Not All Heroes Wear Capes
Fishbone were playing in Boston, but my friend Pablo and I didn’t have tickets. This was long before outfits like StubHub and SeatGeek ushered ticket resales into the internet age, so ticket scalpers would wander up and down the sidewalks, repeating, “Need tickets? Need tickets?”
We did need tickets, so we did what we had done before: headed to the venue on Lansdowne Street a couple hours before the show was set to start, and wandered up and down the sidewalk ourselves with a chunk of cash, waiting to be accosted by someone offering to sell us tickets.
Maybe we were too early, or maybe we were too late, because nobody approached us to offer any tickets. We did see a sign at the club, however, that the opening band—local ska-punk octet The Mighty Mighty Bosstones—had been replaced by some group we had never heard of. We were there to see Fishbone, so didn’t mind the last minute shuffle in the lineup, but without tickets, we wouldn’t see either opening act.
Not having any luck on Lansdowne Street, Pablo and I walked over to busy Kenmore Square a few blocks away, still hoping to find some tickets, but ready to change plans if needed. Cash in one’s pocket makes improvisational planning a lot simpler.
Half a block down Commonwealth Ave, we saw the Mighty Mighty Bosstones hanging out in front of a building. I wasn’t a particular fan of the Bosstones, but I had gone to the same school as their bassist for a couple of years over a decade before. He was five years older than me, so I hadn’t known him except by sight, but I did feel that little twinge of solidarity that can arise from random intersections of biography. Perhaps that small sense of connection is what caused me to abandon my usual shyness and call out, “Why aren’t you guys opening for Fishbone tonight?”
One of the members of the band—it wasn’t Joe, the “schoolmate” of mine—scoffed.
“They wanted some friends of theirs to open instead, so they canceled us at the last minute. Fucking bullshit.”
He was right, that was bullshit, but I was a huge Fishbone fan, so the sense of solidarity I felt with Joe and his bandmates only went so far. Pablo and I murmured some sympathetic sounds and kept walking.
Soon after passing the Bosstones, we had what seemed like a fabulous stroke of luck.
“Need tickets?” two young men asked as we passed them.
“Yes!” we replied. We must have looked so eager and relieved.
“We got two tickets. 40 bucks each,” one of the men said, holding out a TicketMaster envelope for us to see.
$40 was almost double the face value of each ticket, but that wasn’t an unusual markup for illegal scalpers, and we didn’t have much hope of getting another offer at that point, so we said okay, pulled $80 out of our pockets—a fortune for two teenagers—and swapped the cash for the envelope. With the quick and dirty deal done, we kept walking, and the men walked in the other direction, toward the Bosstones.
As soon as we walked away, Pablo opened the ticket envelope. Empty, of course. We turned around to see the men walking quickly away, but Pablo hustled after them, roaring, “Yo! What the fuck? Give us our money back!”
I figured our chances of ever seeing our money again were slim to none, and I wasn’t thrilled about stalking two brazen criminals down a city sidewalk, but I hustled along too, perhaps a step behind my bolder friend. The scammers looked back at us and picked up their pace again, but they were trying to play it cool and slip away nonchalantly without bringing more attention to themselves.
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones heard the commotion, however, and looked up to see what was going on. Having just talked with us about the Fishbone show, they must have immediately known the entire story of our rapid and ignominious journey from fandom to markdom. We were still dumb kids, and they were—in comparison—savvy and streetwise. In a scene that felt straight out of a movie, the eight members of the band, decked out in their trademark plaid, roused themselves from their disappointed loitering and fanned out across the sidewalk, blocking the men’s escape.
The men who had successfully exchanged an empty envelope for $80 of cash continued to be good at math, and quickly calculated that their odds had changed.
“Okay, it’s all cool,” one of them said, handing the $80 back to Pablo.
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones parted to allow the men to leave, then looked at us to make sure we knew how fortunate we’d been, because the next time, they wouldn’t be there to save the day.
We never did see the show that night, but we did know precisely how fortunate we’d been: Mighty Mighty lucky.