A Bride, A Guitar, and a Six-Hour Rabbit Hole
A bride, a guitar, and one unforgettable walk down the aisle sent me wondering about every major artist I’ve ever seen perform live. Nearly six hours later, I had a list—but somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t really remembering concerts anymore. I was remembering my parents, my wife, my son, missed opportunities, ridiculous stories, and versions of myself I hadn’t thought about in years. Apparently, I fell down a rabbit hole. And I’m very glad I did.
September 24, 2026
A few nights ago, I spent almost six hours trying to remember every major musical artist I have ever seen perform live.
This was Kendra Fisher’s fault.
She has absolutely no idea.
Kendra was one of my brides two weeks ago, and her wedding required considerably more preparation than most. I made the drive to Youngstown three separate times before the wedding day. Kendra and I met three times—once with her dad and twice without him—and then, on the morning of the wedding, I arrived extraordinarily early so her father and I could have the ceremony site to ourselves. There was a reason for all of this. Kendra had been planning a surprise for her groom, Kyle, for more than a year. Their ceremony was at Fellows Riverside Gardens, and when the time came for Kendra to make the roughly 200-foot walk through its magnificent rose garden toward the man she was about to marry, she didn’t want recorded processional music coming through my speakers. She wanted to provide it herself. Kendra would walk down the aisle playing guitar and singing a mashup of “God Bless the Broken Road” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Her father would walk beside her, also playing guitar. And Kyle couldn’t know.
It was an absolutely beautiful idea. Making it actually work was another matter entirely. Over those meetings and trips to Youngstown, we experimented with wireless microphones. We worked through ways to amplify the guitars wirelessly. We tested range. We tried different equipment. Then, on the morning of the wedding, her dad and I adjusted speaker placement and direction, gain, reverb, treble and bass. We repositioned equipment. We tried four different microphones. We tested, listened, adjusted and tested again. Eventually, we reached that reassuring technical standard familiar to every professional in the wedding industry: we thought we had it. And I was terrified. Not nervous. Terrified. By then, this wasn’t simply another ceremony detail on my timeline. I knew how long Kendra had dreamed about this. I knew how much the surprise meant to her. I knew Kyle had absolutely no idea what was coming. Somewhere along the way, I had become so emotionally invested in making her vision happen that I knew if something failed—regardless of whether it was actually my fault—I was going to blame myself.
Then the processional began, and from the far end of that rose garden, Kendra’s voice rang out. Her guitar came through. Her dad played beside her. Together, they slowly made their way toward Kyle while Kendra sang to the man she was about to marry. Kyle turned, saw her, heard her, and completely lost it. So did I. My favorite moment of every wedding has always been watching the groom’s face when he first sees his bride. After hundreds upon hundreds of weddings, I still watch for it. I still anticipate it. And yes, I still get misty-eyed more often than I care to admit. This was different. Kendra wasn’t simply walking toward Kyle. She was performing for him. She was giving him something she had quietly imagined and planned for more than a year. Suddenly, after all those meetings, all those miles to Youngstown, all the testing and adjusting and worrying about whether some stupid wireless microphone was going to choose this particular moment to ruin my life, there was nothing left for me to do. The music belonged to Kendra and her dad. I got to listen.
And I bawled. Between Kyle and me, had anyone arrived late, they might have thought they had stumbled into the most tragic day of our lives. It was exactly the opposite. In 28 years of weddings, I don’t know that I have ever experienced a moment of such overwhelming, unrestrained joy. Certainly some of that was relief. Everything we had spent so much time planning and testing actually worked. But it was more than that. I was watching music do what music has done throughout my entire life: take an emotion that words alone can’t quite contain and somehow make it larger. Kendra could have told Kyle how much she loved him. She could have written him a letter. Instead, she walked toward him with a guitar in her hands and her father beside her and sang it to him. I had spent months worrying about the technical side of making that possible, but once it was happening, none of the technical stuff mattered anymore. I wasn’t thinking about microphones, frequencies or speaker placement. I was experiencing the music. And in the days afterward, I kept thinking about that.
I love working with live musicians at weddings, although I don’t think I talk about that nearly enough. There seems to be a strange assumption in wedding planning that music is an either/or proposition. You hire a band or you hire a DJ. Pick one. Except it doesn’t have to work that way at all. Over the years, I have shared weddings with full bands, singers, guitarists, pianists, saxophonists, violinists, cellists, string ensembles, dueling pianos, polka musicians, klezmer musicians and plenty of people who probably don’t fit neatly into any category. Sometimes they provide the ceremony music. Sometimes they play cocktail hour or dinner. Sometimes they take over the reception for an entire set and then hand the room back to me. Most of the time they bring their own sound system and I have mine, and the arrangement is remarkably simple: they play, then I play. Sometimes I provide a microphone, mixer or other sound support. Occasionally, as with Kendra, the coordination begins weeks or months in advance and becomes considerably more involved. The important thing is that live musicians and a DJ aren’t competing ideas. Some of the most memorable weddings I have worked have included both.
