Not too long after I moved to America, a friend and I went to Lexington, Kentucky, one weekend looking for a surplus store. We parked our car and immediately got
lost. While walking around we found ourselves walking past a long, long line
outside Rupp Arena. We started asking people in the line where the surplus
store was. No one knew but one guy suddenly turned to me and offered me a pair of tickets,
saying, “here’s tickets for the concert. I have to go home, it’s an emergency.”
My friend tried to take the tickets but this guy would only hand them to me. In retrospect, I suspect he thought the concert would "blow my mind." Well, it did. "Back in the day" Anna looked like this. Needless to say, I had no idea who or what Pink Floyd was. The guy I
was with made a big deal about the tickets, laughing and saying “you have no
idea who this is or what's going on inside.” It was true that I didn’t know what I was in for,
but I knew from the lines and the size of the arena that this was the biggest
and easily the strangest crowd I had ever been in.
Most shocking to me, even more so than being in the fifth
row for a Pink Floyd concert, was the guy standing next to me. He was smoking marijuana
throughout the entire concert! Being from Thailand I knew what marijuana was,
but I didn’t know how openly it was smoked at Pink Floyd concerts.
I don’t remember the concert very well because the whole
time I was watching I could not stop thinking about marijuana, especially
because the guy next to me kept offering me some even though I wasn’t old enough to drink.
For years afterwards I didn’t go to rock concerts because I thought I would get
arrested and deported!
It was the loudest concert I’ve ever been to. It was also
(inflation adjusted) the most expensive ticket I’ve ever used. I remember it as
being a $100 ticket which, for a fifth row seat in 1987, sounds about right (further internet research confirms that it was the most expensive concert ticket of 1987). All I remember is that $100 was more than I made in a week working half-time as a lab
assistant at the University of Kentucky.
It wasn’t until a few years ago when I told a friend about this concert that
I finally realized what a big deal it was. How big a deal? The picture (below)
is from the show I saw! In fact, Wikipedia has a long article about this tour,
including a list of all the songs they played! The concert was in early November of 1987, so
it wasn’t really a Christmas concert, but I think of it as my best Christmas
concert ever because it had the best Christmas lights I’ve ever seen.
We never did find the surplus store.
