How many memories can fit into the Frank Erwin Center?
Graduations, Paul McCartney, and a crumbling monument to the people we once were.
For an intangible object, memories sure take up a lot of space.
Maybe even an arena’s worth.
Earlier this week, I was driving by the Frank Erwin Center, the unmistakable concert and sports arena in downtown Austin that opened in 1977 and is being demolished to make way for two new hospitals.
Even when I was a kid visiting Austin, I knew we’d arrived when I finally saw “The Drum” right next to Interstate 35.
I don’t remember my first visit to the Erwin Center, but I can tell you about my most memorable experience there.
It was May of 2013, when Paul McCartney was on tour. It was right around the time my ex-husband, Ian, and I were celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary. It was our last year together, and this night out to see Sir Paul feels like our last happy memory together as a couple.
A year later, we’d be in the throes of divorce, one that had been coming since the day we met, but I’d learned to set aside my relationship worries so I could soak up these few hours listening to THE Paul McCartney.
Ian and I didn’t fight that night. I’m sure we both cried during “Blackbird” and laughed when Paul made a joke about a love song he’d written for his wife. No, not that one. The new one. “Go, Nancy,” he deadpanned.
Ian encouraged me to buy a knock off T-shirt outside that I’m so glad I still have because it reminds me that we did have some good times together. That you can love someone more when you divorce them than when you’re married to them. That you can move on with your life and still cherish the person you were when you were making decisions you wouldn’t make again.
The complexity of my feelings about that one night could fill up the whole Erwin Center. And when I posted a video on Instagram of the sides crumbling down, a moment that Austinites have been anticipating since the announcement of the demolition more than five years ago, I found out that you all have big feelings about this place, too.
“This is heartbreaking. We had been going to concerts there since the early 80s. That big flan 🍮 was very special to us and we will miss it forever,” @ranchoalegretx said in a comment. One friend reminisced: “My first memory was Achtung Baby, when my friend drove down from Waco for the night and then surprised me with tickets for U2 when we arrived. Walked straight in.”
I wasn’t the only person with fond Paul McCartney memories from that night almost 11 years ago. “It was a simpler time,” one online friend said.
It’s surreal to think about the early 2010s as a simpler time, but it was.
Talk about simpler times: A few folks recalled when UT student registration happened in the Erwin Center, “on paper, in lines.” A couple of others worked there for a stint during school, getting backstage access to stories they’d be telling for the rest of their lives about that one time they walked that one celebrity to the green room.
Concerts, especially those big-name ones in venues like this, are where we experience that sense of “growing up” in real time. We remember how we felt as much as what we heard and what we saw while we were there.
Related: Billie Eilish and the art of radical care
A few dozen people shared their most memorable concerts and events where I imagine something like this happened for them — New Kids on the Block in 1990, Dolly Parton in 2016, Lady Gaga in 2012, Sesame Street Live in 1985, the Harlem Globetrotters in 1979, the 1986 Longhorn women’s basketball national championship celebration.
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