There are also performances that aren’t hired entertainment at all. A member of the wedding party picks up a guitar. Somebody sings. A parent performs. A bride decides she is going to sing her own processional. Those can become my favorites because the person making the music has a relationship with the people for whom it is being performed. It isn’t simply entertainment anymore. It becomes a gift. I’ve watched musicians completely change the atmosphere of a room, and I’ve watched guests stop whatever they were doing because somebody with an instrument suddenly commanded their attention. I have enormous respect for people who can do that. I’m a musician myself—I have been a drummer since I was nine—so perhaps I appreciate the mechanics of it differently than some people do. But I also appreciate it in the simplest possible way: I love hearing talented people make music. I enjoy it enough that a number of musicians I’ve worked with have earned places on the recommended-vendors page of my website. I don’t recommend them merely because they showed up on time and didn’t cause me problems. I’ve heard them. I’ve watched them work. And in many cases, I’ve had the pleasure of becoming part of their audience myself.
That may be my favorite part. Whenever live musicians take over the music for a while, I get to do something I almost never get to do while working a wedding: I leave my DJ booth. If musicians are playing a 45-minute set, I’m not standing behind my equipment for 45 minutes waiting for my turn. I find myself a seat and I listen. Really listen. That’s rarer for me at a wedding than you might think. Even when I’m loving the music I’m playing—and I frequently am—part of my brain is working. I’m watching the room, reading reactions, deciding what comes next, thinking about timing, requests, volume and momentum. I’m watching the couple. I’m making sure the song I thought would work actually is working. I’m already considering the song after the song I’m currently playing. Music may be filling the room, but I’m responsible for where it goes next, and that means I never experience it quite the same way the guests do.
When live musicians are playing, somebody else has the music. I can surrender that responsibility for a little while. I sit down and experience it. Occasionally, I don’t stay completely seated. I’m not much of a dancer, which is an admittedly strange confession from somebody who has spent nearly three decades professionally filling dance floors, but that doesn’t mean I’m motionless. I sway. I clap. I stomp my foot. Every once in a while, the music is good enough that it gets me out of the chair entirely. For however long those musicians have the room, I’m not the DJ waiting for them to finish so I can get back to work. I’m an audience member. I’m a fan waiting to hear what they play next. I spend so much of my life deciding what other people are going to hear that there is something wonderfully freeing about sitting down, shutting up and allowing somebody else to decide what I am going to hear.
A few days after Kendra’s wedding, I found myself thinking about her performance again. That got me thinking about all the musicians I’ve worked alongside over the years. That got me thinking about how much I love hearing music performed live, which naturally led me away from weddings altogether and toward all the concerts I’ve attended throughout my life. It began with my favorite local bands that I often pay a cover to see. But, eventually, a question occurred to me: Just how many major artists have I actually seen perform live? I didn’t know. I had never tried to count them. So I started making a list, figuring it would probably take an hour. One artist reminded me of a venue, which reminded me of another concert I’d seen there, which reminded me of somebody I went with, which somehow unlocked another artist I hadn’t thought about in twenty years. Every time I thought I was finished, another name surfaced. An hour became two. Two became three. Eventually, the sensible thing would have been to stop. I did not do the sensible thing.
“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”
Down the rabbit hole I went. Curiouser and curiouser. Almost six hours later, I finally stopped, looked at the list, and thought: Holy shit.
The List
AC/DC
Aerosmith — 4x
Christina Aguilera
The Allman Brothers Band
Pat Benatar
Tony Bennett
Chuck Berry
The Black Keys
Blink-182
Andrea Bocelli
Bon Jovi
Booker T. & the M.G.’s
Brian Setzer Orchestra
James Brown
Jackson Browne
Jimmy Buffett — 14x
Eric Burdon
Brandi Carlile
Johnny Cash
Cat Power
Ray Charles
Eric Clapton — 3x
George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars
Coldplay
Harry Connick Jr.
Elvis Costello
Christopher Cross
Sheryl Crow
Def Leppard
Celine Dion
Dire Straits
Dr. Dre
Dr. John
Duran Duran
Bob Dylan
Eminem
Gloria Estefan
Melissa Etheridge
The Everly Brothers
Fleet Foxes
John Fogerty
Ben Folds
Foo Fighters
Foreigner
Aretha Franklin
The Fray
Garbage
Genesis
Gin Blossoms
The Go-Go’s
Goo Goo Dolls
Macy Gray
Al Green
Green Day
Buddy Guy
Hall & Oates
Heart
H.E.R.
