HOWZAT

The concert ended with an instrumental version of God Save the Queen and once more the flicking of the Bics, which, no longer the virgin concertgoer, I understood now as a gesture of tribute. My friends and I weren’t finished, though. Emboldened by Freddie’s toast, we decided to go to the stage entrance again and say hello. I still choke with embarrassment when I think of it. When we got there, a black limousine was pulling away, our heroes and their entourage inside, and we were left with the detritus: older, dolled-up, hard-bitten groupies who had followed the band around and not made this night’s cut. I stared at one, at her long, bleach-blond hair, her miniskirt, her bright red lipstick. She glared at me briefly; then her face went slack as she dismissed the idea of me being any sort of competition. In fact, I had not really taken in that there was a competition, that the girls (and I?) were here to spread our wares and catch the attention of one of the men, and then . . . And then? I hadn’t thought it through at all. I wouldn’t have known what to do with such a man as Brian May if he even so much as looked at me. All I knew was that I was way, way out of my depth, that even if I had eluded the roadie minding the door, there was no way I was ever going to get past a woman like this.

The contrast between the sparkling theatricality of the concert and the gritty reality of the backstage, with its dirty concrete, anonymous faces and unfulfilled dreams turned my stomach, and almost ruined the night. I wished I hadn’t seen it, because it reminded me that the show was a fantasy, while it was my aching feet and the roadies’ boredom and the groupies’ hard desperation that constituted real life. As I stood watching the limo pull away and the unsexy women stand about, licking their wounds, looking for a ride to the next city and another chance, I felt as if a door had been kicked open a crack on to a world I knew nothing about: the seamy underbelly of the concertgoing experience, a mix of sex and power and exploitation, of cigarettes and poorly applied make-up and long, cold nights waiting to be noticed and defining yourself by someone else’s attention. If that was grown-up life, I didn’t want to know about it. I wanted the champagne toast, but not the limo. Not yet.

Tracy Chevalier is the author of

Girl With a Pearl Earring

My father was a Navy man and was genuinely fond of the ever-present military police that were so much a part of Spain in the 1960s. In fact, my father loved everything about the military, its discipline and uniforms, its shiny shoes and tidy haircuts, its patriotism and orderliness, so it made sense that he did not like the Beatles and that he did like living in Spain under the military rule of the man he affectionately called “Generalissimo” Franco. I didn’t see why he shouldn’t like Franco. To me, a grade-school kid, Dictator was sort of like just the Spanish word for President. In any event, it was partly because of Franco’s safe streets that both of my parents allowed my teenage siblings and me to travel to downtown Madrid all by ourselves late at night to see the Beatles.

They had tried to convert the Plaza de Toros into a giant arena. They had covered the ground, which I knew was dusty and blood-and-gut-stained. I had seen bulls get slaughtered there by picadors and matadors and the clown guys who cleaned up afterwards.

My sister and brother and I were on the eighth row, close enough to where you could almost see. There were hundreds of rows behind us and also all the normal, regular bullfight seats way up in the stands. It was the biggest place I had ever been in my life. It felt even bigger than when it was just with the bulls.

There were a million opening acts: a steel drum band; a bunch of singers — croony, Spanish versions of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra; women in shiny dresses who sang to music piped in from somewhere we couldn’t see. There were also a few of the Spanish-language Beatles knock-offs that were sprouting up everywhere.

When the Beatles came on we used binoculars. My brother and I got to use them the most because my sister was screaming and crying so hard she didn’t spend much time actually looking at them. Unfortunately, therefore, as little as we could see them, we could hear them even less. All the girls were screaming, but my sister the most. She screamed so much that next day both the Spanish and English language newspapers had pictures of my sister on the front page screaming. All over Europe, in fact, as we learnt from friends who sent us newspapers from elsewhere, were pictures of my screaming sister.

Rebecca Brown is the author of

The End of Youth

December 1978. I am 17. My mother is an opera singer and my father is a professor of musicology. They dig all things classical. In spite of this, I listen to WABC-AM on my red plastic Toot-a-Loop (it’s an S, it’s an O, it’s a crazy radio) beginning around fifth grade, and establish my strictly pop-leaning musical tastes right away.

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