My first show without parents was seeing Lords of Acid at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC in early 2000. I was 17.

Two friends and I drove up, which from our hometown took about 3 hours. We basically listened to lots of music on the way up, followed by getting super lost in downtown DC. This was before Google Maps, so I'd printed out directions from MapQuest. Unfortunately, MapQuest was shit, and so took us through various traffic circles and just generally not where we needed to be. We eventually found the place. We parked nearby (only a few bucks), and were promptly asked for pocket change by a guy who said he'd just been mugged. He may have been lying, but if so he was a really good actor...had the voice quaver down and everything. I'll add that the 9:30 Club is in NW DC, but is not far from SW DC, which is about as rough inner city as you can get (especially back then, when DC's murder rate was much higher than it is now).

So it was my first club show, and I had a blast. The crowd energy from a place that small was so different from anything else I'd experienced, so we had a ton of fun.

The opener was a guy called DJ? Acucrack. More electronic-y than I like these days, but my tastes lay a little more in that direction back in high school.

Then came LOA, who put on a fantastic show. They were promoting Farstucker, which was a more industrial-sounding album than their earlier stuff.

As I said, great crowd, and the place is small enough that you're never far from the stage (plus I'm tall, so that helped). I remember how much fun the whole thing was, and was super glad that I'd gotten out of my shell and gone (I have some latent agoraphobia). The show itself was about as close as they could come to being a strip show (lot of electrical tape over the naughtiest of bits), with some vaguely pornographic stuff projected behind them. Their guitarist was in a gimp suit.

Also! After the show finished, I was going towards the merch thing in the back (I still have the t-shirt somewhere, although it no longer fits), and some guy tells me "she said yes!" Apparently he had like just that minute proposed to his girlfriend. That was a cool way to end things.

After that, we got super lost in DC again (fuck you, DC), this time ending up in some of the really terrible parts. Eventually we made it out to the suburbs to crash with my grandparents. We spent the night there and then were well-fed the next morning before returning home.

-------

First real concert with parents (or, more specifically, my mom, her sister, and the latter's husband): The Rolling Stones, Voodoo Lounge Tour in 1996. I was 13.

It was at the now-defunct RFK stadium (again in DC). We got there super early for some reason, and people were already drinking. I can remember even before it got dark that some guy was drinking beer out of a shoe. It was also the first time I smelled weed. I have a really vivid memory of it being dark and the light going out, and all these people broke out cigarette lighters. We were up in the nosebleed section, so I could see this huge dark crowd with little pinpoints of orange. It was cool. The Stones were great, even if they were about an inch tall from where we were sitting. My mom almost got in a fight with a guy who was being loud and obnoxious in some way (don't really remember why). A lot of people left early, so we got to move down closer for the encore. My mom bought me a bootleg t-shirt on the walk to the metro station (still have that one too).

I didn't know their music as well then as I do now, but still remember really enjoying it.