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Crew All Access Pass | From the Crew | Rock On Vintage Tees | Fashion Alert | Fans Tell-All

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In a 2009 Tampa Times interview with Jay Cridlin, Matt Simmons also recalled a unique moment 24 years ago at the USF Sundome when he was randomly chosen from the audience to come up on stage and play with the band U2. Rewind to May 2, 1985

“U2 is at the USF Sun Dome on their Unforgettable Fire tour. Matt and Rosemary, 17, skip school, arrive early and stake out a spot up front. And as U2 plays I Will Follow, Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year’s Day, they edge ever closer to the stage. Late in the show, Bono — not known for his guitar skills — emerges for an encore carrying a six-string, strumming four chords: G, D, A-minor and C. “Those four chords on a guitar are more im-portant than all this lighting rig, the amplification, fancy stadiums, the lot,” he says. “Because they’re the same four chords that anybody in the audience that has a six-string guitar can play.” The bit serves as the intro for one of

Imagine: Larger-than-life light shows. Two-story high speakers. Flying apparatuses. Video screens and elaborate set designs - all in the name of rock and roll baby! Attending a rock concert in the 1980s and 1990s was a once in a lifetime event. Rock music of the ‘80s and ‘90s, now categorized as classic rock, is making a comeback with younger generations. Rock bands from eras gone by, such as Def Leppard and Aerosmith, are re-surging their careers and still producing the same larger-than-life concerts. Only now concerts are called events showcasing two-story high LED video screens, narrative slide shows, and yes...pyrotechnics and light shows beyond the limited imagina-tion. Now, just imagine working as a crew member for one of those shows as a spotlight operator or video/sound technician. Many of these technicians have had the opportunity to work up close and personal with the classic rock bands we have all come to love. Dave Rauch worked as a spotlight operator at the USF Sundome during the 1980s and an audio-visual tech-nician for Busch, Disney, and Opryland productions from the 1980s thru late 1990s. His memories are sparked by his collec-tion of All Access crew passes while working every one of his shows. Kenneth Joyner also worked as a video crew member at the Starwood Theater, Vanderbilt University Memorial Gym-nasium, and Operyland Hotel in Nashville during the 1990s. Accompanied by band stats and photos ,Rauch and Joyner member share their collection of All Access passes and vintage concert tees while recollecting memorable stories and experi-ences of past shows.

Throngs of people threw their hands up in the air.

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History of The Unforgeable Fire Tour

• U2 shows moved into indoor arenas (U.S. leg) • Consisted of six legs/112 shows.• Tour commenced in Australia in September 1984. • Programmed sequencers used prominantly to

translate elaborate/complex studio-recorded tracks to live performance

• Songs criticised as being “un�nished”, “fuzzy” and “unfocused” on the album - made more sense on stage.

• Rolling Stone magazine - critical of the album version of “Bad” - described its live performance as a ‘show stopper’.

Fact: • Band was reluctant to use programmed sequencers.

Since then, sequencers are now used on the majority of U2 songs in live performances.

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Picture it: You’re 15, a gangly high schooler wearing Bermuda shorts, pink sneakers and a mighty mullet . . . in the middle of the show, the lead singer [Bono] picks you — you! — from a crowd of 11,200, and pulls you onstage to play with the band.

U2 - The Unforgettable Fire Tour

11 O’Clock Tick TockI Will FollowSecondsMLKThe Unforgettable FireWireSunday Bloody SundayThe CryThe Electric Co. / Give Peace A Chance/ Amazing GraceA Sort Of Homecoming

5/02/1985 USF Sundome, Tampa , FL

BadOctoberNew Year’s DayPride (In The Name of Love)

Encore(s):

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

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Set List

the simplest songs in the history of rock music: Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. After a couple of verses, Bono pipes up again. “Any gui-tar players here?”

“Throngs of people threw their hands up in the air,” Simmons says now. “The difference was, I had a few people around me, friends of mine, and they knew that I played guitar. So they were pointing at me.” Bono looks at Matt, then cues se-curity to pull him across the barricade. The singer hands Matt the guitar and whispers the chords in his ear. “Wait’ll you see this!” Bono shouts to the crowd.The song kicks back up. Simmons strums along. And to the band’s evident surprise, he doesn’t choke. The kid is rocking out with U2. Then Bono leaves the stage. So do The Edge and bassist Adam Clayton. For a moment, it’s just Simmons and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. play-ing to the fans. But soon Simmons has a moment of panic: He can’t remember how the song ends. “It was going to be a big rock finish; you could kind of smell it coming. And I looked over at the Edge, and he tilted his neck over and gave me a look like, It’s going to be a G.” That’s the memory that stands out for Simmons — one of the great-est guitarists alive, watching him play, reading his mind, nudging him in the right direction. It’s the moment he realized that he was actually jam-ming with the band and that he wasn’t just some kid who hit the rock concert lottery. His time on-stage lasted two minutes and 23 seconds — and, in a way, the next 24 years” (Cridlin).

