Senior year swan song

I gave up on the Dallas concert for financial reasons. I regretted the decision from the moment I made it, even though I knew that I’d made the right fiscal choice.

From the first time I read the show announcement, I was just flabbergasted with shock—Jackopierce actually playing together again?—wasn’t I there for one of the concerts on the farewell tour five years ago?

I had been introduced to Jackopierce my freshman year of college, but never got to see them perform in Juanita’s, their customary Little Rock venue, because the concerts were for ages 21 and up.

I didn’t turn 21 until my senior year of college.Monica and I managed to conquer the vagaries of age in time for the Little Rock stop on their farewell tour. The reasons they gave held the blithe cadences of PR, but it wasn’t hard to understand to understand the real reason. It must have been difficult to have spent a decade playing sold-out shows on the southern bar, club, and university circuit, finally landing a major-label record deal, and seeing a decade’s worth of effort never coalesce into a hit.

They phrased it as ‘being time to move on,’ and that would, simply, have to be that—the pomp and spectacle of ‘reunion’ tours and albums were reserved for acts who actually managed to make scads of money the first time around.

So I went to the concert with the understanding that this performance would be the first, the last, and the only time I would ever see them play. I stood up front, close enough to sit on the stage, the music slamming into me like a physical force.

I stood still during one song and realized that the low vibration I felt was my sternum vibrating with the force of the sound. I stood still and breathed in the smell that is ‘concert’ - smoke and beer and the jangled cologne-and-sweat of those dancing around me.

I remember more of that moment than I remember of my last three college roommates.

Here they are, playing sporadic dates again, five years later. I’d love to know why. Why now, five years after the fact, when there was no expectation of any performances or further music?

Five years can change so many things.

Anyone who is interested in watching me devolve from my current adult state to the hooting collegiate freak I once was might want to consider picking up a ticket to their Sunday, March 9 (nine p.m.) performance at 3rd & Lindsley Bar and Grill in Nashville.

I’ll certainly be there.

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