Getting tickets back in the day

[skuncles]

It occured to me this afternoon that when I buy concert tickets these days it's no big deal, I come down to the computer at 10am, search for seats until I find what I like, enter my credit card info and I'm done. It's not like the old days where it was an all day thing. Back for Fleetwood Mac in 1990 it meant calling up TickeTron repeatedly until you got thru (this was on a rotary phone no less!!!). Then in 1991 my brother in law and I went into Hartford for Billy Joel tickets, had to be there by 5am to get a good spot in line and then waited as show after show was sold out. 12 hours later we had tickets to a 5th show that had been added.
The last shows I waited in line for were Fleetwood Mac in 1997 and Stevie Nicks in 1998. For both I was at the local record store by 5am to wait five hours for tickets to go on sale. By 10am there was probably 100 of us waiting. For the Mac show it was to be the first show of the Reunion tour. When it was announced they said they were only going to sell the seats inside (no lawn seats) so that meant you might not get tickets. Due to the demand though, the opened up the lawn. It was cool waiting in line in that we were all there for a common purpose so we all had something to talk about. What also struck me at the time was that each person had AT LEAST $100 cash on them (tickets bought this way was cash only). So if anyone wanted to make a lot money real fast all they had to hold up the entire line!!
Today with the internet the whole process is over and done in five minutes. I kind of miss the old days.