Dave Rauch was asked if he remembered that moment when Matthews was pulled up on stage: “I absolutely do!!! WOW. I remember them bring-ing him out as prize winner or something and the crowd went wild. That was one of the U2 shows that I worked [spotlight] probably the “Unforget-table Fire” Tour!

Rauch’s concert collection of All Access passes totals 35, with an additional collection of accom-panying t-shirts.

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History of Livin for You Tour

• May 16, 1995 BOSTON’s “Livin’ For You” 1995 Tour kicks o� in Mankato, Minnesota. Scholz also an-nounces that BOSTON has left MCA Records, though other sources indicate that the breakup was mutual.

• August 6 The BOSTON 1995 “Livin’ For You Tour” wraps up in Detroit, Michigan.

• Following the conclusion of the tour, Scholz an-nounces that BOSTON will next release a Greatest Hits album. It was initially planned for an August 1996 (the 20th anniversary of the �rst album), but the album’s release would eventually be pushed back nearly a full year. The album is set to be re-leased on BOSTON’s original record label, Epic, which is now owned by Sony.

1995 Set List (USF Sundome) Rock & Roll Band Play Video Peace of Mind Play Video Surrender to Me Play VideoHollyann Play Video Livin’ for You Play Video Don’t Look Back Play VideoDon’t Be Afraid Play Video More Than a Feeling Play Video A Man I’ll Never Be Play VideoAmanda Play Video We’re Ready Play Video Walk On Medley Play VideoWhat’s Your Name Play Video To Be a Man Play Video I Think I Like It Play VideoParty Play Video Foreplay / Long Time Play Video Feelin’ Satis�ed Play VideoSomething About You Play Video Smokin’ Play VideoCool the Engines Play Video Encore: Magdalene Play Video

Band Stats

• August 8, 1976 -- The group’s debut album, Bos-ton, is released. It is almost entirely written by Scholz, with Delp writing “Let Me Take You Home Tonight” and co-writing “Smokin’.”

• Album stays on the charts for 101 weeks, peaking at #3.

• By 1995 - sold over 15 million copies in U.S. alone, making it the highest selling debut album of all time, and 2nd-highest selling album of all time (behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller at 24 million). Would later be eclipsed at #2 by Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours

• September 1976 - May 1977. Group launches a tour with innovative technology to help the live BOSTON compare to the studio BOSTON. Initially open for other acts, but soon they are headlining (supported by Sammy Hagar, among others).

• March 1977 - “Long Time” charts at #22 in and the follow-up “Peace Of Mind” hits #38 in June.

• Nominated for a Grammy Award (“Best New Art-ist”) and voted by readers of Rolling Stone mag-azine as Best New Band; Time magazine praised the album as one of the Top 5 of 1976.

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be taken to the catwalk about 80 feet above the stage, the reply came, “300 pounds of puffed wheat.” The production manager said it was to be dropped on the band as a joke during the show. The facility manager said there was no way anybody was going to be in the cat-walk while there were people in the house and there was certainly not going to be anything dropped during the show from there. “How about a cow and a machete?” the production manager asked. “What’s THAT for?” asked By-ron, the facility manager. “We’re going to sac-rifice the cow in silhouette behind the scrim, backlit so nobody will actually see it happen,” was the answer. “It’s a Sunday night. The cow-rental places are closed. No cow sacrifices.” Undeterred, the production manager asked, “How about two crew hands and a cow suit?” Byron, at this point, just walked away shaking his head and saying over his shoulder, “We’re done here.”