John Lee Hooker
Jennifer Hudson
Iggy Pop
Indigo Girls
Chris Isaak
The Jerry Garcia Band
Joan Jett
Billy Joel — 8x
Elton John — 2x
Samara Joy
Kansas
KC and the Sunshine Band
Alicia Keys
B.B. King
Carole King
The Kinks
Diana Krall
Alison Krauss
Lake Street Dive
Cyndi Lauper
Huey Lewis and the News
Jerry Lee Lewis
John Legend
Little Richard
LL Cool J
The Longest Johns
Jennifer Lopez
Darlene Love
Madonna
Maroon 5
Wynton Marsalis
Paul McCartney — 2x
Meat Loaf
John Mellencamp — 3x
Men at Work
Natalie Merchant
Father John Misty
Alanis Morissette
Mötley Crüe
Mumford and Sons
Willie Nelson
Stevie Nicks
Ninja Sex Party
O.A.R.
Wilson Pickett
Robert Plant
Gregory Porter
The Pretenders
Bonnie Raitt
Ben Rector
Lou Reed
R.E.M.
Lionel Richie
Robbie Robertson
Smokey Robinson
Kenny Rogers
Rush
Santana
Paul Simon — 2x
Simon & Garfunkel
Slash
The Smithereens
Soul Asylum
Regina Spektor
Rick Springfield
Bruce Springsteen — solo 2x
Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band — 6x
Steely Dan
Steve Miller Band
Ringo Starr's All Starr Band
Sting
Joss Stone
Stray Cats
Styx
Taylor Swift
Susan Tedeschi
Toto
Train
Robin Trower
Shania Twain
Keith Urban
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons
Jimmie Vaughan
The Wiggles
Brian Wilson — 2x
“Weird Al” Yankovic — 2x
Zac Brown Band
“She had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.” —Lewis Carroll
Looking at all those names together is admittedly pretty cool. There are people on that list whom I feel incredibly fortunate to have seen. Some are gone now. Some stopped performing years ago. Some were already legends when I saw them, while others were still writing the chapters that would eventually make them legends. There are artists whose names practically define entire eras of popular music. Tony Bennett is there. Chuck Berry. Ray Charles. Johnny Cash. James Brown. Aretha Franklin. Paul McCartney. Bob Dylan. Brian Wilson. Little Richard. Al Green. Jerry Lee Lewis. Smokey Robinson. And then, sitting among all of them as though there is absolutely nothing peculiar about their inclusion, are Ninja Sex Party, The Longest Johns, and The Wiggles. My musical autobiography has apparently never had much interest in maintaining its dignity. But as I sat there looking at the list, something unexpected happened. I stopped thinking about how many concerts I had attended and started thinking about my life.
And yes, The Wiggles are on there. That one requires some explanation. We took our older son, Joel, to see them when he was three, but his obsession had started much earlier. As young as two, he would run around the house in his diaper, dancing and singing along to “Wake Up, Jeff,” “Fruit Salad” and “Hot Potato.” From the moment he woke up until the moment he went to sleep at night, it seemed The Wiggles were playing on the stereo. Fortunately, he wasn’t a one-trick pony. Before he was four, he had also learned the words to Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man,” the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” and “Octopus’s Garden,” Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” and Jimmy Buffett’s “Jolly Mon Sing.” Looking back, I suppose I should have recognized fairly early that music was going to be part of that kid’s world. He absorbed songs. He remembered words. He sang them back. And because apparently popular music alone wasn’t enough for a toddler in our house, he also developed another little party trick.
At three years old, Joel memorized “Jabberwocky.” The whole damn poem. He would recite it for anyone, frequently without being asked, because apparently three-year-old Joel believed the world was desperately waiting to hear some Lewis Carroll. He would begin:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsry were the borogoves,
And the mome raths aoutgrabe.
And he just kept going. All the way to “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chorted in his joy” before returning to the opening stanza at the end. Certain parts absolutely delighted him. “One, two! One, two!” got him excited. So did “snicker-snack.” “Callooh! Callay!” was practically a celebration. My favorite, though, was “galumphing back.” When he reached that part, he would do this adorable little dance that, in his three-year-old mind, apparently represented riding a horse. I can still picture it now that the memory has come rushing back, although until I started writing about The Wiggles, I honestly hadn’t thought about it in years. My God, it was adorable. And I was ridiculously proud. Other parents were teaching their toddlers the alphabet while mine was standing in front of adults confidently warning them about jaws that bite and claws that catch. My three-year-old had memorized poetry, and he wanted the world to hear it.
Maybe that’s another reason the rabbit hole seems particularly appropriate now. Lewis Carroll was already lurking in this story decades before I started writing it. I taught Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for years. I’ve loved Carroll for much longer. And apparently, for a brief period of our family history, I lived with a tiny three-year-old Carroll enthusiast who could recite “Jabberwocky” before he could possibly explain what half the words meant—which, to be fair, nobody else could explain either because Carroll made them up. But the memory returned because I saw The Wiggles on a concert list. That is what fascinates me. One silly-looking entry among more than a hundred artists opened a door I didn’t even know was still there. Suddenly I could see Joel in his diaper again. I could hear the songs that played endlessly through our house. I could see his little “galumphing” dance. I could remember how proud I was when adults stared at my three-year-old in disbelief as he kept going and going through an entire poem. I started this exercise trying to remember musicians. Somehow, I had already ended up remembering my little boy.
