Fifteen Bands for Fifteen Dollars

May 14, 1994.

Weeks from graduation, my friends and I drove to the park-and-ride and took the Metro from safe and boring Fairfax County, Virginia, to RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. Tickets in hand, we had our bags searched, and we joined 30,000 other concert-goers for the HFStival, what for us (or maybe just me) was an epic concert put on by the local alternative rock station.

On the inner stage: Counting Crows, Cracker, Violent Femmes, Rollins Band, Toad the Wet Sprocket, James, Meat Puppets, Pavement, Afghan Whigs.

On the outer stage: Six other bands I really don’t remember, even with Wikipedia’s help.

I do remember that I wore cut-off jean shorts (grunge-style, not Daisy-Duke-style) and neglected to put sunblock on my legs so I went home with bright-red burned patches on only the left side of my lower legs.

I also remember that I packed cucumber, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches on homemade whole-grain bread for my concert-day lunch and that the sandwiches became hopelessly soggy by the third band.

And I remember that while I wanted to get closer to the stage, I was terrified of getting caught in the mosh pit. (Yes, there was a mosh pit in front of Toad the Wet Sprocket. I didn’t get it then, and the intervening 19+ years have not shed any more light on the phenomenon that was the mosh pit.)

Actually, I don’t think this was my first concert. I think my friend Michele and I went to see Lush and Weezer in DC a couple of months before this, and my friend Berni and I might have gone to see Veruca Salt at GMU before this, too (although that might have happened a year later. And might not have been Veruca Salt. Stuff kind of runs together after a couple of decades).

And I know that my parents took us kids to see Helen Reddy when she performed at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Or so my memory goes. I know that I must have been nine or ten and had only the vaguest notion why we were sitting on the grass listening to music we heard nearly every day from the tape deck in our Volvo station wagon.

But the HFStival is the concert that stood out when The Waiting posted this week’s “Remember the Time” theme (for which I am publishing about two minutes too late to link up, but I’m having trouble sleeping and decided to just post anyway). I still remember the catch phrase from their radio ads: “Fifteen bands for fifteen dollars.” It was both epic and affordable.

What was the first concert you attended?