Hardworker – FIRST CONCERT EVER

In this First Concert Ever segment, Sus Long of the indie rock band, Hardworker, talks about her first concert ever. You can check out the feature, after the break.

I attended my first rock concert when I was thirteen. My dad had been a jazz producer when I was growing up, so I’d spent my childhood wrinkling my nose at Diana Krall and Manhattan Transfer concerts. Everything about that music was virtuosic, yes, but also pressed and restrained. I was bored. I remember slouching in my $80 seat and pretending my hands were tiny brontosauruses. I knew, from the music my dad played loud in his office, late at night, that there was fever and frenzy in jazz music—that there was passion and urgency—but in the late 90’s it didn’t seem like anyone was making anything near as compelling as Coltrane. Men and women with asymmetrical haircuts sang lazy, syrupy songs about regret and wine.

So, when a friend invited me to see The Hives at The Warfield in San Francisco, I had no concept of what it might mean to be in the pit at a real rock show. We were four, barely-teenage girls from the burbs, I remember that I had worn a jacket and was immediately boiling, crammed on the floor between jostling bodies. Between bands, I tilted my face to the ceiling and tried to get fresh air. I thought, at that moment, I hate this. Why does anyone like this? I only went to this show to be cool, not because I knew the band or because I liked their music. I was merely walking forward on this path of absorbing other peoples’ musical taste. First my father, now my friends, not yet sure what the excitement was all about.

And then The Hives came on, in their black suits and bolo ties, Pelle emaciated and furious, climbing the stacks of speakers on the stage, climbing out of his own skin. I had never seen anything like it. It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. Like the most head-spinning first kiss. Someone had let these men get up on a stage, in front of a screaming crowd, and amplify something that other people kept neatly hidden. They played violently, they shouted, they sweated through their clothes. Pelle called us “goddamn fucking hippies” and we screamed our allegiance. I floated home that night, high on an unnamed energy (and maybe a little secondhand smoke) and didn’t sleep. The high was replaced with a low that lingered for days. I wanted so badly to burn that brightly, be that uninhibited, tell a story that true. It seemed impossible to me that a girl who looked like me, who moved so carefully and thought so privately, could ever be as free as the men I saw perform that night.

It would be several years before I got the courage to show a song I’d written to someone else. Several more years before I could stand on a stage without trembling. But that first concert gave me a taste of something that I could never quite shake and I’m so grateful for those five little words: “We’ve got an extra ticket…”

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