Of course, Joel wasn’t the only Wiggles fan in our house. The show started as his obsession, but somewhere along the way it became a guilty pleasure for Gail. No, strike that. It became the guiltiest of her pleasures. And Gail had a favorite Wiggle: Anthony. So we took our three-year-old son—ostensibly the child in this story—to see The Wiggles in concert, only to discover that Anthony wasn’t performing that night. Someone else was filling in for him. Joel, who was three, apparently managed to cope with this devastating development. His mother did not. Gail sat there grumbling through the concert because her Wiggle wasn’t there and his replacement simply wasn’t good enough. I honestly suspect she was more disappointed than our toddler. Looking back, perhaps I should have leaned over at some point and asked the obvious question: Which one of you is three? And now, more than two decades later, I find the whole thing even funnier because Gail was apparently applying a musical standard that I would spend years applying to grown-up bands. No Glenn Frey? Not my Eagles. No Steve Perry? Not my Journey. No Lindsey Buckingham? Not my Fleetwood Mac. Apparently Gail got there first. No Anthony? Not her Wiggles.
That’s what seeing The Wiggles on the list gave back to me. I don’t really see four Australian guys in brightly colored shirts. I see our three-year-old son. I see our house when he was little. I see him dancing in a diaper to “Hot Potato” and galloping around while reciting Lewis Carroll. I see Gail sitting at a children’s concert genuinely annoyed because her favorite Wiggle had the audacity not to show up. I see our family at a particular moment in its history when these were simply the things filling our house and our lives. I put The Wiggles on my list because I saw The Wiggles in concert. But that isn’t what their name gave back to me. Once I realized that, other names began changing, too.
Music has occupied an almost ridiculous amount of my life, and not just listening to it. I’ve found an awful lot of different ways to put myself somewhere in its vicinity. I am squarely Generation X, so some of that started with mixtapes. I made them for myself, but I also made them for other people—especially girls, because apparently it seemed much safer to let somebody else’s lyrics explain what I was feeling than to actually say it myself. Long before I understood anything about programming music professionally, I already cared about which song came next. I cared about what one song said when placed beside another one. I cared about opening songs and closing songs and whether a transition felt right. I certainly didn’t think of any of that as training for anything. I was a kid with a dual cassette deck, a turntable, a stack of music, and far too much time invested in fitting everything onto Side A and Side B without cutting off the final song befofre its end. Looking back, however, some of the instincts that would eventually become part of my livelihood were already there. My history with a cassette deck could fill an entire blog post. Actually, it already did, and you can read the post here: Mixtape Memories.
I’ve also been a drummer since I was seven, which gave me a completely different relationship with music from the one I had sitting beside a radio or making tapes. I’ve played in a few bands over the years, none of which will require an entry on Wikipedia anytime soon, but playing music changes the way you hear it. You begin listening to individual pieces inside the whole. You notice what the drummer is doing beneath a song that most people simply hear as a song. You understand how much work can hide behind something that sounds effortless. You also learn very quickly that four or five musicians agreeing on what should happen next is occasionally a greater feat of diplomacy than anything accomplished at the United Nations. I loved being part of that process, though. There is something fundamentally different about loving a song and sitting behind a drum kit trying to become part of one. Maybe that is one reason live performance has always fascinated me. I know just enough about making music to appreciate how difficult it can be, and just enough about performing it to recognize when somebody onstage is doing something extraordinary.
Then there was radio. I spent four years on the radio at Bowling Green State University, and those years probably expanded my musical vocabulary more than anything else ever could have. College radio exposed me to artists I might never have encountered on my own and put me in an environment where people cared passionately about music I didn’t know existed. That was part of the fun. You could walk into the station with one collection of musical reference points and walk out with a dozen more. Some artists became permanent additions to my listening. Others became interesting detours. Still others apparently exist primarily so that, decades later, I can mention them in a blog post and discover whether anyone else remembers them.
Big Audio Dynamite, anyone?
Crickets.
I swear they existed. Four years of that kind of exposure helped destroy whatever boundaries my musical tastes might otherwise have developed, which probably explains why a list containing Tony Bennett, Dr. Dre, Carole King, Wynton Marsalis, Mötley Crüe, Paul McCartney and Ninja Sex Party doesn’t strike me as particularly strange.
After college came two years DJing in clubs, along with karaoke in bars. I still occasionally DJ karaoke today, although it remains one of my least favorite ways to spend an evening behind a sound system. There is a musical purist buried somewhere inside me who desperately wants music to sound... good. Karaoke does not always share that objective. Weddings eventually became the center of my professional musical life, and nearly three decades later, they still are. Somewhere along the way, I also spent years co-hosting a music-themed podcast, which gave me yet another excuse to talk endlessly about something I was already spending an absurd percentage of my life thinking about. So yes, I’ve listened to music, but I’ve also played it, performed it, programmed it, talked about it, written about it and made a career out of it. I’ve approached it as a fan, musician, radio DJ, club DJ, wedding DJ, podcast host and occasional unwilling witness to someone absolutely murdering “Don’t Stop Believin’” at karaoke. Somehow, after all of that, I still love it. Maybe that’s the part that matters most.