At Starwood I usually ran a camera provid-ing image magnification for the people in the cheap seats out on the lawn. There were three screens hung on the back edge of the “shed” where the good seats were. I almost always

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From the CrewDavid Rauch

First concert I ever did was the Oak Ridge Boys at the USF Sun Dome in Tampa, FL...that’s were all the

US and world concerts I did were. I got there and was told I was doing truss spot, which is a posi-tion 35-40 feet over the main stage floor, i.e. over the band, where you sit in a “truss chair” that a spotlight is attached to and is where you mainly backlight the main singers / band on the front line. This, after a few more shows, became my fa-vorite place to be when I did spotlight, however it came with many stories to share! One climbs up a small aircraft cable ladder up onto the trussing system, again 35-40 ft in the air, then you make your way across the trusses until you reach your assigned spot. This is standard ops for this posi-tion, however at this concert when I saw the last truss I had to climb out onto it was slanted at a 45 degree angle and the chair I was to sit in was at the same degree. The kicker was that when I ar-rived at the chair I was directly above the drum kit, there was no seatbelt / harness to hold me in and one, just one foot rest, not two, to put my feet on. I somehow got into the chair wrapped my two feet around this foot rest and for the next two hours held on as tight as I could to the spotlight handles...sitting at a 45 degree angle...

praying I wouldn’t fall and hit the drum set as I swung from side to side to cover the “boys”!! Truss hanging crew must have been on dope that night!!

Rod Stewart concert!! Great concert, again doing truss spot around 35ft in the air and was

just right of center stage and had Rod as my main coverage that night. That night I had a great spot-chair which was much like the chair in the Millenium Falcon when Luke and Han were warding off the tie-fighters in the origi-nal Star Wars...they swung left and right and up and down...pretty cool! I was surrounded by and just above a row of Vari-Lights (mov-ing / intelligent lighting)....I settled in and the show was great. Near the end of the show and all of the shows he does, Rod, being the soccer fan that he is, brings out a huge box of soccer balls and commences to kick them out into the audience...however; that night he had a slight “miss-kick”...he grabbed one of the balls, threw it in the air and kicked the crud out of it...how-ever; it wasn’t heading out into the audience...it was headed right toward me. It hit the vari-lights just below me and shattered one of them sending glass and parts flying past my head! He

Kenneth Joyner

The first show I worked as a tech was at the Starwood Amphitheater in Nashville, TN. It was the Fourth of July, 1986 or ‘85, maybe. I was a grunt unloading trucks pulling cable. It was sort of a mini-festival with Stephen Stills, America, The Outfield and Star-ship. Over the years I was local crew at Starwood more than at any other venue. I did quite a few shows early on at Vanderbilt University’s Memorial Gymnasium as a follow spot operator. I worked for Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello, Squeeze, The Pretend-ers, Simply Red, Nick Lowe and a string of bands whose names I can’t remember at Vandy.

One night at Vandy, on the last night of this particular tour, the name of which escapes me, the production manager for the opening act asked the facility manager for access to the catwalk above the stage and two hands to help haul some “stuff” up there. When asked what kind of “stuff” needed to

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From the Crewimmediately looked up at where he had seen it go, covered his eyes as the pieces came down onto the stage and then looked up directly at me as I was staring down at him at this point. He smiled and gestured that he was sorry about the same time as the LD (lighting director) came on headset and asked if any of the lighting instruments were damaged...much less me!!

Short and sweet...worst concert I ever did...Run DMC! As I entered backstage that evening of the show, I was immediately handed a “riot plan” by the manager of the Sun Dome. I looked at him and he stated it was for our safety...that the night before in NYC there had been a riot at this show

and people had been shot...well that started off the evening on a positive note...then I told him...”hey I’m up on truss spot tonight, if anyone tries to mess with me I’ll be grabbing anything and everything that I can up there and throwing it at them...pray-ing that there would be no gun shots and / or try-ing to tear down the truss from a true riot!!! The show was horrible and even though I had in some of the best ear plug protection you could buy and a “two-ear” headset for hearing lighting cues...I was deaf from the volume of the event for at least 2 hours after I left! There are a lot of cool stories...getting Ann Wilson’s guitar picks after the Heart show. Meeting several of the acts, etc.

