Reflecting back on the last ten years as they apply to my ability to jump into a crowd and join in on the collective receipt of a downright unfettered assault to multiple sensory inputs at once leaves me waxing rhapsodic.

Save for those years in my adolescence in Casper, Wyoming, when I was hitting concerts whenever I could abscond with the $15 a pop to do so, I’ve spent more time in my 40’s at concerts than I did at all in the previous two decades.

Granted the previous two decades for me had presented a completely different focus involving parenting the kids and getting into the occasional skirmish with debtors and others of questionable repute who felt that services rendered should be properly compensated.  The arrival of my 40’s brought with it kids who could wipe their own ass and more disposable income with which to go rock, rock, until I dropped.

And that I did.

TharpSter’s Gigs Between the Milestones Concert Series started out quite innocuously, and never really was intended to be the decade long pursuit that it ultimately turned into.  Given that there are only so many things anymore that strike me as being worthy of commitment to the ages via verbal brilliance for an otherwise dull internet, I find it only necessary to take on the duties as a scribe for this effort.

Years down the road when I’m pricing out Bluetooth enabled hearing aids, I’ll look back on this post and ponder if my decision to abandon proper hearing protection during all of those concerts was a good decision or a bad decision.

Now naturally, I could list them all off.  Going forward, I could tell you which ones rocked, which ones didn’t, and which ones just turned out to be….

Technically, none of them turned out to be [insert whatever you’re thinking here], so I won’t pursue that angle.

In the last decade, I attended 15 events in nine different venues spread out across four different cities here in the great state of Texas in order to see a total of 25 acts.  There were three particular acts in that time period which captured more of the TharpSter disposable income because I saw them more than once.  Night Ranger and Shinedown each had two visits from me.  Frequent readers of this testament and evidence to my eventual competency hearing will know right off the top of their head which particular act had their performances graced by yours truly 4 times in the last decade.  The first time with was with my son.  The second time was with my daughter.  The third time was with my brother.  The fourth time was with my wife.

They’re actually on deck as my first concert in my 50’s.

Look around the website here if you don’t know who I’m talking about.

Last year (2017) was the busiest year with seven acts in four events.  In a matter of a few months, I managed to see…..

Good Lord in Butter, look what I’m doing.

I’ve made a spreadsheet listing of the acts, dates, and venues I’ve attended in the last 10 years.

And for what purpose is that?  Do you really need all of the statistics?

I even made a pivot table.

Who the hell does that when recalling the fun he’s had?

All things being equal, you really don’t really need to see a recap of all of the concerts I’ve attended in the last 10 years because there will never be a way I can convey to you what they meant to me in the moment I was there.  Besides, I’ve already published several of those accounts right here on the only website you ever need to visit with any regularity.

I could post live recordings on YouTube (I have), and even still that won’t convey the feelings I experienced when I was there.

You’ll never fully understand my encounter with a reality star I had in Dallas early on in the concert series.  I sneezed, she said ‘Bless you’.  It was the weirdest thing.

You will never understand what it was like in 2009 to see a video retrospective of a group of five guys from Sheffield played on a massive video screen as a single guitar played a solo that I have no way of describing here in words.

You will never understand the nostalgia I felt when the best keyboard riff ever to be played filled the AT&T center one night in 2011 as it announced to me that I was about to hear one of America’s best known rock anthems live.  Shortly after that, I was besieged by a paranoid teenaged girl who had joined me at that concert, and then remembered she had an important assignment due the next day.

You’ll never understand how brilliant it was for those guys in 2014 to suddenly appear on stage after the long keyboard solo in the song “Won’t get fooled again”, which was being played on the speaker system just moments prior, only to finish off the rest of that same song live.

You’ll never understand the sentimentality I felt while sitting with my wife listening to a live version of the song that was played at our wedding.

You’ll never appreciate how good that vocalist with the Pat Benatar pipes looked in her sparkly britches.

You’ll never fully understand my confusion of watching the lead singer of a rock band do a little moon walking (check around 3:40) during a musical interlude of one of their less moon walky songs.

You’ll never know just how damn hot that flame thrower was in 2017, even though it was 50 yards away.

You’ll never know how ambiguous my feelings were last year when I became the owner of a glove that some famous drummer cast into the audience after playing another one of America’s best known anthems.  I mean sure, it’s cool.  At the same time, I’m 49, and have no need for a drummer’s glove.

And then there was that night in April, 2018 when a few thousand of us were introduced to Kiss Guy.  For the record, KISS wasn’t on the line-up that night.  I will never, ever, be able to fully convey to you what an awesome time I had that night.

Of course, words fail me when it comes to even trying to describe how good that chicken smelled that night Wifey and I went to see that controversial TV chef.

Yet still, I’m here trying to describe them to you, because they meant that much to me.

The Old Man TharpSter Concert Series starts this summer y’all.