Depeche Mode - the Palace, Auburn Hills, Michigan - November 9, 1998

I moved to East Lansing in the late fall of 1998 to go to graduate school at Michigan State University. One of the reasons I chose Michigan State was because my former company, Invest Learning, had an office in East Lansing and I had spent a lot of time there in the previous couple of years, working on video productions and products with our development team. I knew the town pretty well (not hard to do really, considering its size) and thought it would be a comfortable spot to spend a couple of years getting my MBA. I even imagined that I might do some part time work back at the old company. Well, that didn’t really happen, although at this point I still thought it might.

My friend and former boss KK planned one of her regular work trips around this Depeche Mode concert so that we could go together up to Auburn Hills to see it. We drove up in the evening, as I remember the fall weather was still pretty decent in Michigan though it got dark pretty quickly, and we sped up in the rental car over to see the show.

The Palace is a gigantic basketball arena where the Pistons play – this is probably the largest indoor concert venue I have ever visited. I think at this point I was still adjusting to Michiganders – it may be the same country, but I still felt the Midwest was a different universe – but something about seeing a Depeche Mode concert, something so familiar from my youth, made me feel at home for some reason. Depeche fans are the same everywhere, wearing tattered black concert t-shirts and dark eyeliner.

For the most part I remember this being a very sedate concert. We had seats up on one of the upper tiers and it felt as if we were watching the whole thing on film. Everyone around us were in their 30s or 40s and they sat quietly through most of the show. KK and I were quiet for a while but eventually we got up and started dancing, which even seemed to stir some of the older crowd around us, who were up and dancing by the encore anyway.

I thought this might be the first of many trips that KK made out to Lansing, but probably just a few months later the company was acquired and the San Diego part of the office was closed. I had picked a really good time to leave as it turns out – so much so that a lot of people asked me later if I had known it was coming. The folks in the East Lansing office stuck around for a little while, but I think by now most of them have scattered into other firms and opportunities. And my life started to move on a bit from my old one in San Diego.