My bedroom circa 1984

This was my bedroom shortly after graduating high school. A year earlier all 4 walls were 100% Who stuff (posters, record sleeves, and pictures cut out of one of the three copies of Maximum R&R I bought - one to keep and 2 to cut up). It looks like here it's down to 2 Who posters. I see a few Sparks posters, a Sid Vicious poster, a Fleshtones sleeve, a Big Black flyer, and a poster for the Chicago film fest. That appears to the be the cleanest the room ever was, which is probably why a picture was taken.

Ticket Stub Nostalgia: My life in concerts

Dipping back into the box of ticket stubs for some concert induced nostalgia.

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The Who concert at Rosemont Horizon was my first concert ever - and thirty years a month later I'll be seeing them again at the same venue. The Sisters of Mercy show was a pretty crappy experience since Andrew Eldritch walked off stage during the second song after a girl ran on stage and hugged him and he never came back. I'm glad I saw the Clash, but it was with an asterisk since it was the post Mick Jones Clash on the Cut the Crap tour. The Cars concert goes down in my book as the second most boring I ever saw (seeing Yanni for a work function tops the list). Lords of the New Church were fantastic - it's a shame I never got another chance to see them live. The REM show was ther first show I saw in college and it was the first show I ever walked to, which seemed absolutely surreal since I was so used to have to trek into the city to see a live band.

The REM show was the one with Dream Syndicate opening that later resulted in their live record. I'm pretty sure that that was the Graham Parker show where he did the setlist chronologically by album release.

Two Finn Brothers ticket sutbs? The Mrs' ticket must have gotten into the batch. We'll just say it's one stub for each Finn brother.

Didjits are the band I've seen more live than other band by a longshot, but I don't have many ticket stubs since they tended to play at bars that didn't have preprinted tickets.

One of the benefits of keeping ticket stubs is reminding you of shows that you forgot you saw. I forgot I saw Power Station live on their comeback album tour. I even met Robert Palmer! Sadly Bernard Edwards died shortly before the tour - I would have loved to have seen him live.

Ticket Stub Nostalgia: My life in concerts

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Ticket Stub Nostalgia: My life in concerts

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some previously forgotten buttons I recently rediscovered in an old box

While going through some boxes I had left behind at my parents I found a cassette carrying case full of old buttons that I had long forgotten about. Many of my favorite buttons from this era were lost after falling off of jackets or backpacks, but there are still some faves here.

The Dwarves button (white button with text) was probably my fave since it always got a reaction. And I was glad to find a WMET button since that was the main station I listened to in my musical formative years. I found two Dillon Fence buttons, which is 2 more than the number of Dillon Fence albums I own.

Other than the Cheap Trick, XTC, and 999 buttons, I don't really recall wearing any of these.

Ticket Stub Nostalgia: My life in concerts

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Everything but the Jewel Case and 1/4th the space!

Tired of losing the war on space to my CD collection, I have begun converting jewel cases to plastic sleeves. 25 jewel cases (pictured below) take up as much space 105 CDs in sleeves!

Top-CDs in plastic sleeves. Bottom-jewel cases. It got little tricky with digipacks, but practicality finally won out over sentimentality and I took an exacto to them and cut them in half and trimmed them to fit in the sleeves. Since I don't plan to resell the CDs anyway, it's no big deal.

RIGHT: Here's a CD in the sleeve with the booklet on one side and the CD and tray card on the other side. And for the astute Didjits fan, yes the booklet is upside down for the sake of this picture (the front cover on the other side is upside down). For those of you playing at home, that's the Gatefold CD sleeve (SCDGF4) from Bags Unlimited.

This part seems to have made a few fellow music nerds cry. Continuing in the "conserving space" theme of breaking down my CDs to the much slimmer plastic sleeves, I've started on the box sets. It was a little harder to bring myself to reduce them to just CDs, covers, and the books, but once I brought myself to tear apart the Velvets and Nuggets box, everything else was pretty easy. Some boxes, like the Zombies, XTC, Grow Fins, and the Ornette Coleman are simply too beautiful to break apart, so they'll remain intact. But hopefully everything else will get broken down.