The Soundtrack To Buying A Michael Jackson Ticket
Sounds Good!
Music memoires are a bit part of (serious) music listening. Anyone that tells you they listen to music but they don’t know what, or they’re just happy to have something on in the background…. the reason I will move away from this person at a party, or keep my answers polite but short is because I cannot relate to them. My entire life is framed by memories that have a soundtrack, the music isn’t just the memory it is the score for many and various memories.
Example: Last weekend I’m drifting about on YouTube looking for a concert to watch or re-watch. (One of my favourite ‘lazy’ options when I want to watch something but might also want to read or computer-scroll is to search up Full Gigs on YouTube). I stumble on a pro-shot of the Michael Jackson concert in Auckland. I was at this gig. So I have a look. It’s got the big long intro with the camera footage that blew our minds at the time but seems so dated now. Oh, there’s the small thing too of how most attitudes to Michael Jackson have, um, changed a lot since that 1996 gig. (That’s a topic for another time perhaps – although I did recently describe my memories of and feelings around MJ and the gig somewhat here).
Anyway, I drifted back out of the gig after about 20 minutes, I watched the opening set pieces and it didn’t feel very musical – well, it was all about the spectacle I suppose. It brought back decent memories of the road-trip up from Hawke’s Bay to Auckland, the final leg of a trip that had started in Wellington. It was a pilgrimage. When the MJ concert was announced I just had to have a ticket. I didn’t care who I was going with – I bought two tickets, the old-fashioned way, lining up at 6am in a queue that stretched down the road for several blocks. When the ticket place opened (pre-online purchasing) and the queue surged forward there was a major hit of anticipation. Would they sell out? Was it all a giant waste of time? The first person to buy a ticket – someone that had camped out overnight – got in their car, which was parked right outside the ticket venue. When the key hit the ignition the drum-groove to Billie Jean pumped out into the street, the window open, and they drove off in a squeal of tyre-scream and their own delight, brandishing a ticket for the rest of us to see. We cheered. This was New Zealand in 1996. All of us there hopeful to get to see The King of Pop.
A lot has happened in the 25 years since eh.
So much so that I couldn’t feel anything much attempting to watch the video of the concert on a lazy long weekend.
But it’s been 25 years since the release of my favourite R.E.M. album, New Adventures in Hi Fi. It might not be the band’s very best – but it runs close. And it’s my favourite. For many reasons. The music. Absolutely. The surprise of it. The vibe. The timing. The fact that it felt like a comeback after they tried to be ‘hip’ with their U2-esque Monster (which isn’t as bad as everyone says).
But the main reason I love it so much is it’s tied to that very same time. And not just because it was also released 25 years ago – well, it is because of that. You see, Money Bags-me, flush with student loan, walked down the road with my precious Michael Jackson tickets in hand and wanted to show someone. Straight into the music store. Fisheye Discs. It’s not there anymore. It hasn’t been for about 20 years. Not many music stores at all survive now. But Fisheye was, briefly, clubhouse stuff. So, I went in to show off my ticket and to talk about music, early on a Monday morning. I left with R.E.M.’s then brand new album. No one cheered when my car stereo blasted How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us.
There is a re-release of the album on vinyl and CD – a double with extras – but Spotify has you covered too of course. And though you might find something gleaming in the bonus disc it’s the original album that matters. Well, it’s what matters to me. Because it was the last truly great R.E.M. album. And though their important decade of music is of course their crucial 1980s work (I once made a case for them as The Greatest Band of the 1980s) and yes, I once bought one of their albums off a well-known Wellington street juggler and the R.E.M. gig I eventually got to was as memorable for where I slept after, there are moments on New Adventures – the duet with Patti Smith (E-Bow The Letter) the seven-minute chaotic symphony of Leave (one of the most emotionally overwhelming uses of music in a film, though the film itself is lost in the haze and I almost never think of A Life Less Ordinary now) – that make this album their transcendent very best for me. Always and forever
But part of its magic, and indeed part of its story, for me, is the purchase-date. Some 25 years ago I bought the album as a way to remember the day that I bought a ticket to see Michael Jackson.
That’s the blur of music and memories that I love. No connection beyond the connection I have forced.
My own attendance at the MJ gig – sure. I’m glad to say I saw him when he mattered. And maybe when he mattered most. Certainly a victory-lap of a gig. But it neither deserves nor begs analysis beyond that. Not now.
The R.E.M. gig was very good and made up for not seeing them when everyone else did (the triple bill with Grant Lee Buffalo and Crowded House – I eventually got to see each band separately but at the time I felt like the dumbest person not invited to the party for missing them all on the one night).
But my favourite R.E.M. album will always be the one that just slipped out between tours, without hits or hype and was both a return and an escape. And was also the soundtrack to the day I bought a Michael Jackson ticket.
That’s what music is to me too. A return and an escape.
Have a listen to New Adventures in Hi-Fi today. Listen to it if you love R.E.M. and it’s already your favourite. Listen to it if you have never heard it or never liked the band. And listen to it if you too bought it the day you bought your Michael Jackson concert ticket. I’m possibly the only person that connects those two moments. And that’s not special. But it is my story. The music framing it. As always.
And for some new music memories, or just your background listening, here’s today’s playlist, volume 36 of A Little Something For The Weekend