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January 16, 2026
Okay, the other night I was watching a CNN special about music in the 1980s and saw a segment on the Rolling Stones' 1981 Tattoo You tour.
All of a sudden I flashed back to that fall when my brother Mike and I hatched a get-rich-quick scheme: buy a bunch of tickets to the Stones' shows at the Capital Centre in Landover, MD, and scalp them for massive profit.
I was still living in the basement at my parents' house, and Mike had just closed on his first new home - and we were both feeling ambitious.
Back in 1981 you couldn't buy tickets online; you had to show up in person at the venue box office.
For this particular show, the ticket office opened five days before the performance.
Since the ticket window didn't open until 9 a.m., we decided to get there at 4 a.m. to make sure we were at the front of the line.
We scraped together every dollar we could, hit one of the few newly introduced ATMs ($200 daily limit), and drove the 37 miles to the Cap Centre parking lot, ready to clean them out.
There were a few people already there when we arrived but we were close to the front of the line.
We waited in the cold for five hours.
When the ticket window opened we tried to buy 50 tickets each.
That's when they informed us that you could only buy a max of 8 tickets each.
Okay, so we wouldn't get as rich as we had originally planned, but we would still make a bundle, right?
The next morning we took out classified ads offering to sell them at an inflated price that we thought would make us rich,
and...
The phone never rang.
So, in the end, we ended up "scalping" them to friends at face value just to get our money back.
Great plan.
Wrong decade.
