My Bruce Journey - Part 16

'We shall live in peace someday. Well here in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day'


So it was a Friday when I heard - or more accurately read about The Seeger Sessions tour.  I know it was a Friday because it was during the day and I am at home on a Friday.  It was an announcement on Backstreets News pages and immediately sent me in a panic about tickets.  At the time I was in a job where it wasn’t easy to get time off at short notice so if tickets went on sale at 9.00am on a work day I was stuffed.

I had tried to become a ‘Ties That Bind’ member for a ages.  At the time Badlands website had a problem which meant I got an error message every time I went to checkout.  It was a known fault and I could get round it by phoning instead.  Me and computers fall out regularly and if the computer does not do what I want I simply take my bat home!  So I never rang I just carried on trying to checkout and getting frustrated with the computer.

Anyway this day I had to bite the bullet because I needed to give us every chance of getting tickets.  Spoke to the Badlands people on the phone and I was a ‘Ties that Bind’ member for two years.

I was on tenterhooks waiting for the announcement of the day the tickets would go on sale.  There were different rumours every day and being a first timer I didn’t know how the ’Ties That Bind’ worked.  As it happens I got a phone call from them - a recorded message type thingy - when I was in Waterstones in Bradford.  I remember this because I am one of those very annoying people who have a mobile phone that is never (or hardly ever) switched on.

Well it was switched on this day so I got the message telling me that tickets were going on sale on 7 April 2006 - a Friday phew don’t need to beg for time off work.

The big day arrived and I was ready for the long haul - a flask of coffee, sandwiches, chocolate, Kendal Mint Cake and after several trips to the loo (didn’t want to get caught short at the crucial moment) I was in front of the computer at 8.55am.

Bought Manchester tickets from Ticketmaster.  I hate this - the agonising waiting whilst you are in the queue - the way it tells you the wait will be five minutes and then suddenly it’s seven minutes and… worst of all the page where you know you have tickets but you only have two minutes to fill in your credit card details - I am mildly hysterical by this time.

We had a broadband connection by then.  Don’t know whether that made the difference between this and last time but I was ringing Mike at work by 9.10am telling him we had the tickets - I was euphoric.

Decided to buy four tickets - we reasoned that somebody would want the extra two.  As it turned out the relatives we thought would come couldn’t make it.  A friend of Mike’s brother, who apparently was a big fan, said he would have them and then changed his mind because he had heard Bruce had gone all gospel. All our Bruce friends already had tickets so… two spare tickets anyone??

We decided to go to Hammersmith as well on our first Badlands package - getting these tickets wasn’t half so stressful.  In fact I don’t think tickets were hard to come by at all.  A lot of fans who would have killed for tickets to an E Street Band tour had no time for this folky stuff.

Being relative newbies we grabbed anything we could get.

So all set up for our first back to back shows.

And those spare Manchester tickets? They eventually went to a BTXer from Sheffield who came to pick them up the day we got our We Shall Overcome-The Seeger Sessions CD.