3/1/2023 0 Comments Summer sanitarium 2003 lineup![]() Sturgis, South Dakota during the Motorcycle Rally Now, remember how I said that real bands rarely came to my hometown? There’s an exception to that rule – my hometown is about a half an hour drive from the yearly cesspool of drunken debauchery that is known as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. That Metallica concert was uproarious and energetic, but it didn’t compare to what the other concert would wind up meaning for me personally. These weekends of freedom were exhilarating and only made me wish that I could get away for good.īut those excursions are not what I’m sitting down to write about, no, instead I want to talk about the band that I saw less than a week after Summer Sanitarium, this time closer to home. All wonderful reasons to escape the doldrums of life in small-town America where we still had a Blockbuster in 2012. I saw Metallica, I saw Iron Maiden, I saw Eric Clapton, I saw Dream Theater. I went to either Denver or Minneapolis (or one time Boise, Idaho) frequently over the next several years, often with the excuse of seeing a band or an artist that would never come to Rapid City, South Dakota. And indeed, that summer I drove nearly 600 miles to Minneapolis to see the Summer Sanitarium tour. ![]() If it meant driving 8 hours to get to a real city? So be it. So it became a rite of passage to flee the state at every opportunity because it was the only way you could get away from pickup trucks blasting pop-country. You see, real bands rarely came to my ‘city’ of 85,000 in western South Dakota. I drove across my terribly boring, flat home state to get to a real city to see real bands for once. It was a summer of road trips for concerts, and generally just to go places. It was a summer to be remembered, at least the parts that weren’t fogged over by the underage partying that I partook of. It was 2003, I was nineteen years old and had just graduated from high school three months earlier, it was that last summer of freedom feeling, knowing that soon I’d be off to college and something new.
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