Run DMC in concert

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ran the camera in the “pit”, the area between the front edge of the stage and the barricade that keeps fans off the stage. There were odd occa-sions when we’d be allowed to put the cameras on the stage and sometimes even go handheld on the stage. Aerosmith always wanted us on the stage because they were very interactive with the cameras. One night I was handheld onstage with Aerosmith and I had been remind-ed that after ev-ery song Joe Perry changed guitars and that I had to make sure not to be caught between him and his guitar rack at the end of any song. The is-sue was the chance that I could trip him with my cable even though I had a cable page (a hand pulling my cable for me to help keep it from getting tangled on anything). I was given a “home position” to get to where I would be out of the way between songs. I was apparently too conservative because Stephen Tyler began urg-ing me to be more active, in not so many words. Brad Whitford was doing a guitar solo and Tyler told me to get out in his face and “mess” with him (only he didn’t say “mess”). I obeyed and was really working it! I was shooting down the guitar neck . . . I was really earning my pay and breaking new ground in handheld camera tech-nique. I was so involved in what I was doing I accidentally stepped on and broke Stephen Ty-ler’s tiny fluorescent light that was illuminating his set list on the front edge of the stage. As I walked back toward him he stared at me, hands out, palms up as if to say, “Are you kidding me?”

Later, I was in my safe area, he was out singing to some young lady in the front row and she gave him a flower. He made a beeline to me, got right in my camera and stuck the flower between my fingers. He was right in my face and I was try-ing to hold my shot. It was awkward because of the way I happened to have my left hand on the lens to focus when he approached me. He stuck

the flower between my fingers and then began poking me in the stom-ach with his finger. He was delighted every time I jumped. And ev-ery time I jumped when he poked me the direc-tor yelled at me on the com, “HOLD YOUR SHOT! HOLD YOUR SHOT!”

I was shooting Me-tallica from the pit and the pyro they had as part of the show almost took my face off. I was ready to leave at that point. Later in the show a Jack Daniel’s bottle flew just inches over my head and smashed on stage. I told the director I was done but he talked me into staying there. When a fan tried to get on the stage security grabbed him and pulled him down right next to me. The bass player grabbed the security guard from the stage and put him in a choke hold. There was a fight between the band and event security on my cam-era riser. At that point I unplugged my camera and went backstage. I figured things had broken down to the point that we might not be able to re-cover from. I’ve also sat down and had dinner in the catering area backstage with Pat Benatar and Neil Geraldo and their kids. I’ve been offered “anything, and I mean anything” for my back-stage pass by women who wouldn’t look twice at

Roadie wearing tank top that states-- NO BACKSTAGE PASSES, ca. 1970.http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com

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Rock On

Vintage Tees

MY FIRST was REM. It was white, loose and had a chequerboard on the front. I bought it - secretly - from the back pages of the rock music newspaper the NME; I ran for the postman ev-ery morning, before my mother did, to check if it had arrived.

The day it came, I ran upstairs, locked the door and put it on. Fifteen years old, there I was in my first band T-shirt and, just like that, I felt part of something.

The band T-shirt is one of music’s most po-tent totems. Wear one and it points out an al-legiance, however confident or timid the wearer. Six months ago, Ian Wade and I started a blog, My Band T-Shirt, to tell their stories. I began with a story about an Or-bital top given to me by a boyfriend; Ian followed with a tale of living in a Blur top for a year.

Inviting others to post stories, we were stag-gered by the emotions bundled up in them: people gave birth, lived and died in the shadow of their screenprint; life’s rich tapestry was re-vealed in these scraps of cotton.

Band T-shirts first appeared 50 or so years ago. The Beatles and the Dave Clark Five were early adopters, two bands that understood mer-chandising. Then came the hippy phenomenon of tie-dye with a logo slapped on top.

Johan Kugelberg, author of Vintage Rock T-Shirts, doesn’t put their success down to the power of music. ‘’What broke band T-shirts was mass distribution, just like everything else.’’

The idea of branding yourself with a musi-cian’s name wasn’t new, according to Kugelberg. ‘’Bobby-soxers [in the 1940s] began the trend of writing the name of their favourite singer across the back of their jackets - a flourish of Frank, or a swirl of Sinatra. Band T-shirts were a later ex-tension of that.’’

By broadcasting love for an artist on their chest, Kugelberg says, a person could suggest a mystical connection between themselves and a superstar.

Band T-shirts reveal contradictory impulses in owners, a desire to be seen differently, but also to fit in. On our blog, Ste-vie Chick claims, tongue in cheek, that his T-shirts reveal ‘’exquisite taste and enviable cultural nous’’; Sarah Drinkwa-ter confesses to using her Blur Mile End Stadium T-

shirt to pretend she was at the 1995 gig, when in fact she cried off at the last minute, afraid of her father’s reaction if he found out she’d been.

