Back in '88

It was my first concert. The venue was the Capitol Centre in Largo, MD (before they renamed it the US Air arena). The date was May 21, 1988. The band performing was AC/DC, and the ticket price was $17.50 . I was a Freshmen in high school with less than a month before Summer vacation. I was a huge AC/DC fan and was very excited to be going to the concert.

We purchased our tickets at Maryland Waterbeds on Craign Highway in Glen Burnie. I thought it was really weird that a waterbed store was "the" place to buy concert tickets, but that is the way it was before the internet and it was better than going to the ticket master box office at the Macy's in Marley Station mall. The person in line in front of us purchased Pink Floyd tickets for their Momentary Lapse of Reason tour which was later released as the Delicate Sound of Thunder live album.

My friend Phil Borczon's dad drove us to the show in his pickup truck and dropped us off right before the pay to park booths. We walked across the parking lot and got in line at the closest entrance. We got inside the place and walked around the concourse where you could see the massive audio rig at right about eye level if you walked into the right portal. WOW was what my expression said, and all I could think. Huge audio cabinets and hundreds of chrome par cans, or "lights", lots and lots of lights. The light rig was massive to me because it was the biggest I'd ever seen to date, being it was the only lighting rig I'd ever seen.

LA Guns was the opening band and as is tradition they only got to use a minimal portion of the stage and lighting for their set. Our seats turned out to be excellent because we were in the section closest to the left side of the stage, but not blocked by the speaker cluster. Didn't really care for their set because as far as I was concerned they were preventing AC/DC from taking the stage - hurry up man.

Finally it was showtime. The house lights go to black and the crowd goes wild, screams and roars of anticipation in the arena. The opening song was Heatseaker, the first song on the Blow Up Your Video album. The stage was empty except for smoke pouring out hole in the center of the stage. A 15' - 18' rocket slowly emerged from the center of the stage with triangular stage pieces cut like slices of pizza hinging open. When the rocket was sitting on the stage the for a few moments a door gets kicked open and Angus Young jumps out playing his guitar and the rest of the band joins him onstage. To this day I think this stage entrance was one of the most clever and effective.

They played all the songs I knew and most everything from Blow Up Your Video. It was when they played the song Let There Be Rock that something clicked in my head saying, THIS is what I want to do. The lighting for LTBR involves a lot of crowd blinding and lots of white light, a call and response for lighting if you will. From the first notes of the song Let their Be Rock that night back in '88 I knew what I wanted to do. Stage lighting for rock shows became my dream at that very moment. I didn't know that dream would later become a lighting company, but that is how it happened.

Years later I found myself in college trying to find a major. The closest thing to rock and roll lighting was theatre lighting, so that is the path took. Ten years after that AC/DC show I purchased four used Intellabeam 700s and started lighting shows (music or corporate) or anything else I could and Afterglow Lighting was born in 1998.

One of these days I'll rewrite this into a more compact version for the company website.