Concert (Ticket) Vault: Pilgrimage

Ah, this is a good one: on May 3, 1985, which will be 30 years ago next week (gulp...), I was fortunate enough to see R.E.M. play live at MIT. The band was doing a spring college tour in the months leading up to the release of their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction.

(For once it made sense to take the photo vertically)

The show was limited to MIT students and their guests, but one of my dorm mates had a brother who was enrolled there, and he was able to get tickets for about half a dozen of us (many of the same people I'd seen U2 with just a few weeks earlier). I remember walking across the Mass. Ave. Bridge on an incredibly beautiful spring evening to get to the show.

As it happened, this was not the first time I had seen R.E.M. Two years earlier, The English Beat had played a show at BU that I went to with some friends, and R.E.M. was the opening act. Both bands were on the same label, and R.E.M.'s first full-length album Murmur had just been released. It was one of those shows where you know you're witnessing something special and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world catches on.