Miracles do happen (or how we ended up in the middle of row A at the Bruce Springsteen concert ...)

Well perhaps not a real, bona-fide miracle, but amazing how a really bad situation can turn into something wonderful with a large helping of luck.

The first time I went to see Bruce Springsteen was back in 1988 when I was 18 and a first year student at Edinburgh University. I had been a big fan for a few years, ever since I had seen him singing Born in the USA on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and even though he wasn't playing anywhere further north than Birmingham on that tour I knew that I was going if I could get a ticket. No-one wanted to come with me so I ended up getting the overnight bus down the day before, arriving in plenty of time to  get a great spot near the front before travelling back on another overnight bus.

I've mentioned it before on this blog, but it was worth every minute on the bus and hanging around Birmingham as the show was amazing. I couldn't believe how incredible the band was and Bruce was everything I had heard or read and more. Full of energy, it seemed he wanted to connect with everyone in the audience and they played and played, until after four hours everyone was exhausted. There were serious moments, anger and sadness, but mostly just joy and exuberance. The excitement of the audience and the reflection of this in the Bruce and the band was incredible.

Needless to say that evening has stayed with me every since and Bruce's music has been a constant throughout the many years that followed. I managed to see him live once more in London in 1999, but since moving to Australia in 2002 there haven't been a lot of opportunities to see him play live ...

And then early last year I heard some rumours that he might be touring Australia late in 2012. Nothing seemed to come of them, but then in November last year there were low-key adverts in the paper announcing dates in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Hanging Rock. At the time only one date had been announced in Melbourne, so I knew the demand for tickets was going to be sky-high. I signed up to get into the advance sale and we tried to book as soon as they went on sale. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get any. We tried again when general tickets went on sale, when the next night was announced and then when the third and final night went on sale. Still didn't manage to get any tickets.

Getting pretty desperate, a friend who had also been trying to get tickets put us on to a guy who had two tickets for sale. They were mobile phone tickets and not in the best seats, but he was selling them at face value and seemed pretty genuine. My wife wanted to get them as birthday present, so she drove over to his house, paid the cash and he texted her the tickets. Whew, sorted we thought.

Over the last few weeks excitement was rising and we decided that since K was just getting back from a training course in Brisbane on the Sunday afternoon that son number one would come with me. Sure it would be a late night and might mean a day off school, but if you are going to go to your first rock concert at eight years old, you might as well make it a good one.

So, Sunday evening we set off full of excitement and anticipation. I am not sure what son number one was expecting, but I guess he was probably thinking how could it possibly live up to my build-up. He was impressed by the number of people, but not by the queuing and then imagine my disappointment and shock when the tickets didn't work. Someone had already used them and was inside sitting in the seats we thought were ours.

More queueing at the ticket office and they confirmed that yes, the tickets had already been used – someone entered using them just after the doors opened. As we hadn't bought them ourselves there was nothing we could do.

By now it was about 7.29 pm and Bruce and the band were due on stage at 7.30 pm, so staying calm (but inside feeling like I wanted to drive round to someone's house and break all his legs) we checked at the ticket sales window just in case there were some tickets behind the stage left. Then the miracle.

'Yes, we do have a couple of tickets for sale in the seating just behind the general admission area.'

'Okay, we'll take them. What row did you say they were in?'

'Row A, in the middle.'

Not wanting to get too excited, but thinking there must be some mistake. I scribbled my signature on the credit card slip, grabbed the tickets and we tried not to run too fast to get inside. One quick toilet stop to empty an eight year old bladder and buy drinks and we were inside. The seats were incredible – probably the best in the arena. Straight in front of Bruce's microphone, slightly raised so that we had a great view over all the standing general admission crowd and right next the walkway he would use when he came out into the crowd.

Wow, it doesn't get any better than this I thought. A few minutes later the house lights went down and the band kicks into Out in the Street. A couple of minutes in and Bruce makes his way down into the crowd and round onto the walkway. He spots son number one smiles, shakes his hand and gives him the guitar plectrum he was using. Unbelievable.

Ten minutes ago we had no tickets and were looking at a pretty dismal walk back to the train station and home, and now we are sitting (well standing mostly) in the best seats at Rod Laver and Bruce has just shaken my son's hand ...

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur, but you can see the set-list here. Bruce came past a few more times, including giving number one son another plectrum, crowd-surfing his way from just in front of us up to the stage during Hungry Heart, standing right next to us during the emotional tribute to Clarence and Danny during the encore and getting number one son to sing a line of Tenth Avenue Freeze Out.

So, Mr Eddie Black, you may be a con man and a miserable person, but if you weren't a dishonest fraud we wouldn't have been in those seats and had the most incredible night. Only problem is that I now have to somehow explain to number one son that when he goes to concerts in future he may not get to shake hands and sing with band!

Eddie, if you have a change of heart and decide to do the right thing, leave a comment below. If not, I hope the Police catch up with you and that you haven't conned too many other people out of their dream of going to see Bruce Springsteen. I guess they may not all turn out quite as happily as our experience ...

Borders, REDGroup and Australian bookselling

In November 2009 I started a post entitled Is Borders evil? so as you may guess the news that they had placed themselves into voluntary administration on Thursday didn't cause too much heartache around here. As a chain-bookshop ex-employee I do feel sorry for the shopfloor staff who now face irate customers with impossible demands and the likely loss of their jobs.