Kugelberg thinks T-shirts are status sym-bols. ‘’They’re middle-class luxury items, no doubt. It’s luxury consumption. It’s what brand you slap across your chest.’’

This doesn’t explain the hymns to self-made T-shirts that have been sent to our site - includ-ing a David Bowie logo reappropriated from a too-tight pink top, or the disastrous Sweet T-shirt made by Mark Wood (‘’The end result was bits of melting Sweet faces all over the place and an iron that had to be thrown away.’’).

More than anything, band T-shirts are about

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communicating hidden messages. In hindsight, I know how much meaning I ascribed to my Oa-sis Shakermaker T-shirt, worn to my first day at college, bought with paper-round money. It said: ‘’be gone, school; be gone, uniform; be gone fi-nancial dependence; hello all you new people who might understand me.’’

Dick Hebdige’s 1979 sociological classic Sub-culture: The Meaning of Style framed these feel-ings in academic lingo.

‘’It is through the distinctive rituals of con-sumption, through style, that subculture at once reveals its ‘secret’ identity and communicates its forbidden meanings.’’

That explains why band T-shirts are often embraced by alternative genres and why, after tie-dye, the rock T-shirt market was dominated by the black cotton of heavy metal. Grunge did similar business, but there was also irony, with logos of soft rock bands such as Boston worn as

a sign of self-awareness. Later, this trend was ad-opted by the mainstream, and soon band T-shirts trickled into high street fashion. David Beckham, at the peak of his turn-of-the-century fame, was pictured wearing a T-shirt with the Crass logo picked out in diamante studs. Here, T-shirts were simply the vehicles for the communication of a vague kind of ‘’cool’’, unrelated to the messages the original wearers had wanted to convey.

Sometimes T-shirts would become better known than the band. The Ramones probably sell a great many more T-shirts now than they did records in their heyday.

But why do we still cling on to band T-shirts as adults? It’s partly nostalgia, Kugelberg says, but it goes deeper than that. ‘’A T-shirt can help us acknowledge the changes we’ve gone through in our lives. When we’re approaching middle

age, we want to show why we were part of some-thing meaningful.’’

Perhaps it is telling that the most touching posts on our site have been about T-shirts that were discarded. John Earls got rid of his when he moved in with his girlfriend. The boyfriend who gave me my Orbital T-shirt, which I still wear to clean the house, regretted his own T-shirt cull: ‘’As a public information warning, I urge you: don’t throw them out.’’ GUARDIAN

The Clash, The Clash, and Ultravox, Handmade (1978)

(submitted to mybandtshirt.com by Bartdog)

This is the only band t-shirt I have ever bought. In 1978 you couldn’t buy punk clob-ber in Bradford - you had to hit the train and head for Leeds which had one new wave boutique - X Clothes. That’s where I had bought this red/purple/lime green screen printed tee (above). I don’t have it or the hair or the waist line any more. At the insistence of my younger brother, my parents also bought me a Jam glitter t-shirt as a holiday souvenir. As much as I loved The Jam, glitter tees were never going to be cool were they? I wore it inside out and drew an Ultravox logo on it and the words ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ - a favourite ditty of theirs. Much cooler. Twenty years later I was a teacher in a Lancashire town. There was a poor lad in my class who was often picked on or sneered at by other kids. His estranged mum had drunk herself to death, and his dad wasn’t much of a father to him. We used the hard-ship fund to pay for a place to the outward bounds centre in Wales we were using that year for the Year 10 residential. Wayne’s dad had got him some bits of clothes from local charity shops I guess. At least he was trying. Wayne turned up for the abseiling activity in a black tee shirt, shapeless, a bit too big for him with a peeling white logo.

‘What’s Ultravox?’ asked one of the other kids.

MyBandTshirtOne day many moons ago, Jude Rogers and

Ian Wade started talking about band t-shirts – “how they said things about us, told stories about us, took us back to times, places and peo-ple, never really left us behind.” So they set up a blog about band t-shirts people owned, that still mean something to them, and asked them why.

