Why not, right?  And, Why not make this an event.  I figured I'd buy a hand full of tickets and then get some people to go with me. It'll be an old time, summer outdoor, parking lot party with good friends and cold beers type of gig.  I bought six tickets.  Petty was bonafied. I'm sure someone would want to go. Quite an investment for a single guy living in a gutter level basement apartment on the Boston/Brookline border, but I was sure I could find some friends to come along. 

Six tickets. I had almost three months to find five friends to come along with me. No problem, right?  Fast-forward to one week before the July 10th gig......no takers on the Petty show.  No takers?!?  Shit, Lucinda Williams was opening up?  How could there be no takers. For that matter, why did I buy five extra tickets and what the hell was I going to do with them. Going alone to club shows was cool.  Going to an outdoor gig, drinking alone out of the hatchback of your SUV in the parking lot was not.

This had only happened to me once before.  A year or so earlier I bought six tickets to see Van Morrison and Bob Dylan at the (new) Boston Garden.  No one, I mean NO ONE wanted to go with me.  I even tried to give the tickets away fro FREE. Nope.  I thought that was a can't miss investment.  I ended up trading three good seats for one killer second row seat and selling the other three on the cheap. It was a great show, too.  Carl Perkins had just died and Van and Bob tributed him with a rowdy duet version of Blue Suede Shoes. 

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It was a day prior to the Petty show.  Some friends from high school lived a few suburbs over.  They were always up for a good time. I called one of them up and she said she was game. Her roommate, another friend from school, said she would go too.  Two tickets down, three to go. The second friend said she knew another girl we went to high school with (a year behind us) and that she would go as well. This third friend said she might know someone who would want to go. Fine with me; I still had two tickets to get rid of.

That night I went out for a few beers feeling good that I wasn't going to end up with another Van/Bob loner fest. Three confirmations and one maybe. I told them that I would do the driving and that I would cut everyone a deal on the tickets.  It was the least I could do seeing as they were more apt to be taking pity on me than excited about me taking them to Petty.

Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes.
Even the losers keep a little bit of pride.
They get lucky sometimes...

Saturday morning.  The day of the Petty show.  It was a beautiful, blue sky summer day; which ended up being a warm-breeze summer evening, perfect for a outdoor concert. I got a call from friend #3. She said her girlfriend (Girl #4) wanted to go and asked if I would pick her up first seeing as she lived around the corner from me. No problem. Happy to do it.

We decided to get to the parking lot around 4:00pm so we could get the food and beer out and enjoy the traditional (and mandatory, per my Live Gig Manifesto) parking lot party scene. I stopped by Girl #4's apartment around 2'ish. I rang the buzzer and waited...and waited...and waited some more. Was I at the wrong place?  I waited another 10 minutes and then decided to ring friend #3 to make sure I had the right address.

Just as I am about to do that, I look down the end of the street and see someone walking up to me. It was a female...could this be her...maybe its her...hot damn, I hope this is her.  She had on a pair of black shorts...short black shorts...with a set of legs...long tan legs...spilling out from in what seemed like forever. She was wearing a tight yellow shirt that was almost as yellow as her tousled, summertime-blond hair.  There were curves everywhere. I remember saying out loud to myself, "this better be her".

It was. 

She was so cute.  She was holding a sandwich in one hand and sipping on a smoothie with the other.  She shifted the sandwich to her left hand, stuck out her right and said, "Hi. Are you Judd".  If there was ever a time I was happy to be me, this was it.

We small-talked for a few minutes (both thinking, "hmm, I kind of like this guy/girl") and then got in my car. I walked her around the passenger side and let her in.  "Do you mind if I eat my sandwich in your car?", she asked.  "Do whatever makes you happy" I said, and then shut the door.  (...little did I know I would end up saying that a lot over the next ten years). 

We arrived at the venue and proceeded to do some First Class tailgating.  I was still chatting up Girl #4 quite a bit. Girls 1, 2 & 3 noticed how well we were getting on and made mention of it. Might this be a classic R&R love story in the works?

I dropped off all of the girls that night.  It was not a mere coincidence that Girl #4 was dropped off last. I walked her up to her apartment and stayed for a bit. I do remember thinking that I didn't want this to be some "one-hit-wonder" so I politely excused myself and set off back my cave apartment. I went home that night and listen to music, drank beer until dawn and thought about Girl #4 all night. 

_____

I gave it a couple weeks and then gave her a rang. I had two tickets to the Davis Cup tennis tournament which was being played in Boston that summer. She said she would love to go with me. It was hot that day...blistering and unrelenting...over 120 degrees Fahrenheit on the court. I was sweating like a construction worker stuck up on a beam, punching rivets with not a sliver of shade in sight. I mean, I was drenched with sweat. On our first "official" date I was a dripping mess. I tried, as usual, to break up the madness with a bit of humor.  I told here I was nervous about seeing her and I usually perspire quite a bit when I am nervous.  She took that one as a compliment I think.  Now, she...she barely had a bead of sweat on her brow.  She's still like that today...cool under pressure.

Our second "official date" was to see Bruce Springsteen.  She loved/loves Bruce and was happy to go to that show. We never sat down after the first note and our motors revved high until she called it a night and went home.  I went back to my apartment, cued up the tunes and cracked open the beers, again, until dawn.

