Tuesday, October 20, 2009 | by nathan

City of Blinding Lights

Laurie snuck a point-and-shoot camera into the concert, and so pretty soon I’ll have the benefit of getting to see some better photos from the show, but as you probably noticed, I was stuck taking pictures with my phone. It’s fine, the iPhone takes a decent photo every now and then, but the maddening thing is that once we got into the inner circle I looked around and saw no fewer than a half dozen people with digital SLRs, many of them the exact same model I’d left at home. It seems that once upon a time I let Tina Turner’s 700-pound head of security put the fear of God in me about taking cameras to shows, and now I’ve got an entire psychological complex about it. From now on I’m totally just going for it. SO WATCH OUT, ROCK STARS – I’m coming to steal your souls whether you like it or not.

And anyway, the whole prohibition on taking photos at concerts is ridiculous. Everyone has camera phones now – photos from concerts are going to end up online. Period. If these rock stars were smart they’d sell "photo passes" along with their tickets – $15 to bring in whatever camera you can lug in. In this day and age it’s good word of mouth. It’s not going to hurt DVD or ticket sales; if anything it would drive them. At any rate, I’m totally kicking myself for having such great seats to this show and not nutting up and sneaking my camera in like I did last year at Robert Plant and Alison Krauss at the Zoo Amphitheater.