Having been keeping up with the progress of Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball tour as it moves through the US, and having listened to the Harlem Apollo show, I keep thinking back to how strange an experience it was to see him at SXSW.
The fact that tickets were distributed in a ballot gave the occasion and the memory of it a strange tinting The decision to announce that the concert was to be played was a definitely a good one. To know that Bruce was in town with no dates fixed would have set the SXSW rumour mill into overdrive and led to far too much rushing into obscure acts hoping for a 'special guest appearance', and no doubt many acts puzzled by the audience they faced and audiences frustrated if a rumoured appearance came to nothing.
But knowing Bruce was playing on Thursday evening, and that he was likely to be doing so at the ACL Moody Theatre given the gaping hole in the schedule then, gave a certain piece of mind. The fact that tickets were to be allocated by a ballot, rather than having to rise at an unearthly hour in the vain hope of gaining a ticket was also good news – it took the matter out of our hands.
But the ballot-allocation system also meant that we all hugely managed our expectations. We expected not to win tickets. We expected to hear second-hand how amazing the full E Street Band show in a tiny theatre was. We expected to have to make other plans for the evening. So receiving the '… Winner!' email was rather overwhelming.
The single-ticket ballot system also meant that, bar from a few people in large groups (and Broken Biscuit Records four-strong ballot-entry contingent was not large enough) the audience was filled with people who did not know one another. Admittedly, we were in the US, so everyone was talking to their neighbours before the show started. But there was little opportunity to reflect on the show as it unfurled, or to share it afterwards, other than in the most general terms.
That's certainly not to say that I would have wanted it any other way (except, of course, for my friends to have won too), or that I think any other way of allocating tickets would have been better, but the system did make the concert a strangely unique experience.
Not knowing until 10 hours beforehand that you are going to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in a tiny theatre and then not being able to talk about the experience in any real depth means that,in thinking back on the concert, it feels almost as if it was a strange dream. A wonderful dream of unusual vividness, but a strange one.