Our third date I had her over to the apartment.  I told her I would cook for her.  This was a bad idea seeing as I had no food, no cooking skills and no where to eat in my apartment.  That Sunday morning I drove to my parents house (two hours away) and took some of my old man's legendary homemade pasta sauce out of the freezer.  My dad understood that to win a woman's heart you had to go through her stomach. On my way back to Boston I had to stop and buy a table and two chairs, two forks and spoons and two plates.  Yeah...I was living the glorious life of a bachelor. 

Girl #4 came over around 5:00pm.  I didn't even have time to take the table out of the box or put it together.  She came in to the apartment and I waited anxiously for her expression.  She still can't recall why she stayed, she said it felt "creepy" when she came in.  That still makes me laugh.  She said it had "lots of character".  Creepy with lots of character.  Yep...that's me.

It was raining heavily that afternoon.  About twenty-five minutes of her being there, whilst we were sitting on the couch, inexplicably, the power went out...extra creepy.  She said at first she thought it was something I did. It sure as hell seemed possible.  Creepy, basement apartment, with a guy she kind of knew, almost fifty pictures of black bluesman on one wall, no kitchen table and a bedroom sitting behind mirrored sliding glass doors.  Shit, I'd be creeped out too!  Fortunately for us, it was the entire block that was without power and not just my apartment.  Turns out it wasn't creepy at all...just an unexpected and well timed tension breaker.

We set up the table together (symbolic, eh?) and then had dinner...of which I broke down and told her my dad actually had made it.  I scored extra points for the story about the drive and the cheeky "come-clean" on the sauce. 

We kept on dating and kept on enjoying each other's company more and more.  I was so head-over for her, that on another occasion I asked her out for dinner and didn't have a dime in my pocket. I ended up hocking two prize possessions: The Complete Stax Singles Collection 1959-1968 (nine CDs!) and the Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1947-1974 box set (8 CDs!).  I can still remember looking at those box sets when I handed them over and thinking, "thanks for all your lessons my friends, I'll put 'em to good use".  It hurt to do it, but it was worth it.  And the rest as they say, is rock and roll history...

_____

July 10th, 1999 was one of the coolest days of my life. You never know what you are going to get when you go to a concert. Great guitar solos, incredible sounds, killer theatrics...I got a wife.  "Rock and roll is dead they say...Long Live Rock"!

I have attached some pics of the ticket stub from that day.  A few years ago, I found it, framed it and gave it to my wife for Valentine's Day.  You can barely make out the printing on the ticket. The picture in the frame is one year on from that summer we met.  We still go to concerts together today...

...yes, the losers do get lucky sometimes, indeed.

Here is the Boston Globe review of the this momentous Petty show. The review is by Steve Morse. I used to read Steve Morse religiously when I was growing up in Keene, NH...about two hours west of Boston.  He was my eyes and ears to all things music-scene in Boston.  Here is a link to his last article for the Globe in 2006, "A Rock Critic's Greatest Hits".

Williams, the Austin-based wunderkind who topped many critics' polls last year, fulfilled that promise and then gave way to a shimmering set from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who played like an unstoppable, joyously coordinated team.

"This is the first time in four years that we've been on the road," said the ever-affable Petty. "And the most fun of it is that I get to be up here with my friends."

The Heartbreakers have dispensed euphoric, unfussy guitar rock for more than 20 years -- and they dispensed another two hours and 15 minutes of it last night before a near-sellout! crowd of 19,000-plus fans. (They'll do it again tonight; some tickets remain.)

Petty and Company were as hot as the rajah-like red draperies and incense burners that lent a fiery flavor to the evening right away. And the band's restive, rootsy tales of life in search of romance and other dreams were blasted through an outstanding sound system -- a new, state-of-the-art Vidas system from France. The result was one of the best-sounding shows in memory at this sometimes cavernous shed.

The Heartbreakers jumped out of the gate with "Jammin' Me," "Runnin' Down a Dream," and the still-menacing "Breakdown." With the crowd already breathless, Petty said as casually as can be: "If you're getting here late, we're Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.'

New song "Swingin' " was about a woman who comes out "swingin' like Charlie Parker . . . Benny Goodman . . . and Sonny Liston," Petty sang with a retro glee. He then accelerated with "Don't Do Me Like That," pop a! nthem "I Won't Back Down" (getting the drift yet?), and the By! rds-like twang of "Listen to Her Heart," which threw away the testosterone and really got to the nitty-gritty of the female sensibility.

Guitarist Mike Campbell, besides slamming out one classic riff after another, sang for the first time in concert (the hook-filled "I Don't Want to Fight," in which he actually sounded a lot like Petty) and took off on a surf-rock/lou nge jam through the Ventures' "Penetration." A nice change of pace.

The guitar hammer went down again later, with the likes of "You Got Lucky," the slashing new "Free Girl Now," the visceral "You Wreck Me," and the ageless "American Girl." Encores included a jive-filled, but jam-rich version of Van Morrison's "Gloria," which reaffirmed the group's Florida bar-band roots.

Williams's appealing set contained her tough-mama tune about surviving a bygone relationship, "Changed the Locks," which Petty has also covered. Otherwise, the raw, cowboy-hatted Williams earned plaudits for her Dylanesque wor! dplay and funky roadhouse songs that were the perfect complement to Petty's similarly inspired repertoire.