Depeche Mode - Cal Expo, Sacramento, CA - April 30, 1988

After we had traveled for Echo and the Bunnymen, it seemed only logical that we would make the far shorter drive to Sacramento to see one of our all time favorite bands live.

It was towards the end of my first year in college at UNR, and four of us decided we would make the trek over the hill to see Depeche Mode in Sacramento, probably the closest major city to Reno that had any decent bands coming through. I had been listening to Depeche Mode since I was 14 and pirated a copy of People are People from a friend of mine in high school. My boyfriend (and still a good friend) at the time, CF, was pretty rabid for them, after having seen them in Europe as well as driving down to San Diego the previous summer to see them during their Black Celebration tour.

Say what you may about Depeche – call them Depressed Mode or that they were new wave pussies or whatever, but I still love the songwriting in some of those old songs, Everything Counts, Somebody, Shake the Disease, I could go on and on. I guess by now at the ripe old age of 34 I have sort of outgrown them, but at 18 I knew every song and every idiosyncrasy of every album by heart.

I still love and often quote a lyric from “Blue Dress” – You can’t change the world. But you can change the facts. And when you change the facts, you change points of view. And when you change points of view, you can change the world.

Anyhow, we started out pretty early for the trip to Sacramento. You have to climb over Donner Pass from Reno to get there, and for some weird reason that late April day, it was snowing. Lightly, mind you, but enough to cause some slowdown in the traffic and question myself whether or not we would be able to drive back the two hours much later that night.

Cal Expo is an outdoor amphitheatre, so luckily, it was a warm spring day for the concert. The place was pretty packed full of black-clad teens with spikey hairdos and boys with pierced ears, which was still a bit unusual in 1988.

I remember the show itself being amazing to me. I actually got chills during a couple of the songs. I came out pretty energized and thrilled, and for many years later I considered that concert to be the best I’d ever seen and one of the most powerful.

I kept my Music for the Masses t-shirt from that show for well over a decade and wore it until it shrunk more to a kid’s size. People obviously still go for that stuff, since I was able to sell that old faded t-shirt on e-bay to a guy in Germany a few years ago.