In T-minus 17 hours, REM tickets will be going on sale. I am suddenly flashing back to my first REM concert experience during the spring of 1995.
It was a much simpler time back then. The internet was still pretty new and TicketBastard (TM) did not offer any online sales just yet. The process, while primitive in this day and age, was exciting and infuriating all at the same time. You had to line up at any TM location the Thursday night before tickets went on sale to receive a bracelet that was randomly distributed to everyone on the line. Each bracelet had a number and this number was used to determine your place on line Saturday morning. Even though it was random, even if you were first in line Thursday (which I tried to be as much as possible) it still didn’t guarantee you first in line for tickets Saturday morning. In fact, chances of you being first in line both times were pretty slim. Boy was I a dumbass for not thinking about the odds.
Saturday morning would come and of course people would start lining up 2-3 hours before tickets went on sale, even though you still didn’t have your place in line yet. About a half hour before tickets went on sale, a store representative would come out with the “randomly” chosen number that all Ticketmaster outlets were to follow. For instance, let’s say they number they chose was 304. If you had 304, you were first in line and so on and so forth. If you had 298, you were SOL since they would have to go through everyone else first and then get back to you. Most of the time I was within 10-15 spots of the first person and if you were really chummy with any of those ahead of you, you’d ask them to get extra tickets for you. Of course, most of them were all douche bags and wouldn’t bother being the nice guy. While the system wasn’t the greatest, it definitely helped avoid those online ticket snipers with automated bots scooping up all the best tickets. That’s the only downside of the whole online purchasing system, with the exception of course of deciphering the stupid captcha codes.
