Band Shirts.
Chris Neary recently sent me My Band T-Shirt, a Tumblr where people send in the story of their favorite band shirt, along with a picture. It’s a rad site, but I can do them one better:
Band shirts I have lost.
Because more interesting to me than the things you cherish and keep in your closet for years despite their condition/hipness/smell… are the things you cherish and have lost- to giving them away, to moving, and to the sad old mistress of time.
Here are some of the band shirts I no longer have but still think about.
I bought this shirt at the U2/Pixies show I went to in 1992. I was in 7th grade, I remember exactly what I wore (a plaid suit jacket type of thing I borrowed from my sister, a black silky skort, tights, and the closest thing I had to combat boots at the time- loafers) and I remember thinking that surely Bono would notice me in the crowd and pick me out. He did not. I was in nosebleed seats with my friend Liz. I bought this shirt and wore the shit out of it for many many months, until my high school boyfriend Allan borrowed it from me and then we broke up. I miss this shirt. My friend Reggie has one too, and I have tried to steal it from him several times.
I probably got this Primus shirt from Leather Express in our local mall, and when I wore it to school one day, I was sent home for wearing vulgar language on my shirt. IT’S A BABY WITH A BOTTLE! From what I remember, my parents made me get rid of the shirt, and I secreted it away to wear it later, only to realize that it wasn’t that cool of a shirt to begin with. So I trashed it.
I was gifted a New Order shirt that had this on the back, and on the front, it said New Order down the side of the shirt. I loved this shirt more than anything, but I happened to get the shirt right around the time that I wanted to look like a girl again. You see, young folk, for years band shirts only came in XXL, and were stiff and terrible looking on girls, especially girls with boobs. Sometime in the mid-90s, companies started making “baby t” band shirts for girls, but those were terrible too because they were basically midriff shirts if you were taller than 5’2″. My consolation was to buy boy band shirts, cut the design out, and affix them to more form-fitting shirts.
Women should really have protested the whole baby-t thing a bit more. It was horrid.
Anyway, so I got this shirt and I loved it, but I didn’t really wear it, as I couldn’t find any way to wear it that would keep me looking girlie and cute. So when my friend Doug envied it, I just gave it to him. I hope he still wears it.
