“This is bullshit! This is bullshit!”
The concert, scheduled for December 3, had fans excited: Springsteen’s first concert in town in three years, an acoustic solo performance in the relatively intimate confines of the brand-new 4,200-seat Rosemont Theatre. Tickets went on sale Saturday morning at eight by phone and at only two locations in Chicago, both of them Tower Records outlets.
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By seven on a nippy morning more than 100 people had gathered, most of them prime representatives of the species Yuppicanus northsideicus. Indeed, many brandished cell phones, trying their luck at buying tickets by phone as well. At about 7:15 red numbered tickets–“carnival tickets,” people called them–were given out to assign ticket buyers’ places in line. This randomization process stops fans from camping out overnight.
Soon a queue of more than 50 fans had formed. As many or more stood nearby or watched the proceedings from the steps to the nearby el platform. As the process went on many of the onlookers started to notice something strange about the demographics of the line. Almost all of the first 25 were black males, and all of them, in rather sharp contrast to the well-scrubbed whites milling around, looked a bit down on their luck. Considering, and then rejecting, the possibility that Springsteen had enjoyed a sudden crossover appeal, the crowd quickly came to the not unreasonable conclusion that the men had been hired by scalpers to buy their tickets, and that some legerdemain in the alleged randomization process had conspired to put them in front of the line. That’s when the hooting started.
Enterprisingly, she bought one of the front-runner’s tickets for $10 and went to the beginning of the line to confront the manager and the Ticketmaster rep. What exactly she meant to do wasn’t clear. “I just thought if I incited something and made a big enough situation I could turn the thing around,” she said later.
But by this time it was nearly 8 AM, and everyone could see that the new lineup was probably legit. In the event, Tower began letting in ticket buyers at seven minutes after the hour. And in the end, the sale’s two-tickets-per-person limit meant that a pretty large proportion of the crowd who wanted tickets eventually got them.
