Let’s Talk Stadium Concerts in This Friday’s Open Thread

Sneaky folks that we are, we found a way to talk about The Event that everyone is talking about without mentioning names. That's right—we're talking stadium concerts today on the open thread.

Stadiums—they're kind of a terrible place to see your favorite artist perform! Especially if your city's stadium happens to be enclosed so that sound reverberates around inside and you happen to be watching and listening from the building's upper reaches.

But stadiums are also the only place you can see your faves after they've reached a certain level of popularity. And then there's the excitement of being surrounded by thousands of fans as intense about an artist as you are, and the overwhelming spectacle of it all. So today on Racket, we're asking: What are the first and best stadium concerts you attended?

I'll start: My job has taken me to more of these affairs than most normal people would be willing to shell out for or sit through. (I have seen Kenny Chesney more than once.) My first was David Bowie's misguided Glass Spider tour at the now-demolished and absolutely unmourned Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia in 1987. The best? Maybe the 2016 storm-tossed Beyoncé show at what once was TCF Bank Stadium, or, yes, Taylor Swift at U.S. Bank Stadium in 2018 (though I preferred her at the just-slightly cozier Xcel a few years earlier).

So feel free to share your first/best stadium concert memories here. Football stadiums, baseball parks—hell, you can talk about arena shows if you want. Or, as always, anything else that's on your mind.