There are obvious things about me hidden in the list. Billy Joel appears eight times because Billy Joel is my favorite musician. Jimmy Buffett appears fourteen times because until his death, a Jimmy Buffett concert was synonymous with summer itself. Bruce Springsteen totals eight if I count the six shows with the E Street Band and the two times I saw him solo. Aerosmith gets four. Clapton and Mellencamp get three apiece. McCartney twice. Brian Wilson twice. Those numbers tell part of my story because you can look at them and immediately see which artists I loved enough to keep paying to see again. But the more I looked at the list, the less interested I became in the numbers. The Wiggles had already reminded me of Joel at two and three years old. Other artists began doing the same thing. Some of the musicians I saw only once carry memories every bit as powerful as the people I saw eight or fourteen times. In fact, a few names on the list barely feel like my concerts at all anymore because the person I remember most clearly wasn’t standing on the stage. They were sitting beside me.
Kenny Rogers is one of those names. Mom loved Kenny Rogers. In fact, Kenny was apparently her celebrity “free pass,” just as Olivia Newton-John was Dad’s, which means my parents had apparently negotiated contingencies for circumstances neither of them was remotely likely to encounter. I got to take Mom to see Kenny, and at the time that’s all it was: a son taking his mother to see somebody she loved. I wasn’t thinking about preserving a memory. I certainly wasn’t thinking about a future version of myself looking at Kenny Rogers’ name on a concert list and immediately seeing Mom instead. That’s the strange thing about memories. We tend to imagine that the important ones announce themselves while they’re happening, as though some part of our brain should recognize, Pay attention. You’re going to want this one later. Most of the time, they don’t. You’re simply living your life. You’re going to a concert with your mother. Years later, you discover that an ordinary evening quietly became something priceless without asking your permission.
Mom died unexpectedly. Horrifyingly unexpectedly. She went into the hospital with what we thought was food poisoning, and 36 hours later she was gone. She had become septic, her organs failed one by one, and even now we don’t completely understand how something that seemed so ordinary became catastrophic so quickly. There was no long goodbye, no gradual understanding that we were approaching the end and no time to prepare ourselves for a life in which she wasn’t there. One moment our family was worried because Mom was sick; an impossibly short time later, we were trying to comprehend that she was gone. Losing her devastated all of us, but it also changed Dad’s life in ways that would become increasingly painful as the years went on. Her absence only exacerbated what followed for him, and eventually dementia and Alzheimer’s began taking pieces of the father I had always known. His journey was almost the opposite of hers. Mom disappeared from our lives with terrifying speed. With Dad, we had a long goodbye.
And yet, when I see Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons on this list, dementia isn’t where my mind goes. Dad’s favorite band was the Four Seasons, and sometime in the early 2000s, I got to take him to see Frankie Valli. I say Frankie Valli rather deliberately because, while the ticket may have included the words “and the Four Seasons,” the three gentlemen standing behind Frankie were most definitely not the Four Seasons my father had grown up listening to. Normally, this matters to me more than it probably should. I am admittedly something of a purist about bands, and we’ll get to that particular character flaw later. But I didn’t care that night. I wasn’t there because I needed to cross the Four Seasons off some imaginary musical bucket list or because I had spent my life desperately waiting to hear “Big Girls Don't Cry” performed by Frankie Valli and three replacement Seasons. I was there because my dad loved that music. I got to sit beside him while he heard those songs performed live, and that was enough. Dad’s eventual journey through dementia was long and difficult, and Alzheimer’s eventually brought him to hospice and, finally, peace. But thankfully, Frankie Valli doesn’t take me there. He takes me back before all of it.
Maybe that’s when I began to understand what I’d actually made during those six hours. For all the ways I eventually had to say goodbye to my parents, the list doesn’t remember them that way. Kenny Rogers gives Mom back to me before that hospital. Frankie Valli gives Dad back to me before dementia. They’re not sick. They’re not dying. I’m not saying goodbye to either of them. We’re just going to concerts. The names themselves are almost incidental now. They’re little portals to evenings I got to spend with two people I would eventually have to live without, and I had no idea at the time how valuable those evenings would become. If you had asked me when I bought either ticket whether I was creating an important family memory, I probably would have laughed. We were going to hear some music. That’s all. Except decades later, it isn’t all. Not even close. And God, I love that.
Nobody occupies more of the memories surrounding this list than Gail, which makes sense because she has occupied more of my adult life than anyone else. The Wiggles now apparently belong partly to her, which is a sentence I’m sure she will appreciate being preserved on the Internet forever. But there are considerably more dignified entries that belong to her, too. Celine Dion was for Gail. Andrea Bocelli was for Gail. I enjoyed both, but the greater pleasure for me was watching her experience somebody she genuinely wanted to see. There is something wonderful about sitting beside somebody you love while they are completely absorbed in something they love, even when your own level of enthusiasm might not be quite as intense. I’ve been on the receiving end of that generosity plenty of times, too. Gail has attended concerts she did not particularly care about simply because I wanted to go, which is either one of the great unheralded acts of marriage or evidence that she made some very poor contractual decisions 26 years ago. There have been artists who were mine, artists who were hers and artists we both genuinely wanted to see. After enough years together, all of those concerts become part of the same shared history anyway.
Increasingly, though, we’ve reached a different stage of marriage, one I actually find rather wonderful. Sometimes I buy one ticket. There are artists I want to see badly enough that I don’t particularly care whether anybody comes with me, and there are artists Gail is disinterested in enough that she no longer feels compelled to pretend otherwise. There is no guilt attached to either side of that equation. I can say, “I’m thinking about seeing _____,” and she can essentially respond, “That’s nice. Have fun.” And I do. There is something different about attending a concert alone. You aren’t sharing reactions with anybody. There is nobody beside you when the opening notes of that song begin. You’re there for one reason: you wanted to hear that artist badly enough that somebody else’s lack of interest wasn’t going to stop you. Yet even some of those solitary concerts somehow belong to the larger story of us, because the freedom to go alone is itself part of a marriage that has lasted long enough for neither of us to require the other person to enjoy everything we enjoy.
That is what makes Gail’s part of the list so different from Mom’s and Dad’s. With my parents, I can look backward at a finite collection of memories and realize only now how much some of those ordinary evenings came to mean. With Gail, the list is still growing. There are concerts from early in our relationship, concerts from the middle of our marriage, concerts we attended for one another and concerts we both would have hated to miss. There are now concerts I attend alone and come home to tell her about afterward. Music has been playing somewhere in the background through all of it. I don’t know which of those nights will eventually become the one I remember most clearly twenty years from now, and maybe that’s the lesson my parents’ concerts taught me without either of them intending to teach it. You don’t always know you’re making a memory while you’re making it. Sometimes you’re just sitting beside your wife waiting for the lights to go down.
Once I stopped looking at who was on the list, I inevitably started thinking about who wasn’t, and those missing names divided themselves into two very different categories. There are artists I desperately wish I could have seen but never really had the opportunity. Some died before I was born, of course. Others were still performing in my lifetime, but never provided me the opportunity to purchase a ticket. For some I was too young; others had limited tour schedules with no stops in Ohio. Stevie Ray Vaughan is one. The Ramones is another. The Cars. Roy Orbison. And let's not forget Sinatra. George Harrison is a big one. Harrison’s Cloud Nine comeback happened at exactly the sort of moment when I would have loved to see him, but he didn’t tour behind the album. There wasn’t a ticket I considered and decided not to buy. There wasn’t an evening when I chose to stay home or attend something else. I can’t beat myself up over a decision I never had the chance to make. Those are what-ifs, and every music fan who has lived long enough probably has a few.
Regrets are different. Six names bother me because there were opportunities: Dolly Parton, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Prince, and Whitney Houston. At various points, I could have seen them, and I passed. At the time, every decision had its own logic. Concert tickets cost money. Calendars fill. Sometimes you look at an artist who has toured repeatedly and assume you’ll catch the next one. Sometimes somebody in a band leaves and you decide the version currently touring isn’t the version you want to see. Sometimes life simply gets in the way. None of those decisions feels particularly momentous while you’re making it because you don’t know you’re making the final decision. You think you’re deciding whether to attend this concert. Only later do you discover that you were deciding whether you would ever see that artist at all. And there is a huge difference between wishing history had given you a chance and knowing it did.
The Eagles may be the most painful example because I regretted my decision before the concert I chose to attend was even over. I was in college when the Hell Freezes Over reunion happened, and nobody saw that coming. The Eagles were famously finished. The title itself came from the idea that hell would have to freeze over before they played together again, and then apparently hell froze. They came to Cleveland, and a friend had an extra ticket. No cost. It was mine if I wanted it. There was only one problem: I already had tickets to see the Indigo Girls with another friend that same night at Jacobs Pavilion in the Flats. I wanted to see the Indigo Girls, too. My friend and I had made the plans. We’d bought the tickets. Walking away from him because something I wanted even more suddenly appeared didn’t feel right. So I honored the commitment I’d already made and went to the Indigo Girls.
Meanwhile, the Eagles were at Gund Arena, roughly five minutes away. I knew it. I thought about it. I kept thinking about it while the Indigo Girls were performing. That’s the part I hate most about the story because, under different circumstances, I would have enjoyed the hell out of the concert I was actually attending. Instead, I managed to miss the Eagles and diminish my enjoyment of the Indigo Girls because part of my brain was down the street at Gund Arena all night. At the time, I genuinely believed I might have blown my only chance. Nobody had expected the Eagles reunion in the first place, so there was absolutely no reason to assume they would simply keep doing this. I didn’t sit there consoling myself with the thought that I’d catch them next time. I thought there might not be a next time.
