A couple of years ago, as we were launching the Rock Town Hall blog that you are presently reading, a Founding Father of this long-running discussion group, one who launched our original Yahoo Groups list with me, was caught in the grips of resistance to the changing tides. He fought valiantly to keep the old list alive, posting his patently hilarious and sometimes offensive rants, ones that increasingly tended to center around insults at me and my co-conspirators in our great leap forward. It was a difficult time for us all.

One post from this time has stuck with me since we flew by the 2-year mark in the launch of this blog. Our passionate Townsman was discussing his newfound love for the Dixie Chicks. He wanted to talk about them, and he wanted to talk about them through the original RTH forum. He threw down the following challenge, in a passage that I’ve kept printed out and in my wallet for the last 2+ years:
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Trust me, it has nothing to do with the music. I immediately had this thought while watching it with the sound turned down. I barely turned the sound up about 30 seconds into it, and that part of the clip made no impression on me one way or another. I don’t recall ever seeing a performance – lip-synched or not – that so uniformly bugged me in this way. Can you identify what bugged me so?

Someone put a sign up here at work which says they are selling four tickets for the Billy Joel/Elton John tour. The tickets are $250 a pop.

I’ve become numb to high ticket prices over the years because I don’t go to “big” shows anymore. It’s like hearing numbers about the federal deficit: on a certain level it registers that it’s a lot of money but it doesn’t affect my daily life. I have been obsessed with music since about 7th grade but $1,000 for four seats in a baseball stadium struck me as pretty outrageous, and I can’t think of anyone that I would pay that kind of money to see. I suspect that there is an inversely proportional relationship between the level of rock snobbery and the amount one is willing to pay for a show.

So the question is this: What is the most you would pay to see a show and who would you pay to see?

A couple of qualifications:

• It has to be a possibility (No “Clash in ‘79” or “Who at the Marquee” answers).
• We just talking about the price that you pay for admittance. You can’t factor in transportation, beer, concert tees, etc.

Me? I might go as high as $100 for a Replacements reunion tour depending on the venue, or a Tom Waits show if he had Marc Ribot with him. But I might not.