345 Shows and Counting

Live music has always been something I needed more than wanted. It didn't really matter what it was. I'd go see almost anything if the opportunity was there, and more often than not I'd walk out with something — a moment, a song, an energy in a room I couldn't have gotten anywhere else. The style was never the point.

That openness has led to some genuinely unexpected nights. A group of us guys were at happy hour, girlfriends and wives heading to see Barry Manilow at McFarlin Auditorium the next night. The consensus among the guys was a hard no. Tickets were cheap, I had nothing going on, so I said sure, why not. The man put on one of the best shows I've ever seen. Tight production, incredible voice, a crowd that knew every word and meant it. I was as shocked as anyone when I left a fan.

Then there was Ozomatli — I won tickets to a hip-hop Latin fusion band I'd never heard of and almost didn't go. Ended up being one of the most fun shows I can remember. The energy was unlike anything I was used to and I was completely into it.

Not every story ended that well. One night I was having beers at July Ally in Deep Ellum when some people invited me to walk over to Trees to catch a band. I decided to stay at the bar. That was the night Nirvana played Trees — the show where Kurt Cobain got into a fight on stage. One of the more infamous nights in Deep Ellum history, and I was a block away choosing another beer.

The data behind all this has its own story. Decades ago I started keeping a digital list of every band I'd seen, nothing fancy — when a band came on the radio and the memory surfaced I'd add them to the list. Old ticket stubs filled in some gaps. About fifteen years ago or more I found setlist.fm and started working through the list, matching bands to tours, picking the specific shows I remembered. As I moved each one over I'd delete it from the original list to track my progress. Eventually the old list was gone and setlist.fm had everything.

One gap worth noting: the electronica scene. I saw a lot of those shows — Freq Nasty, David Starfire, Paul van Dyk, Aphrodite, and plenty of others — and I never went back and logged them properly. That whole run is mostly missing from the data. The list below is a good representation of my concert life, but it skews toward the rock and industrial side of things. The full picture has more lasers in it.

What came out of that process is 345 shows across 46 years, from The Kingston Trio at Starfest with my parents in 1979 to a Formula 1 stage in Las Vegas in 2025 with my wife. The ticket stubs that survived are on a bathroom wall — my girlfriend Pia, now my wife, surprised me one day while I was at work and put them up floor to ceiling.

Below is the full list, searchable by artist, year, and venue.