Except there was. They toured again, and I passed. Then they toured again, and I passed. Then they toured again, and I passed. Ironically, the very thing I hadn’t expected—the Eagles continuing to tour—slowly trained me into believing there would always be another opportunity. Each return made passing easier because every return seemed to prove that another one would eventually follow. By the last time I passed, I specifically remember telling myself, “This is the last time I pass. I WILL see them next run.” I wasn’t vaguely promising myself I’d get around to it someday. I had finally decided the next tour was going to be the one. Then Glenn Frey died. Poof. There went next time.
Yes, I know the Eagles continued touring after Glenn Frey’s death. That’s not the point. Vince Gill is an enormously talented musician. I have nothing against Vince Gill. But I didn’t spend all those years wanting to hear Vince Gill sing “Take It Easy.” I wanted to hear Glenn Frey sing “Take It Easy.” This is where that musical purist I mentioned earlier comes roaring back, and I should probably clarify that I don’t have some mathematical formula for determining when a band stops being the band. It isn’t “lose two original members and your license is revoked.” I don’t expect anybody else to share my standards, either. If somebody loves Journey without Steve Perry, wonderful. If somebody had the time of their life watching Queen with Adam Lambert, I’m genuinely glad they went. They’re simply not the versions I want to pay to see.
I will never see Journey without Steve Perry because Perry’s voice is too thoroughly intertwined with what Journey means to me. I passed on Fleetwood Mac once Lindsey Buckingham dropped out because, again, the version of Fleetwood Mac I wanted to see included Lindsey Buckingham. I passed on Van Halen during the Sammy Hagar years, not because I hated Hagar—far from it—but because David Lee Roth was the frontman of the Van Halen I grew up wanting to see. Admittedly, Roth eventually seemed determined to transform himself into a lounge act after leaving the band, but that’s another discussion. Queen without Freddie Mercury presents the same problem for me. Adam Lambert can sing. That isn’t the issue. Freddie Mercury is simply too central to my idea of Queen for me to separate the songs from the person I wanted to hear sing them. None of this is an objective declaration about which touring bands are legitimate. It’s a completely subjective question: Who is indispensable to my idea of this band?
And apparently, I married a woman with exactly the same problem.
I didn’t recognize it at the time because...well, it was The Wiggles. Not the Eagles, Journey, or Queen. But Gail had already established her own version of my rule while sitting beside our three-year-old at a children’s concert. Anthony wasn’t there, and whoever they put in his place simply wasn’t Anthony. She grumbled. She complained. She was not satisfied with Replacement Wiggle. More than twenty years later, I find myself saying essentially the same thing about Glenn Frey while Gail can point back to that night and quite reasonably argue that she got there first. No Anthony? Not her Wiggles. No Glenn? Not my Eagles. Apparently this is what passes for compatibility in our marriage.
The funny thing is that Dad proved I am perfectly capable of throwing all of these principles out the window when the circumstances are right. Frankie Valli and three replacement Seasons? Apparently fine. I wasn’t buying that ticket for the musical purist in me. I was buying it for Dad. Context changes everything. But the Eagles regret remains because the version I wanted existed, I had multiple opportunities to see it, and I kept assuming there would be one more. People can tell me I can still see the Eagles. I understand what they mean. But I can’t see my Eagles. Not anymore. With Dolly, Whitney, Prince, Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, there was a moment when the concert I wanted existed. I simply didn’t go.
Perhaps that’s why I eventually became completely ridiculous about Elton John. I had tickets to see Elton on three separate occasions before I finally managed to see him, which at some point begins to feel less like bad luck and more like the universe taking a personal interest in keeping two people apart. One of those occasions was the Face to Face tour with Billy Joel. That show was canceled, which hurt twice because it would also have brought my Billy Joel concert total to nine. Another time, Elton and I were thwarted by my decision to fall down a flight of stairs and tear my quadriceps badly enough to require surgery. I was recovering from the repair and wasn’t going anywhere. Then there was attempt number three. A friend decided to get married on the date of the concert. The nerve. I sold the ticket. By that point, I had begun to wonder whether Elton John and I were simply not meant to occupy the same building.
Then came the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, and one word in that title got my attention: farewell. I had heard this story before. Artists die. Bands change. Tours you assume you’ll catch the next time occasionally turn out not to have a next time. I had already accumulated enough empty spaces on my concert list to know how that works, and I was not screwing around with Elton again. So I bought tickets for Columbus. Then I bought tickets for Cleveland. This was not extravagance. This was insurance. If one show got canceled, I had another. If something happened in my life that prevented me from attending one, I had another. If another friend suddenly decided his lifelong happiness depended upon getting married on precisely the night I had Elton John tickets, I was covered. After three failed attempts, I had developed a contingency plan for seeing a musician.
