You meet a lot of music fans as a professional concert photographer, but over the past couple years, one has stood out to me the most. When culling through my photos from events across the state, I kept seeing the same guy, always up front by the barricade. Show after show, photoset after photoset, there he’d be. Finally, at a concert not too long ago, we met and got to chatting.
Waterloo resident Jim Reiners is, to put it lightly, quite an avid concertgoer. Reiners credits his parents for introducing him to live music, bringing him to see “Rama Lama Ding Dong” singers Sha Na Na back in 1979. But he states his true “first concert” was the Eagles back in 1980.
Fast-forward about 45 years and Reiners attends, on average, between 50 to 60 concerts per year. Last year was particularly prolific; he claimed to have caught a whopping 96 shows…