Aerosmith, Boston, New Year's Eve
How the road to a bucket list concert suddenly got REALLY bumpy
I see that the mighty Aerosmith is going out for what’s being billed as a final tour. Now is it a final tour for sure, or it’s going to be like The Who that have been doing “final” tours for like 30 years, I guess we shall know soon enough.
Although it must be noted that drummer Joey Kramer will not being going out with them due to health issues, I believe everyone else in the band has dealt with some significant health issues in the last few years, and they are all well into their 70s, so unless you are a leader in Washington it’s natural to suggest some degree of dialing back is imminent.
I did happen to eye that the tour doesn’t seem to be winding down here in New England as one might expect. However, what I did see what that they’re doing New Year’s Eve in Boston at the Garden.
Oh, New Year’s Eve. Boston Garden.
Many years ago, this ticket was pretty much #1 on my bucket list. Aerosmith being one of my all-time favorite bands ever since I was a teenager, and Boston, while a pain in the ass to get around, was certainly quite doable.
New Year’s Eve 1997, I clicked that off of the bucket list. One of my favorite concerts of all time. ALL. TIME. Although there were a couple of points where things got really dicey.
The first was the process of getting the tickets themselves. In those days there was no fighting with Ticketmaster online (one day I’ll write about watching the hell that was my niece navigating that hellsite during the infamous Taylor Swift presale). Nope.
There were two options that were on the table back then. The first was fighting with Ticketmaster on the phone, physically dialing their 800 number hundreds of times until you could finally get through, and hopefully there were still tickets left. Having had this option fail for me for Springsteen and for Clapton tickets around that time, I wasn’t liking this option very much.
Which left the other option, which is the one thing I possibly hate more than using a phone. Physically standing in line.
This was bucket list, and for bucket list, extreme measures had to be taken.
Now the down side was that the nearby Strawberries was no longer a Ticketmaster outlet. The local record store chain was headed toward the bottom of the 9th overall, but at this point was only an outlet for tickets if it was for a show that was say, at a club in Providence or Boston that didn’t deal with Ticketmaster. Back then, Ticketmaster wasn’t the monopolist pig it is now, but it was still enough of a pig that needed to be dealt with if you wanted to go to stadium or arena events. This feels unfair to actual pigs, and to pigs, I am sorry for using you to describe Ticketmaster.
Anyway, I’m telling a story.
The closest physical Ticketmaster outlet was about 20 minutes away, at the Filene’s Basement in the Galleria mall (neither of which exist today, either). I woke up too goddamned early on a Saturday morning to go and stand in line outside at first, only to repeat the line process inside once the mall opened.
The tickets officially went on sale at 10, as they used to back then. I was probably there in line for a good two hours after that, although that part is a tad fuzzy. I remember getting to the counter and just asking for the best three tickets available. She looked like she was struggling a little bit to find the tickets, but after a couple of minutes which felt like panic stricken hours, three New Year’s Aerosmith tickets were in my hand.
I was starving and I had planned to grab something to munch on in the food court but instead I just hit a drive thru on the way home because I didn’t trust myself to not accidentally leave the tickets somewhere. At least if I did a drive thru, if I lost the tickets they would just be in some crevice of my car.
So we made plans, booked a hotel for the night nearby so we wouldn’t have to deal with drunk drivers after the show (which was shockingly cheap for Boston on NYE) and everything was planned, secured and good to go.
That night, we got to Boston, dumped the car in a garage, dropped our crap at the hotel, scored dinner, walked around Boston Common and downtown for a bit. Boston also was doing First Night at the time so there were a lot of different things happening besides the concert so we bopped around a bit before making our way to the Garden for the show.
We got to our seats in plenty of time for the opening act, Days of the New, who had a couple of okay songs back in the day. They were just about to start when shit started to go really sideways.
This very, um, bourgeois couple about 20 years older than us can over, showed us their rain checks and insisted that myself and the kid next to me (who was with a different group we didn’t know) were sitting in THEIR seats.
Rain check slips, not tickets. Which we each had, and in our pockets. Which we’re always taught to keep in our pockets because of shit like this. We each politely explained that these were ours, showed our tickets, saw that their rain checks were in a different section, explained this politely to them, which they brushed off. Eventually, once we made it clear we were not moving, they went away.
Problem over, right?
Of course not.
They came back with security. Did they ask for our tickets? Nope. Did we tell them we had tickets? Yep. Their response: “We don’t care, let’s go”, and they grabbed us out of our seats and escorted us down an elevator, into an office and sat us on a metal bench.
The kid that was next to me, who again neither of us knew each other, which you would think would have been some sort of tip off to these wannabe cops that maybe something was off…but then us having tickets while they didn’t (again, rain checks for a different section) wasn’t enough of a sign to them either. They just seemed hellbent on imposing their authority. They made us wait on the bench while one of them “attempted” to look on a computer to find us other seats. We were told that if they couldn’t find any that we were going to be kicked out. I started getting loud with these assholes at this point, and loudly asked, with a few F-bombs intertwined, that they were actually going to take people with physical tickets out of their seats, and kick them out just so a couple of uppity assholes with rainchecks for the wrong section could just drop their ass where they wanted to?
One of the guards, the one with the biggest power trip of the two, just said, “Guess so”.
That was the point where I had decided that if they followed through with trying to kick us out, that I was going to jail. Which would have of course been stupid but it was a pretty on par choice for a 23 year old with authority issues and a trigger temper in situations just like this.