We want you to share yours with us too! Tell us a story, in as few or as many words as you like, and remember to send us a picture of your t-shirt - now or then. Then email us at mybandtshirt@gmail.com. And follow us on Facebook and Twitter! ~Jude Rogers and Ian Wade

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Fashion Alert

Investing was probably the last thing on the minds of Iron Maiden fans as they flicked their Bics to the heavy-metal band in concerts back in 1982. And yet, if they bought a T-shirt at the show, they made a decision that would make Warren Buffett proud. Twenty-eight years later, that $10 purchase would net them as much as $1,000 -- an enviable hundred-fold increase in value, al-most 10 times better than the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Stocks? Gold? Real estate? Neither can compare to the vintage rock T-shirt as an investment class. But most people who rock vintage T-shirts do so largely out of a passion for rock ‘n’ roll -- the music, the attitude and the style. “I started buying shirts because I loved music and thought they looked

cool,” says Cleveland tee aficionado Gregory Boyd. “I never imagined they’d get this pricey.” Boyd, a 27-year Cleveland musician who drums in the band Clovers, owns about 50 shirts, rep-resenting everything from the Grateful Dead to Poison to Joy Division. He didn’t get started by going to concerts, though. He was inspired after dancing in seventh-grade gym class. “My gym teacher was a little weird and would make us dance to Kraftwerk,” says Boyd, referring to the 1970s German electronic-music pioneers. “And I was like, ‘These guys are cool -- I gotta get me a Kraftwerk T-shirt.’ “ He pulled out a can of spray paint and some stencil. Presto!, k, k”I couldn’t find a Kraftwerk shirt where I grew up, in Canal Fulton,” says Boyd. “But I really

Vintage rock T-shirts not only make a fashion statement but are a good investment, too

by John Petkovic

loved the band and I started making my own.” It’s that pas-sion for music that spawned the rise of the rock T-shirt, says Johan Kugel-berg, author of “Vin-tage Rock T-Shirts.”

“They’re a sidebar to rock ‘n’ roll becoming a plausible business,” says Kugelburg, via phone from New York. “They grew out of the rise of the touring circuit and were initially a counter-culture phenomenon.” Yes, rock tees have been around since the 1960s. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that ambitious designs and silk-screening advances made them the apparel of choice for rock fans. “They went from a promotional tool to an art form,” says Kugelberg. “Wearing a rock T-shirt said what kind of band you liked, what kind of a person you were.” For instance, Stones shirts for “rockers.” Zeppelin shirts for “burnouts.”

By the mid-’70s, the shirts became a sort of se-cret code, not to mention the fashion of choice, for punks. The punk fascination with tees is thought to have started when New York punk rocker Richard Hell famously tore up a white T-shirt and adorned it with safety pins. “[Designer] Vivienne Westwood and [Sex Pistols manager] Malcolm McLaren turned the T-shirt into a punk fashion statement,” says Kugelberg. “Wearing a Ramones shirt suddenly announced that you were different from most people.”

It’s one of the reasons Ramones vintage shirts have become one of the most sought-after -- fetch-ing up to $1,000, says Erica Easley, author of the rock shirt history, “Rock Tease.” “The Ramones always sold more T-shirts than records,” says Ea-sley, a Portland, Ore.-based writer. “It isn’t just about liking a band, it’s about the ‘cool factor.’” Or, in some cases, the “ironic factor.” “Indie-rockers started buying Styx and REO Speedwagon shirts

-- not because they were cool bands, but because they were so unfashionable that so few people were wearing them,” says Easley. “Some of the designs were so outlandish that people started buying them.” That’s what led Boyd to track down a Rush 1990 “Presto” tee. “I don’t even like Rush, but the design is so funny,” says Boyd. “It has nine squares on the front. Five of them have hands and other four have a rabbit in a hat.” It’s the same reason he has five Poison shirts. “One is absolutely disgusting looking, with this guy with a tiger face and a 10-inch tongue,” says Boyd. “I had to get it because it was so weird.” Even the weird and the ugly have enjoyed a surge in price -- so much so that it’s hard to find vintage tees in thrift stores. “The collectibility of tees has en-tered the public consciousness,” says Easley. “As a result, more people are selling them on eBay --

and it’s driven up the price.” It’s also led to count-less knockoffs that are falsely advertised as vin-tage shirts. “Many sellers take the original design and put them on a new shirt that looks vintage,” says Easley. “You can always tell by the tags: The originals have much smaller tags and if the tag isn’t as worn as the shirt, you’re probably buying a fake.” So why spend hundreds when you can get a knockoff? “They feel different,” says Boyd. “The old shirts are softer and feel nicer. But more than that, it’s isn’t just about the shirt -- it’s about they stand for: the history of rock ‘n’ roll.”

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