A Genuine Rolling Stones Experience

Old friends Mark, Jeff and I went out to Denver’s Pepsi Center that sunny afternoon to tailgate and hopefully find Stones tickets. We sat in the parking lot and watched Lexus after Mercedes after Hummer show up and park for the show. Jewelry-clad men and women walked by us, tickets in hand. Perhaps our generation has a sensibility that prohibits shelling out even the kind of face-value money required for a ticket to this concert; maybe the whole thing was just a hassle. In any case, very few people of our age group appeared to be in attendance.

The scalpers were out in force, and bidding wars raged for tickets; people were paying up to $400 just to sit in the upper level behind the stage. We, having only planned on paying $120 at the most, were outclassed. Jeff, after informing one scalper that he only had $100, got nothing more than a disgusted passing look, as if to say, “Go back to the mountains, hippie.” A radio station was having a “Jumping Jack Flash” contest in which you had to do the most jumping jacks in one hour wearing nothing but a trench coat to win two tickets. Poor fools, I thought. It was clear that we had underestimated the situation.

We went into the big bar next to the arena and ran into one of Jeff’s lawyer friends. He initially seemed pompous and condescending (and much drunker than us,) flaunting his tickets, but as it turned out, he had a friend who had both a luxury suite and several extra tickets. Jeff’s friend was nice enough to check out the situation for us. We waited, crossing our fingers, while he went to look for the guy. Soon he was back, shrugging and telling us that the guy and his entourage had already gone in, and that they’d given away their extras to whomever in the bar wanted them. We had been five minutes too late.