Thankfully for me and for my record, that was also the same moment their supervisor came down and told them that “these kids can go back to their seats, those other people realized they were in the wrong seats and they moved.
They just escorted us back to our seats. Still absolutely livid, I told them point blank that they owed us an apology, and that we were waiting.
Silence.
Me, not knowing when to just stop, “What was that, I didn’t hear you.”
“Sorry for the inconvenience.”
Me, still not knowing when to just shut up but also believing in my mind I was one more dumb choice on their part away from a fat lawsuit:
“As you should be.”
As we got back to our seats, that couple came back over.
“We just want to apologize that this happened to you, and wanted to let you know that we are very close friends with the Attorney General and we’ll be sure to call him and have him investigate this.”
Me, still in “Hulk smash” mode, yet fully understanding that, um, what exactly was the Attorney frickin’ General going to do here? Two self-important chuckleheads who can’t read their damn rain checks properly, threw their self-importance around, almost got two kids kicked out for no reason, who are completely incapable of seeing that THIS WAS ALL THEIR FAULT were going to call their buddy the Attorney General to do…what exactly?
I just looked at them, having somehow realized that telling these people to go piss up a rope was probably pointless despite still being angry enough to go off on them like a powder keg, and just said, “enjoy the show”.
I realized that Aerosmith was about to come on and I managed to miss Days of the New because of all of these shenanigans. The Days of the New part, whatever. But the adrenaline was wearing off in time for me to realize that “holy shit, after all of that, I was here. In the Garden. On New Year’s. Ready to watch Aerosmith. I’m about to check off that big bucket list item. YEEEEAAAAHH!!!!!!”
And from there, it was everything I ever would have wanted it to be.
Here’s the crazy part, as I was tying this piece together to publish, I went to go find some Aerosmith for people to listen to, as I’ll do my best to make a habit of. While I’m exploring…I FOUND A RECORDING OF THE DAMN CONCERT! I…uh…the room might have gotten a little dusty. I’ll share a couple of clips only here (it’s broken up into different songs) but the whole damn playlist is here, and if you never hear from me again, it’s because I’m now in solitude playing this on repeat.
It was a frickin’ phenomenal show. I’ve seen them (I think) 5 times, including once where I saw them do “Walk This Way” LIVE WITH RUN D.M.C., and this was still the best one! They really pulled out a lot of the good ones. Not that you asked for it, but this was the playlist, taken from the notes of…well, it’s on each song:
Live Boston 31-12-1997 New Year's Eve
Nine Lives Love In An Elevator
Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)
Toys In The Attic
Hole In My Soul
Livin' On The Edge
Janie's Got A Gun Rag Doll
Taste Of India
Pink
Draw The Line
Stop Messin' Around
Last Child
Countdown to 1998 /Full Circle
Dream On
Back In The Saddle
Cryin'
Dude (Looks Like A Lady)
Walk This Way
--Encore--
What It Takes
Sweet Emotion
They played the woefully underrated “Full Circle” from Just Push Play (which is older than I care to acknowledge, huh?) after it hit midnight, with all their families on stage with them (even Liv, if memory serves me right).
(PS: the noises in the background are balloons popping. There were A LOT of damn balloons that dropped at midnight.)
It was pretty close as possible perfect. Oh, and the other thing that floored me was that Tyler sang the ending part of “Dream On” in that weird false voice that he used when recording that first album, which I had never heard live before. You could tell he was struggling to hold it but holy shit. Check it out:
I had always wondered what the deal was with that, did he have something happen to his vocal cords back in the day? Nope, I think it was in the biography Walk This Way when he admitted using a false nasally voice to record Aerosmith because we wasn’t confident in his true voice. Even the legends doubt themselves sometimes, apparently. I loved that he was able to recreate that for a couple songs live, but even happier that he learned to trust what he had…well, at least in the voice part. Not touching the rest.
I should note that I have this weird tick when it comes to entertainment. It’s very rare that I’ll see anyone live more than once. I don’t really understand why I’m like that. It’s the same with movies too. Even if I like it, I’ll almost always watch something once and then I’m like, “nah, I don’t need to again. I’m good.” Seeing Aerosmith 5 times is very much off character. I’ve seen Rush 3 times, Elton John 3 times, and that’s pretty much it. There’s a couple I’ve seen twice like Cheap Trick, Lenny Kravitz, I’m sure there are others I am forgetting. Oh, and Kid Rock (look, the first time he opened one of the other Aerosmith shows, and the second was $20 for a ticket, Foreigner was the opener and they were awesome, and who here hasn’t spent $20 in um, interesting ways? Feel free to judge me for it, the kids have, and it’s certainly fair.)
With that in mind, odds are I probably won’t do NYE at the Garden this one more time, because I’ve already done it. But the idea of them doing it again (for maybe a final time) did inspire me to want to tell this crazy story.
I actually have a couple more Aerosmith-related stories sitting in my back pocket, but we shall save those for another day. Can’t give you all the goods at once, right?
And here, I’ll just give you a whole bunch of Aerosmith to explore all at once instead of picking out my favorites.
What are your favorites from the Bad Boys of Boston? I’d love to know.
If you want to throw an artist or an album at me to respond or riff to, message me or leave me a comment. (Might make this a paid bennie going forward, but today it’s free. Just sayin’.) Whether it is something everyone knows, or if they regularly perform in front of like 7 people, or if they existed 100 years ago, if there’s a story to tell, bring it!
If you like what I’m throwing down, please share or even hit the little heart button at the end. It’s always awesome to know people are reading and really awesome if they’re connecting and enjoying it.