I came to the conclusion that they probably weren't inherently evil as much as incompetently nefarious, so I never did publish the post, but charging well above RRP on about 90% of your stock did seem like a strange strategy for a bookshop looking for customer loyalty and longevity. The half-empty shelves, poor stock selection and lack of key backlist titles over the last few years also seemed to point to some problems with management and strategy.

Around this time the government was also looking into the parallel importation laws and book pricing in general, so there was plenty of media coverage about the disparity between book prices in Australia and those in the USA and UK, but bizarrely there was no coverage anywhere about one of the major book retailing chains over-pricing the vast majority of their stock.

It wasn't always like that, however, when Borders first opened in Carlton in early 2003 it was a well stocked and pleasant spot to browse. I still never bought much there, but occasionally one of their discounted bestsellers like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition or something more esoteric not stocked elsewhere would persuade me to get the credit card out.

Unfortunately in 2007 the Borders US group started getting into difficulties and the UK and Asia Pacific parts of the business were put up for sale. The Australia/NZ side was bought in June 2008 by the REDGroup who are in turn owned by Pacific Equity Partners (PEP), a private equity firm who clearly weren't buying because of a love of literature. The REDGroup already owned the Angus and Robertson chain in Australia and the Whitcoulls chain in New Zealand, so it was fairly obvious that PEP thought they could merge Borders into the existing business, streamline back office functions, maximise profit and sell it on as soon as they could get a good price. (The financial background is explained well in an article in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Evans.)

Straight away you could see the change in the shops: backlist wasn't replaced, shelves got empty, prices went up across the board and non-book products became more and more prominent. I am probably not the average book-buyer, but it wasn't long before I stopped buying anything from them and quickly realised that it wasn't even worth going in to the stores as it would just annoy me.

Not as annoyed, however, as I was when it was revealed soon after the announcement that Border's chairman Steven Cain had written to the government blaming them for the chain's failure because of the overseas internet shopping GST loophole and parallel importation laws. Sure, internet booksellers will have taken a some of Borders market, but the parallel importation laws have very little to do with the problems the REDGroup encountered. For their management to try to shift the blame from their failings to others over two issues which they were well aware of and should have had strategies for dealing with is pathetic in the extreme. It is also telling that Dymocks and other, smaller independent chains, like the ever excellent Readings, can survive in the current climate when they are dealing with exactly the same issues, albeit far more successfully.

Most of the articles about the collapse have made much of the impact of overseas online booksellers like Amazon and Book Depository (some even going so far as to predict that this is the beginning of the end for all shops!) who are undoubtably grabbing a bigger and bigger share of the market in Australia and many have pointed out that the widespread take-up of ebooks will squeeze the bricks-and-mortar bookshops further. Personally, I think that big and bland chains will struggle as more of their custom goes online, but am optimistic that smaller and more customer-focused shops should still be able to thrive. Their role will change slightly as all the bestsellers go digital, but provided they focus on the things that on-line and ebooks can't provide like author events, discussion groups and great customer service then I think they will be all right. Of course they may need a bit of help from the publishers in all of this, but that is another story which can wait for now.

There is bound to plenty more coverage over the coming weeks and the whole industry will be watching intently to see what happens. In the meantime, if you want to know more here are some of the best sources and stories:
John Birmingham – Borders' demise: why the book chains are doomed
Bookseller + Publisher blog – Things we keep repeating
Bookseller + Publisher blog – Round-up of stories on REDGroup entering voluntary administration
And my favourite, Ross Honeywill – How Mark Rubbo killed Borders books

My holidays

 

The People's Train

My views on historical fiction tend to be the opposite of Booker Prize judges, but strangely this goes out the window for anything set in Russia especially around the October Revolution.

Unfortunately The People's Train is the exception that proves the rule.

Sometime last year I chanced across a review that  praised the book and mentioned that it was based on a true story about one of the minor protagonists in the Russian Revolution.  I have never read anything by Thomas Keneally (or Tom as his Australian publishers prefer), but he won the Booker for Schindler's Ark and is undoubtably one of Australia's best regarded and prolific writers so it seemed likely to be something I would enjoy.

The first two-thirds is set in Brisbane and is purportedly the English translation of the memoirs of one Artem Samsurov (Late Hero of the Soviet Revolution) – a protégé of Lenin's who escapes from prison in Tsarist Russia and makes it to Australia by way of Japan and China. The last one-third is billed as Paddy Dykes' Russian Journal and culminates in his account of the storming of the Winter Palace on 27 October 1917.

It is a brilliant idea to swap the perspectives in this way – the Russian exile narrating the Australian section (although with a great deal of back story and plot filling along the way) and the small-town Australian idealist reporting the momentous historical events he witnesses in Russia.

Unfortunately it just doesn't work. The characters are flat and unconvincing, the historical details are correct by don't come to life and the narrative trundles along when it should race toward the obvious conclusion.

At one point Paddy complains that Artem's bride-to-be 'Tasha didn't seem to exist beyond her reputation. She was most alive and was a real presence when she spoke at factories around Kharkov. In the Gubin house she was a bit like a ghost.' Unfortunately this could applied to a great many of the characters in the novel. And on top of this the writing can be clunky and laboured, almost as if he forgot to re-write all the material that his researcher came up with. It's a shame because Artem's story is incredible and I couldn't help feeling that it was short-changed by this book.