The Almost Dead Rockers Tour

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Mark and I had a name for what we were doing.

 

We called it the Almost Dead Rockers Tour—seven years of chasing the artists we’d loved for most of our lives, because we had a simple, brutal realization:

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If we waited, they’d be gone.

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Not “gone” as in retired.

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Gone as in dead.
 

And that part of our lives would be gone, too. 

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I hope none of the people I mention—or the ones I leave out—would be offended. For anyone born before the personal computer, you were the people we paid attention to before we scrolled.

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I started realizing I was getting old with the first death that really registered—not the first death in history, and not the way you half-remember the sixties. I mean as a mature citizen, when it begins to land: oh… they’re starting to go.

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And when Mark and I met, it clicked. We had similar interests despite being from different parts of the country. He was a West Texas kid. Me—I was raised where I could hear the hydroplanes during Seafair.

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We met, became friends, and started sharing the usual guy conversations: exes, the sixties and seventies, how we got to where we were. But one thing stood out fast:

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Mark and I were both musical our whole lives.

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He and I were different in a lot of ways, but we met at music.

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So we went to concerts. He had his life, and I had mine—different friends, different places, different women we were drawn to. But we both loved live music.

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There’s something magical about it.

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Live music helped me breathe. Mark enjoyed it differently. He was vocal about it. He had what I called a “yip” he’d do when something hit him just right. Me—I’d sit back and listen. Close my eyes. Float away. Quiet and contemplative, and it would take me places.

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And somewhere along the way, you start noticing it—one headline, then another. The old musicians begin to pass away. That wasn’t the trigger, exactly, but it mattered. It made time feel more real.

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So we didn’t treat concerts like casual entertainment.

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We treated them like windows that were closing.

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Mark was seven years older than me, and during those later years I was in my 50s—early 60s. We probably saw four hundred shows in about seven years. We saw the Stones in Kansas City. We chased shows in Phoenix. We tried to make a habit of catching Van Morrison during his Vegas residency.

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It wasn’t always glamorous.

It was deliberate.

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A way of refusing to postpone the things that make life feel sharp.

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And for me, the seed of that whole obsession goes back to a night when I was about 17.

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The night I learned the difference

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That concert had two opening acts before Blue Öyster Cult.

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The first was supposed to be Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, right when Live Bullet was happening—but they were late. So the other opener went on first.

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And it was… honestly awful. I’ve seen a lot of live music in my life, and it was the worst show I ever attended.

Not “a little rough.” Not “bad mix.” Not “boring set.”

I mean so bad I almost talked my friend into leaving. They weren’t ready. The set dragged. The energy was wrong. The room felt like it was waiting for the real thing and getting punished for it.

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We stayed anyway.

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Then Seger and the Silver Bullet Band finally showed up, and the whole place changed.

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This is where the story clarifies something important: Blue Öyster Cult was perfect. They sounded like the records—tight, polished, exactly what you came for.

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But Live Bullet was different.

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Seger wasn’t just playing the songs. It was live music—breathing, moving, filling the room in a way a record can’t. You could feel the band pushing the night forward in real time. It wasn’t note-for-note perfection.

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It was presence.

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And I still remember the sax player—Alto Reed—climbing up on top of the big speakers and playing from up there.

It was pure showmanship. Pure joy. The kind of ridiculous that only works when a band has the room in its hand.

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Then Blue Öyster Cult came on, and they blew the roof off.

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It was a great night.

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But the thing that branded itself into my brain—the thing I didn’t have language for at 17—was the contrast:

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Blue Öyster Cult sounded like the records (perfect).

Live Bullet sounded like life (alive).

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And it was that “life in the room” feeling I spent the next decades trying to find again.

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The show that snapped the whole thing into focus

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I need to correct the “who did I chase” part, because the honest answer is: I didn’t chase perfection.

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I chased that Live Bullet kind of alive.

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Blue Öyster Cult—I saw them that first time at 17, and one more time later. That was it for that band.

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But years after I was 17, when I finally saw Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band again—Mark and I saw them in Phoenix together—it flipped a switch.

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After that show, Mark told me something I didn’t expect. He said he’d been watching me during the music, and he said:

“You looked like you were 17 again.”

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At the time it sounded like a compliment.

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Later it sounded like he’d named the whole mission: not youth—aliveness. Access. A version of yourself that isn’t just managing life, but actually inhabiting it.

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And I didn’t intend to make this story about me and Mark. I thought it was a story about music, and a feeling, and a habit of going.

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But it doesn’t stay there.

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The last show

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The last concert Mark and I saw together was Van Morrison at Caesars Palace, the last day of February—about a month before the world shut down.

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Mark was really sick. He couldn’t walk. That night, he told me to go without him.

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I told him—politely but firmly—something that rhymed with “tuck you.”

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I rented a wheelchair. It was across the street. I pushed him into the venue.

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We couldn’t sit in our seats because of his chair, but the staff were incredible. They moved us to a great spot where the chair could fit and we could actually see.

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And Morrison played a straight-up rock and roll show. Other shows were jazz. Another was straight blues. But this one rocked—like somebody decided the room needed one last surge of electricity.

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I didn’t know it would be the last show we’d see together.

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After that, we had tickets to Electric Tuna. When I went to pick Mark up, he couldn’t walk. He told me to go without him.

I did.

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That was the last time I saw him.

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A few days before the COVID pandemic hit, Mark died. Then the world shut down, and grief got even stranger—more private, more dislocated, like reality itself had become an isolation chamber.

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And here’s the part that still doesn’t sit right: there was no funeral for Mark—none that I knew of. He was my best friend at the time, and then he was gone without a public moment where the world acknowledged it.

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No shared room.

No ritual.

Just absence.

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What I think was really happening 

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We called it the Almost Dead Rockers Tour as a joke, but it turned out it wasn’t really a joke. It was a strategy:

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Don’t delay the things you’ll regret delaying.

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And near the end, it wasn’t just about seeing legends before they died.

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It was also about seeing Mark before he disappeared from the world we used to share.

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The wheelchair wasn’t symbolism at the time—it was logistics. But looking back, it feels like a line in the sand:

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If you can still get there, we’re still going—even if I have to push you.

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I haven’t been to a concert since. Grief makes you smaller if you let it. So does postponing joy until it feels safe.

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Maybe the next show won’t bring me back to 17. That’s not the goal.

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The goal is to be reachable again—to remember that life is reachable again.

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Maybe it’s time to start going again.