The Stub Project: Adam Ant – Veteran’s Memorial – Columbus, Ohio – 4.24.1983

This was my first concert. I was fifteen years old, a freshman in high school. Despite being the proverbial “goody two shoes,” so much of this show is hazy in my memory (which I suspect will be a prevailing theme of this feature). Apparently, the show was postponed as the date on the ticket does not correspond with dates I have found on the internet.

Adam had just gone solo. Granted “Friend or Foe” was kind of lame, but I loved Adam Ant. I made Adam Ant t-shirts and posters. I’d ride my bike down to Magnolia Thunderpussy Record on the OSU campus and buy fanzines and buttons. I was a superfan, an AntPerson. (“AntMusic for SexPeople! SexMusic for Antpeople!”) I watched MTV for hours waiting for their videos to come on.  That’s why Adam Ant would deign to come to Columbus: MTV. Columbus, Ohio, so typical in every way, is a test market city. And because the heart of Ohio is painfully normal, it gets to sample to wares of corporate America first. Cable TV, sour cream potato chips, the McRib: America doesn’t get to enjoy these fruits of capitalism until places like Columbus, Ohio say it’s okay. Columbus had interactive television in 1977. Sometimes being behind the times puts you ahead of everyone else.

My dad got his secretary to buy the tickets and it looks like she did a great job. I was in the 13th row and as an added bonus I was accompanied by the most beautiful girl in all of Ohio. Her name was Lauren and she would go on to become a model. She was also my pseudo-aunt and uncle’s daughter – my pseudo-cousin – and basically in exchange for a ticket she was babysitting me. My parents wouldn’t let me go to the show without a chaperone. Of course, I had a huge crush on her. In my memory, I was in seventh grade for this show, but that obviously is not the case. Memory can be so kind. Being in 7th grade and having a hot high school chaperone is lot cooler than being in 9th grade and requiring one.

INXS opened the show. I was pretty into them too. Everyone stood for their entire set, which Lauren said rarely ever happened for an opening band. They would have been playing tunes from their megahit album “Shabooh Shoobah.” Michael Hutchence moved around the stage with reptilian grace. I thought I was seeing my generation’s Jim Morrison. Maybe if he’d committed suicide ten years earlier, I’d think of him that way now. Instead, he’s just an answer in my own game of personal pop trivia.

Adam Ant put on a great show, although in my eyes it would have been hard for him not to. He played several songs made famous with the Ants and Marco Pirroni, the Ants’ guitarist and Adam’s c0-songwriter, was still with him, so as far as I was concerned it might as well have been an Adam and the Ants show. A review by Jon Pareles in the New York Times from that era would wonder if  the “irony seems lost on Mr. Ant’s audience.” Indeed, I suspect it was lost on me. It would be another year before I would cloak myself in the black trenchcoat of  unrepentant sarcasm.

Adam Ant exuded sex, making the girls swoon, but it didn’t look like he really wanted it, which I suppose is the very definition of sexy: we can’t help but desire those who don’t desire us. On that note, I’m sure I went home that night pining for Lauren, my mind filled with impossible dreams. But more than anything, as my head hit the pillow, I remember my ears buzzing for the first time – from Pirroni’s guitar, from the girls’ screams – and I could hardly wait to see to see another band live.

and, not aging quite so well, from INXS, just a few months later: