…the first concert you ever went to?
Buddy Guy and Junior Wells at the Checkerboard in Chicago, somewhere in 1974.
Koko Taylor was sitting in…we all looked younger back then…
Junior Wells & Buddy Guy - Live at Theresa’s Lounge (Longer Cut) 1972 **
** Best I could do was a link…can’t seem to get videos to link…
New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 1967.
Glasgow, 1957, I think it was Bach. Sent me to sleep after the intermission.
Sadly it would just be some stupid gospel music concert at church put on by some traveling hucksters who made the rounds. I was an adult before I realized that not all musical performances were amateur snore-fests. Yeah very insular but that’s how it goes growing up in fundie-land.
By the time I got a clue I was busy working and never really plugged into popular music. I know it second hand largely via my wife who grew up in southern CA and went to Berkeley High and actually was acquainted with a number of people who later become famous to varying degrees both in the music and Hollywood scenes. She has made me passably literate about the 70’s & 80’s music scene she grew up around. I now think e.g. Queen was brilliant but back in the day would not have been caught dead at one of their concerts for fear of getting … IDK, Devil Cooties or something.
My only approved not-necessarily-religious musical outlet was classical but we lived in a rural area so I was probably in my 30s before I actually went to a classical music concert in person. It was a revelation.
One of my personal favorites is The Moldau by Smetana. It’s a tone poem that takes you on a cruise down the Moldau River in the Czech Republic:
RUSH, in 1980 at The Forum down in LA on their Permanent Waves tour. I’ve been hooked on live music ever since, and have been to countless concerts and club shows.
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It was a garage band that my best friend’s brother in law (more like an uncle) preformed in called The Purple Turtles. They wore Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes spray painted purple. We helped set up the stage, and pinched alcoholic drinks from the adults the rest of the night/show. The band itself was kind of a surf band I guess. They were not good, but I had a great time!
For me it was The Moody Blues, 1968, at Eagles Auditorium, with The Retina Circus Light Show doing the lights. People stood around the edges or sat on the floor. No seating. Guy sitting next to me was hitting up in a vein on his ankle. The air was thick with smoke…compared to today, it was ragweed. 
It seems like yesterday.
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An all ages show at a small venue in downtown Seattle, 1990. It was beyond capacity and I’d never seen so many wasted drunk teenagers in one place.
It was my first taste of the alternative / grunge scene and the bands were Heavy Into Jeff and Nirvana.
Finally, a music genre that reflected what many in Gen X already knew: there’s nothing wrong with viewing society as basically unwell, or rejecting a secure yet deadening and superficial life.
Korn & Limp Bizkit double header over here in the UK.
Absolutely phenomenal, still one of my all time favs… must have been the late 90s
My first concert was Pavarotti in '93 and I spent the whole time terrified that if I blinked too loud I’d be exiled from the stadium
I don’t like large crowds and crowded places, so I’ve never really attended concerts much. But among the ones I have atttended (excluding pub concerts), the first “real” concert — or at least the first really memorable one — was with The Blues Brothers Band. Fantastic concert. I can not remember the exact year now, but it must have been sometime in the early 1990s.