The last time I bought seats at a baseball game…I don’t want to talk about it. $230 for three Mets-Giants tickets near the left-field line, and it was so cold and rainy we didn’t even attend. Never again, but cost-wise today’s concert prices are even more ludicrous. There was some thought this morning about attending one of the Hollywood Bowl’s Independence Day concert-plus-fireworks shows being held this weekend (tonight, tomorrow and Monday night). Decent seats are going for $250-plus each, or $500-and-change with a date. Not to mention the attendant costs. The inflation factor is off the charts. I was somewhere between poor and living on a tight budget in the ’70s and ’80s, and yet somehow I managed to afford tickets to dozens of concerts. Concerts were regular and vital back then — they kept my heart pumping. But I will not pay today’s absurd prices. I could always sit in the shitty seats, I suppose, but even they aren’t a bargain. The anger I used to feel about the astronomical price of CDs at Tower Records back in the ’80s and ’90s is nothing compared to this. Remember the old Tower Records slogan, “No Music, No Life“? Well, live music today can go fuck itself.