I’m with the band. Sort of. But not really. (A photo essay.)

“NO CAMERAS/TAPE/BEVERAGES” the concert tickets used to say, back in the day.

“No cameras?” No problem. It wasn’t exactly easy smuggling a four-pound Pentax K1000 through security, anyways.

Today, of course, each and every concert-goer has a smart phone-enabled high-resolution digital camera tucked into their back pocket, and their phone is their concert ticket.

So when the band starts playing, it’s all too easy to start snapping some pix; they usually turn out to be pretty awful, and we end up deleting all but a few of the least fuzzy images.

I snuck my Pentax camera into the Smiths show in 1986 and got this awful shot from the cheap seats. But I adore it just the same.
RIP Andy Rourke.

It’s hard to resist the urge to share our excitement of being in the audience, so we snap away and post some grainy pix on social media. But lately I’ve been hearing more and more performers complain about the distraction of having hundreds or even thousands of glowing smart phones shining at them non-stop while they try to play. Many artists are urging their fans to put down the damned phones and to just enjoy the experience. Dave Wakeling, who fronts The English Beat and tours relentlessly, recently banned camera phones from his shows.

A terrible shutterbug myself, I’m starting to feel guilty about my cell phone-dependency at so many concerts over the years. But not guilty enough to not share some of my pix. Perhaps I’ll try my very best to put the damned phone away at the next show I attend. Until then, a few of my favorites…

The one and only Elvis Costello.
This is from the 51st time I saw him perform, in 2022.

Gang of Four at the Paradise in Boston, 2016-ish. RIP Andy Gill.

Love, hope, strength: Mike Peters and the Alarm. 2019.

Erasure at the Boston House of Blues, 2018.

The last show of Crowded House’s 2023 US tour. Boston.

Midnight Oil at the Boston House of Blues. 2017.

Sometimes the band actually consented to being photographed. Here are some pix I took of a Boston band called “forever 19,” back around 1985. I was friends with the drummer, Mr. Russell Hamilton.

forever 19, l to r: Sludge, Mike Walker, Margaret Oot, and Mike Walker.

I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a Boston band called The Cavedogs, who let me take some promotional pix for them in 1988-ish.

The Cavedogs: Mark Rivers, Todd Spahr and Brian Stevens.

I developed a mad crush on Michael Steele (second from left) from the Bangles when I took this pretty terrible shot of them at a media meet-and-greet in 1986.

The Bangles meet the collegiate press at the Rat in Boston, 1986.

My brother JB took these shots of Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway when The Thompson Twins stopped by the Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum in 1984.

Tom Bailey (far right) and the Thompson Twins on the Congress Street Bridge, Boston, 1984.

But the best bad picture I ever took, if you ask me, is of the one concert my late brother JB (the drummer) played with his school of rock-classmates in 1984. You can read about and listen to the band here.

I think I like the pictures I took with my trusty Pentax K1000 in 1980s better than my digital pix — but then again, I used to look like this back in the day. Not a gray hair in sight…