by Abigail Luftig

Created on: April 01, 2009

I recently saw a spot on TV advertising the upcoming Dave Matthews Band tour. It made me happy at first; after all, I own every album DMB has released, even the live ones. I've seen them in concert four times and I even have a fire-dancer tattoo. But then I started to think about it and I've decided that I won't go see the band this summer. Lest I be accused of deserting the band, let me explain.

I've had amazing experiences at DMB concerts. The first time I went to see them was in the summer of 2001 at the RFK stadium in Washington DC. We paid roughly $25 a ticket for seats in the 2nd to last row in the stadium, piled into 2 cars and drove 4 hours to the stadium. In order to understand the magic of this night, you have to be aware of 3 facts:

-We were 17 years old.

-It was the first concert we'd attended that our parents didn't insist on tagging along as chaperones.

-It was before 9/11 so security was much, much looser then it is today. Perhaps time has made my mind exaggerate thing, but this night was almost perfect. It was one of those balmy June evenings with just the right amount of wind and bright stars that mingle with the fireflies that flicker past you. The stadium was far from packed, so we stretched out across the bleachers and chit-chatted with the strangers sitting next to us as we rolled our eyes at the rubbish warm-up act (which, and I'm not making this up, consisted of a chick we all assumed to be stoned rolling around on the velvet covered stage).

During the first song, one of my friends noticed that there was really no security to speak of and people were freely moving from one section of rows to another. We decided to press our luck and see how far we could get. We went from the 2nd to last row to 4 rows from the front and not one guard stopped us. When we got to the stage, we found ourselves in the warmest atmosphere a group of strangers can create. We stood on metal chairs and danced as people broke out "refreshments" (read as: bottom-shelf alcohol and homegrown weed snuck into the stadium) for all to share. Aside from the brief, terrifying moment where the linebacker frat boy in front of me danced too hard, fell off his metal chair and managed to land on me in such a way that said chair left a scar on my right kneecap, it was a perfect night.

Over the next few years, I saw DMB many more times. The warm-up acts improved vastly (nothing tops Norah Jones doing a cover version of The Band's 'Bessie Smith'), the fans were as friendly and generous

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