Frat Boys Scalping Tickets to Pay for Tuition

The first time I can remember waiting out for tickets was probably early 1987 for the Genesis “Invisible Touch” tour that came through Maryland in May 1987. I was jammed in my friend Matt’s VW bus with a handful of Pi Kappa Alpha brothers. Matt and I were still in high school.

It was freezing outside as we waited to buy the Genesis tickets at the Hecht’s department store in Laurel, MD. We got paid something like $50 or $60 for the night to buy tickets, and that was huge to me, since I was making around minimum wage as a movie theatre usher.

After that night, it became a regular thing. We’d sleep out on the streets of Richmond, VA, Washington, DC, and various places around Maryland. My brother, Mike, worked with a ticket broker, Ricky (Ticket Rick) Rae, and he would set up the ticket waitouts.

When I got to college, the chance to sleep out for tickets and make money was a highly sought-after gig. Mike would put up a sign-up list at the PiKA house, and guys would race to get on it. In addition to the nightly pay, we’d also get pizza and beer to fuel us for the nights and days.

This was the era of the big stadium concerts from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, U2, and The Who. Lots of those ticket waitouts were multiple days, and we’d stay in sketchy areas, where no one else wanted to wait, so we’d get the front spots.

Sometimes, I’d also sell tickets in the parking lots of concerts in Maryland and Washington, DC. That was a whole lot more lucrative, except for the time that I decided to buy a bunch of tickets for the Cure and couldn’t sell any. Those charges hurt when I couldn’t pay off my high-interest credit card.

Anyhow, those times sleeping out with a bunch of guys from the frat were a good time. There was this one time, there were probably a dozen of us sleeping at RFK Stadium in Washington for the Who.

During the long nights of beers and hanging out, someone came up with a drinking game called Whoville. I don’t remember how to play, but it involved dice and lots of drinking.

When tickets went on sale for U2’s Zoo TV tour, a large group of us again waited at RFK in late April 1992. In addition to the PiKA crowd waiting out, a guy named Redskins Rob brought out ten or so homeless guys to wait in line, as well. Our crew of middle-class frat boys and Rob’s homeless guys became fast friends and partied and laughed for days.

The Washington Post covered the U2 waitout and heralded how University of Maryland students were beating the scalpers.

After an 80-hour ordeal — four nights stuffed in a car, three days breathing bus exhaust, scarfing Cokes and franks, running blocks for pit stops — the three University of Maryland seniors who camped out at RFK Stadium prevailed. They beat the scalpers to U2 concert tickets.

At 8 a.m. today they would be, if all went as planned, first on line at the RFK box office. By 9 a.m. the 52,000-seat stadium will sell out, predicted a Ticketmaster official.

“It’s what you got to do to get good seats,” said Crawford Conniff, 22, stretched out near the stadium among traffic island dandelions.

“We have unlimited time,” said Mike Collins, 22. “If we had a job making 50 grand, we could pay $150 to scalpers.”

Actually, $150 sounds cheap for the $28.50 face-value tickets. Today’s ticket sale for the Aug. 15 concert, one of the summer’s hottest, is likely to ignite an orgy of profiteering.

When the band played Los Angeles, scalpers scored up to $1,200 a ticket for prime seats. In Washington, as early as Tuesday, ticket brokers had stationed students, unemployed and even homeless people at ticket outlets to snap up hundreds of choice seats.

Those scalping days weren’t all glory, though. Sometimes I ran into trouble while selling tickets. I got robbed at both the 1994 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and a Grateful Dead show in Washington around the same time.

After college, I was underemployed for a while and kept slinging tickets whenever I could. I was also trying to make it as a writer, and I wrote up a freelance article about scalping (Diary of a Ticket Scalper) experiences that was mostly a troll. I got paid $100 by the New York Press (an alternative to the Village Voice at the time), and it elicited some angry letters to the editor.

That article caught the attention of worldwide performing artist Citizen Cope years later, and he sent me a DM on Instagram about it. It wasn’t random, though. I often ran into Cope in the 90s, when he also sold tickets on the streets of Baltimore and DC. I still have his first CD, which he sold to me out of his trunk while we were scalping Pearl Jam at Constitution Hall in January 1995.

It’s been years since I sold tickets, but it all came full circle in 2018 when I met actor Robert Romanus, who played ticket scalper Mike Damone in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

“Scalper? Did you call me a scalper? Listen, gentlemen, I perform a service here, and the service costs money.”

– Mike Damone, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

I miss those days of sleeping and selling tickets on the streets. So many fun, long nights with fraternity brothers and strangers. Those hot showers when we got home were so amazing. And so many of us managed to chip away at our college bills because of it.

Ticket Rick passed away twenty years ago. RIP Ricky.

Originally published at https://shawncollins512.substack.com.

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