Chris Kim A

To get things rolling, I thought it serendipitous to start off with a show from 28 years ago this very day: L.A.-local heroes “X” performing on campus at UC Santa Barbara.

Back in those days, it was easy enough to catch them around Los Angeles, but I was dating a girl who was going to school there at the time, and there weren’t always a lot of big date things going on around Goleta and Isla Vista, so this was quite a bit of a treat. Funny, I can’t recall who opened — either The Dream Syndicate or it might even have been Dave Alvin (or even both). That I retrospectively place Alvin there may just be a mind-mash of concurrent events, since he would replace X-founding-member Billy Zoom a year or so later.

What I absolutely do remember quite distinctly, however, is that by about halfway through X’s set, we’d been moshed out of our great stage-side spots to about halfway back in the auditorium. I saw a dark shadowy something fluttering over the heads of the crowd from in the front of the stage, and it wasn’t until I felt a hard thud on my chest and heard the glass tinkling on the ground that I realized 1) it’s coming toward me! and 2) Crap! it’s a beer bottle! As much as we were having a great time, it seemed like maybe it was time to call it a night before the chairs started flying next.

Something else that came to mind thinking back on this show — up until that weekend, I had been taking the Greyhound Bus up on Fridays from Santa Monica to spend the weekend with her a couple times a month, and take the return bus Sunday night. What dawned on me when I scanned the ticket stub for this show was that this would also have been the first weekend I would have driven my brand-new Isuzu I-Mark (the “ChrIsuzu” I still drive today) up to show off to the girl and her girlfriends.

(As a token tangentially-related factoid, it may also interest you to note that singer Katy Perry was born in Santa Barbara exactly 8 months after the day of this show.)

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