Billy Joel has announced he’s finally winding down his record-breaking residency at Madison Square Garden, after a decade of playing one sold-out concert a month at the New York venue.
Legions of fans have flocked to the arena to see him in that time, but early in the residency Joel said he wouldn’t sell tickets to the front rows, because, he told Billboard in 2014, they were often sold at inflated prices to rich people; he’d see them “sitting there puffing on a cigar, ‘entertain me, piano man.’ They don’t stand up, make noise.”
He wanted the “real fans” at the front – so he began sending crew members to the back of the venue to scout them out. “They get people from the worst seats and bring ’em in to the front rows. This way you’ve got people in the front row that are really happy to be there,” he said.
“Happy” is a mild term for it – a lifelong fan, Jared Dubey, called it “one of the best experiences ever”. Just after he graduated from college, Dubey drove from Charleston, South Carolina, to Orlando, Florida, to see the Piano Man at the last minute. Before the concert, Dubey and his friends were milling around outside what is now the Amway Center when a man approached them and asked where their seats were. They told him they were in the nosebleed section, and Dubey described a childhood listening to Joel. The man offered them a chance to sit closer.
Dubey wondered how much it would cost. The man explained Joel’s front-row giveaway, and “I was like: ‘This has to be a joke, right?’” But “sure enough, this guy hands us four tickets”. Dubey’s friend Westin Lord, who wasn’t on hand to get the upgraded tickets, later spotted the group approaching the front row. “The spotlight that was on Billy Joel was also shining on them, because they were so close. During Piano Man, I think a little bit of sweat came off his brow and landed on them,” Lord said.
And Joel isn’t the only music legend to bring hardcore fans up close.
Miah Edelstein of Tifton, Georgia, said Coldplay are “me and my dad’s band, and so I’ve been listening to them since they started making music”.
Her father bought her tickets for Christmas in 2016. The next year, the two arrived early at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami wearing pins she’d made that said “father-daughter Coldplay concert”. The 18-year-old and her father caught the eye of a roadie, who approached them. But he wasn’t giving away the tickets for nothing. Sphinx-like, the roadie required them to solve a riddle.
“We had a little quiz where he was like: ‘OK, can you list all of their albums from memory?’” Edelstein said. They passed the test and headed to the front, where they joined other fans getting an unexpected treat. “A little girl who had a sign that said I’ve been waiting however-old-she-was years for this – she had been brought up as well as her family because they spotted that she had that sign,” Edelstein said.
“I say it’s my closest thing to a religious experience, being at a Coldplay concert, because I just start sobbing and singing along and it’s incredible,” she added. “So being up there with all of the confetti and all of the bouncing balls that they would toss out there – back in the nosebleeds you wouldn’t get that experience.” She keeps a small piece of confetti from that night in her wallet.
And then there’s perhaps the biggest rock legend still touring. A few fans who buy nosebleed seats to see Paul McCartney get the chance to see a Beatle as closely as they might have at the Cavern Club in 1962.
Among them was Katie Ryan, who was 15 when she and her then boyfriend went to see Paul McCartney in Birmingham, England. “Will and I were dressed up in our best Beatles gear with T-shirts and hats and wristbands – the whole outfit,” she wrote in an email to the Guardian. Far from the stage, a woman approached them and said she could tell they were big fans, so she was upgrading them to the front row. “We were absolutely gobsmacked,” Ryan said.
Everyone around them at the front had also been selected by scouts, and “everyone seemed to be in the same disbelieving, awestruck state that we were”. Front and center, Ryan and Will did manage to interact briefly with McCartney – “a couple of waves, and he even winked directly at me at one point”.
A year later in Vancouver, Tyler Orton was another one of those disbelieving fans. He had his doubts when a strange woman approached him and his then partner at the back of Rogers Arena and asked if they were McCartney fans.
“In my head, I was like: ‘Is she trying to sell me something?’” he said, but he recounted the songs, some of them obscure, the pair had been listening to before the show. “She gave us an envelope and said: ‘Here are two tickets to front row seats.’ And we honestly didn’t believe her. We thought maybe she was making some really mean practical joke,” he said.
When they finally reached the floor, “it hits me. This is actually happening. And then the second thing hit me: I looked at where the mics were positioned on the stage, I looked at where our seats were, and I realized: we’re gonna be just the three meters away from Paul McCartney the entire evening.”
So how can the rest of us manage to achieve such proximity to brilliance?
“I think we just got really lucky. We were definitely kitted out and showing how much we loved Paul but I also think the fact that we were young may have had something to do with it,” said Ryan. Orton, who was 31 at the time, also noticed those around him appeared to be in their 20s and 30s. “It’s very clear that he wanted to make sure that those tickets were going to younger people that could stand up and dance, versus some of the quite wealthy people that might just be sitting there staring at their phones or arms crossed.”
But Edelstein, the Coldplay fan, didn’t notice any age-related trends. “It wasn’t necessarily all young people up there,” she said. “According to the roadie, they picked the people who seemed like the most enthusiastic fans.”
So for your next arena show, deck yourself out in merch, bring signs, and be ready to prove your fandom. You could end up like Orton, who now has a close-up photo he took of Macca over his desk.
“Folks will come over and they’ll say: ‘Wow, so how far did you have to zoom in on your phone to get that photo?’” he said. “And I just explain: I did not zoom in at all.”
