's life, the concert ticket pile.
With the advent of online ticketing and Ticketfast (I pay extra to print my own tickets for what reason exactly?) the days of the torn ticket stubs are numbered. But from 1995 until recently, the pile was a formidable presence.
And this year I am thankful for that first fateful concert that tore a hole in my brain, that fried my soul, and freed my mind. The show was George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars at the University of Maryland in the summer of 1995. I had the pleasure of telling George himself this at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square a few years back. He was actually very humbled, extremely friendly, and half awake during the day which was a pleasant surprise
The show was a free concert on the "mall" at Maryland, which is a huge field in the middle of campus. Still being in high school, and being surrounded by throngs of people both in the crowd and on stage, was a life changing experience. We were all one nation under a groove witnessing George and band clad in nun's outfits, diapers, wizard costumes, extremely phallic noses, and who knows what else romping around. The funk was thick and more importantly I was growing up and into a concert lover. Concerts aren't just about the music but what your life is about at the time, the trip to get there, who you are with, the venue, the parking lot/ride out, and analyzing the night's show. This, my friends, is my favorite activity. So thanks once again George, and thanks to all of you concert lovers out there, on this turkey week 12 years later.
George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic
Flashlight
Washington DC, 1979
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