the number of shows you have seen is the world's most uninteresting fandom metric.
We all need to work to end the annoying habit of asking people at a concert how many times they’ve seen the artist.
We all need to work together to end the annoying habit of asking people at a concert how many times they’ve seen the artist as a main topic of conversation.
When I was in my teens and 20s and 30s and went to concerts, one of the great things about it (besides of course the actual performance) was how it provided you with the opportunity to meet other music fans. This mattered because unlike just meeting random people in some other way, these people liked the same artist enough to do the work to find out that they were on tour, figured out how to buy a ticket to see them and travel to the show. So the chances that you might have more in common were huge.
The conversations as I remember them were straightforward: your name, where you were from, maybe where you went to school, and then you’d start talking about music. How did you get into this artist? What’s your favorite record? Have you seen them before? Have you seen any other shows on this tour? You’d talk about what other bands you liked, what radio stations you listened to, good record stores.
Remember, before we had the internet the only way you were going to hear about what happened at a concert is if there was a review published somewhere, and with print magazine lead times, it would be a while before any report would circulate beyond the alt-weeklies and maybe the local daily paper. So meeting someone who’d seen the show the night before or the week before was like hitting the jackpot. Yes, you’d be juggling what you wanted to know against spoilers but also, this was just a conversation and most people were not just reciting setlists in order. It was information, impressions, thoughts, feelings.
Along the way, you could figure out whether or not this person looked for the same things in that artist or a concert or even music in general to figure out if you had anything in common, if you were sympatico. You’d trade phone numbers and mailing addresses, which you’d put in your address book and some people you’d keep in touch with and some you wouldn’t. People would move or change their phone numbers, sometimes you’d see them again at other shows and you’d reconnect, pick up the conversation. I saw this new band or I heard this song on the radio and they’re coming to town next month or Did you read the article about [band] in [magazine].
Do you know what was a super rare thing to mention, especially when you were just getting to know someone? How many times have you seen [artist]? Anyone who led with that piece of information was immediately suspect and was tagged as not cool. Even people who were following bands around the Tri-State Area did not lead with that detail. It might come up in the course of the conversation – Oh, when I saw them in Philadelphia, they opened with that song -- but no reasonable person was starting the conversation with, I’m Jane and I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen 45 times. Show count could be an interesting topic of conversation but it was so much hard work to get to a concert in the pre-internet days that it didn’t automatically bestow gravitas to the individual boasting of it.
The reason I am reminiscing about ye olden days is because as a solo concert-goer who likes talking to people, I have found myself recently drawn into conversations with people sitting or standing near me where literally the second or third question people ask me is, How many times have you seen them? and I absolutely fucking hate it. It is a meaningless fucking datapoint in a normal conversation. It matters that I have seen certain bands across the decades for what I do for a living but I never want to talk about it, and even if someone says something grossly inaccurate I will almost always counter it by pulling up a setlist or a review and not I HAVE SEEN THEM 24 TIMES. Because you can see a band dozens of times and still not know what the fuck you are talking about.
The other important reason for this is... that I don't ever know the answer to this question. Aside from Bruce Springsteen, I don’t keep a list of the shows I see, beyond putting them into my calendar so I don’t double-book myself (and sometimes that doesn’t even help). The only reason I have a list of every Springsteen show I've seen is because someone else made it for me at some point in the mid '10s and I still maintain it when I remember and I generally only remember when I’m trying to recall whether or not I was at a particular show. And despite the existence of this document I could not tell you right now how many shows I have seen.
BECAUSE IT DOESN'T MATTER!
[Before you say something like If you don’t remember if you were at a show you’re going to too many shows, well, maybe, but also, looking at dates does not necessarily trigger recollection for me. If you tell me “It was the Saturday night at Giants when he opened with ‘Cynthia’” I will remember that, but I am not likely to recall that it was August 28 or 29th, so having the list is helpful for that reason.]
I want to go back to learning about what music the people that are at the same concert as me care about and are listening to, the same way I care about what my friends are listening to. I have always had friends whose love of music was large and robust and we had commonalities but we also had differences, and some of their loves I absolutely detested (and likely vice-versa). It was part of our friendship, we would affectionately rib the other person about their great loves, but we would also show up and help them buy tickets or if we saw a bootleg or a rare single at a record store would call them to see if they needed it or just to let them know it was there or that there was an interview with that band in the latest NME, do you want me to send it to you when I'm done?
I thought about all of this when I was at Nick Cave again this past weekend and was chatting with someone sitting nearby who immediately leapt to HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU SEEN THEM. My distaste of this line of inquiry these days usually leads me to say something like “I don’t count” or to joke and say “a lot” or the guaranteed conversation stopper, “I think show count is boring.” To be fair, I think a lot of people ask that question because they think they have to. I do not think that most people honestly care, and the ones that do have generally outed themselves to be annoying already.
So this time, I tried, “You know, I don’t really know, the first time was in 1993 and the most recent time was in Detroit two weeks ago,” and that response opened up a more interesting conversation than the dick-measuring involved in comparing numbers. Instead we talked about favorite song performances, since they had seen the show in Chicago, and interesting issues of the Red Hand Files. Success! I am going to take this approach moving forward and I offer this formula to others.
Show count on its face is a patently uninteresting statistic, and it is just another form of gatekeeping. A high show count on one artist in particular generally signifies that the individual in question is rich, or has a well-paying job with a lot of flexibility. (I’m looking at you, Chris Christie.) When I was waiting on line in Nashville to see Dylan, the production sent out video cameras to film the line and talk to fans who were waiting. That's how we found out that the people in front of me were seeing him for the first time. They were not young folks, either. My reaction was “How incredibly cool that your first Dylan show is in a small venue!” But the people I later stood next to tried to bond with me by mocking that couple for this being their first show.
I did not like these people for many reasons, but that solidified it. There are so many reasons that people don’t or can’t spend their lives going to see concerts. And in this case, these folks were savvy enough to hear about the show, managed to get tickets, and showed up early to queue near the front of the line. If there was a fandom test, I felt like they had gotten an A just by doing those things. Non-fans do not participate in those behaviors.
Making your personality based on your show count is also incredibly one-dimensional. Do you know how high my Springsteen show count would be if I only listened to Bruce Springsteen? (Again, hello to the former governor of New Jersey.) It is boring. Only listening to one artist means you have no basis of comparison, no sense of history or perspective, and are absent the ability to fully appreciate the artist, because they’re missing context. They’re actually losing out.
I look forward to chatting with you in the next queue about absolutely anything else besides how many times I've seen the artist. Good talk, thanks!
Since my last newsletter here I have written a few things you may be interested in!
I saw Dylan twice on his Midwestern run and wrote about it for Salon (where I am now writing a column twice a month) and over at my favorite Substack:
Salon: Bob Dylan can do whatever he wants
Ray Padgett
Salon: The woman behind your favorite songs finally gets her spotlight - on the great new Allee Willis documentary
Over at Radio Nowhere, my weekly Springsteen newsletter, here's what you've been missing:
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