Naturally, nothing happened. Both concerts went forward. I attended both. Elton played essentially the same show and the same setlist twice, and I was perfectly happy to hear it twice. There was no disappointment that the second night didn’t contain some radically different collection of deep cuts. I had spent years beginning to think I might never see him at all. I got to sit there twice and watch Elton John play Elton John songs, which was precisely what I had been trying unsuccessfully to accomplish for years. There is something satisfying about looking at the list now and seeing his name followed by “2x.” After three tickets that never got me into an Elton John concert, his name finally made the list. Twice.
“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!” —Lewis Carroll
That line feels different to me now than it did when I taught Carroll. Because this really did begin as curiosity. One bride walked through a rose garden singing to her groom. That made me think about live musicians. Live musicians made me think about how much I love being an audience member. That made me think about concerts, which made me wonder how many artists I had seen, and almost six hours later I had accidentally reconstructed a surprisingly large portion of my life. Then, because apparently the rabbit hole wasn’t deep enough already, one ridiculous entry on the list sent me back to a two-year-old dancing in his diaper and a three-year-old gleefully shouting “One, two! One, two!” and “Callooh! Callay!” while performing Lewis Carroll for anybody who would listen. I hadn’t thought about Joel’s little “galumphing” dance in years. It was still in there somewhere. All it needed was The Wiggles to come along and open the door.
The list isn’t a résumé, and it isn’t a collection of musical trophies. Yes, I am incredibly grateful that I can say I saw Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, Al Green, Jerry Lee Lewis, Smokey Robinson and so many others. I know how fortunate I am, particularly because many of those opportunities can never happen again. But the famous names aren’t really what fascinated me after I finished typing them. I see Joel when I read The Wiggles. I see Mom when I read Kenny Rogers. I see Dad when I read Frankie Valli. I see Gail thrilled to see Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli—and, God help her, sulking because Anthony Wiggle wasn’t there. I see the concerts we’ve shared and the ones I’ve attended alone because she took one look at the artist and essentially wished me a pleasant evening. I see my college friend beside me at the Indigo Girls while part of my brain was five minutes away at Gund Arena. I see the Eagles concert that was happening without me. I see three Elton John tickets that somehow never got me into an Elton John concert, followed years later by two more that finally did. I see myself at different ages, with different people, carrying different responsibilities and living different versions of the life I have now.
Maybe that’s why it took six hours to put the damn thing together. I thought I was trying to remember concerts. I was remembering people. I was remembering where I was and who I was with. I was remembering the college kid, the newlywed, the son sitting beside his mother, the son sitting beside his father, the young dad watching his little boy become completely consumed by music and nonsense poetry, the husband watching his wife light up when the person she came to hear finally walked onto the stage—and apparently throw a small tantrum when he didn’t—and the music obsessive who occasionally decided he didn’t need anybody sitting beside him at all. And now I can add another version of myself to the collection: the wedding DJ who has left his booth, found a place to sit and listened while somebody else made the magic happen. Or, in Kendra’s case, the wedding DJ standing there watching one of his brides sing to the man she was about to marry while both the groom and the DJ cried like somebody had died. I had no idea when Kendra started walking through that rose garden that she was going to send me down a six-hour rabbit hole a few days later. I was too busy crying.
Music does that. Every weekend, I watch couples attach new memories to songs that already have histories. A song that meant one thing when they first heard it becomes their first dance. Another becomes the song a bride danced to with her father. Another becomes the ridiculous song that packed a dance floor with everyone they love late at night. Years later, they’ll hear one of those songs somewhere completely ordinary—in a grocery store, in the car, playing faintly from somebody else’s speakers—and suddenly be right back in that room. I’ve spent most of my adult life helping create those associations for other people, and apparently, while I was doing that, I was creating plenty of my own. I didn’t know Kenny Rogers would someday give me an evening with Mom again. I didn’t know Frankie Valli would return Dad to me before dementia. I didn’t know The Wiggles would someday give me my three-year-old back for a few minutes, “galumphing” around the house while reciting a poem I had almost forgotten he knew. And I don’t know which ordinary evening with Gail today might someday become one of those memories I would give anything to visit again. You almost never know what a memory will become while you’re making it. You just know the music is playing.
And I’m still not convinced my list is complete. Maybe tomorrow I’ll suddenly remember another artist. Maybe somebody will read this and remind me of a concert we attended together 25 years ago and I’ll wonder how in the hell I forgot it. But hopefully there are still plenty of names missing for an entirely different reason: I haven’t seen them yet. There are musicians I haven’t discovered, concerts I haven’t bought tickets for, performances I don’t yet know I’ll remember for the rest of my life, and probably a few future wedding musicians who will convince me to abandon my booth, find a chair and start toe-tapping. Six hours after following one innocent question down a rabbit hole, I thought I had made a list of the artists I’d seen. Instead, I found pieces of a life scattered all the way down.
And, thankfully, I haven’t reached the bottom yet.
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