A story:
Neil Young and Crazy Horse were coming to town in three months. My ex-wife planned and schemed to get me tickets to see them at the Boston Garden in 1986 as a Father’s Day gift.
She went to the box office there when the tickets first became available on a Sunday morning at 10AM. Four windows were open. She waited on line for 30 mins. She got to her window as all four of them were closing. She cried out, “Wait! Wait! My husband needs those tickets!” The reply: “Sorry, lady. We’re sold out.”
Deeply disappointed, she took the 45 minute train ride home to tell me of her dashed hopes. Of course, I was devastated. I’d seen Neil every chance I could over the preceding decade. As I believe a critic in the New York Times once wrote, “Mr. Young can get more out of four chords and five musicians than Leonard Bernstein can get out of the Philharmonic.”
Whether that’s an exact quote or not, for me it’s true!
The morning of the concert, we awakened as we always did listening to NPR’s Morning Edition. The lead story: “Lines are expected to start forming at The Garden 3-4 hours ahead of Neil Young’s appearance there tonight!!” Just what I needed.
Defeated, I headed up to my office in the attic to convince myself that, as a new father and a not-so-youngish man trying to provide for a family, it was time to face the fact that I was going to have to settle for an LP rather than the real thing if I was going to hear Neil that day.
At 11AM, a friend of a friend called: “Hello, Michael. Barbara and I are going to see Neil tonight. We had bought a ticket for someone else, but he can’t come. Are you available?”
My response: “YES! THERE IS A GOD!!!”
