Ticket master For avid concert-goer Stan Bedernjak, digital passes can’t compare to old-school admission stubs as tangible mementoes By: David Sanderson Posted: 2:45 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 21, 2025 Last Modified: 3:56 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 21, 2025 Updates

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This article was published 21/03/2025 (207 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first thing Stan Bedernjak did last November after entering Canada Life Centre to attend a concert by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band was make a beeline to the box office.

Bedernjak wasn’t having difficulty accessing his ticket on his smartphone — far from it. Rather, he was there to secure a printed version, indicating the date along with the assigned seat and section number, for the show he was about to take in.

“I’m not sure I should be telling you this because next time there might be a line in front of me, but if you go to a venue and show them the barcode on your phone, they’ll produce a ticket for you, just like that,” Bedernjak says, holding out the ducat-in-question.

Now, one might wonder what possible use a person has for a physical slip of paper in a day and age when mobile, or ticketless, entry to concerts and sporting events has become the norm.

It’s just that for over 50 years, Bedernjak, a musician in his own right who has played with Woodwork, Strawdog and the Kenny Shields Band, has held onto the ticket or ticket stub from every single show, large or small, he has attended, a collection of ephemera now numbering well into the hundreds.

“I admit the Springsteen ticket isn’t anything to look at, not like my older tickets that are more colourful,” he continues, seated in a Main Street coffee shop where he has almost completely covered a table for four with tickets and stubs from shows spanning decades, including Alice Cooper (July 2, 1975), the Police (Aug. 27, 1983) and Nickelback (Feb. 4, 2004).

“Still, it’s a reminder that I was there. Plus, when they’re charging these outrageous prices for a ticket nowadays, the least they can do is give you some kind of memento.”

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For Bedernjak, 65, every ticket tells a story. Who he went with. How he got there. Who the opening act was and what song the headliner kicked things off with.

It was Sept. 1, 1973, a Saturday, he recalls, and he was hanging out in the jeans department of the downtown Eaton’s store, where a disc jockey from popular AM station CFRW was doing a live broadcast. Bedernjak’s dream back then was to be in radio, and for a couple of hours he peppered the broadcaster with questions about how to get into the biz.

At the end of the jock’s shift, he asked Bedernjak if he was a fan of American rock band Three Dog Night, who between 1969 and 1972 had 13 singles in a row reach the Top 10 on the Canadian charts.

“Of course, who isn’t?” Bedernjak shot back. At that point the DJ reached into his pocket and produced a free ticket to that evening’s sold-out Three Dog Night concert at the Winnipeg Arena.

“He asked if I wanted it and I took the ticket without knowing if it would be OK with my parents or not, since I’d have to take two buses from the North End to get there,” Bedernjak says, noting he would have been 14 years old at the time and had never been to a live show before.

“Thankfully they said yes and I ended up having the time of my life. It was loud, people were screaming and to me, it was like seeing the Beatles.”

For months, Bedernjak stored the ticket stub from that event in his wallet, to show off to classmates.

But after returning home from his second concert — a March 26, 1974 date featuring British blues outfit Savoy Brown backed by New Yorkers Blue Öyster Cult — for safe keeping he slipped both stubs underneath a glass tabletop his father had crafted for his bedroom study desk.

“I ended up doing that for years. That way I could stare at my stubs and daydream about shows I’d seen, when I was supposed to be doing my homework,” he cracks.

On May 29, 1976, British guitar legend Jeff Beck was scheduled to perform at the Winnipeg Convention Centre. Bedernjak, still in high school, had become aware that musicians passing through the city usually stayed at the Holiday Inn on St. Mary Avenue (now the Delta Hotel), and that they often registered under their own names.

Bedernjak had a ticket to see Beck and on the afternoon of the show, figuring he didn’t have anything to lose, he approached the front-desk clerk at the Holiday Inn, to ask what room “Mr. Beck” was residing in.

Moments later, he was knocking on the door he’d been directed to, where he was ultimately greeted by the future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee.

“I remember he was hard of hearing, and kept saying ‘sorry?’ as I explained what I was doing there,” Bedernjak says with a laugh.

“I asked for an autograph except the only piece of paper I had was my ticket. He signed the back of it, I said thanks, then I went to grab a bite before the concert.”

Problem was, when Bedernjak presented the ticket to an attendant at the convention centre a few hours later, stressing that it couldn’t be ripped in half owing to the signature on the back, the worker scoffed at his request.

“It was either a case of he didn’t believe me or didn’t give a s—-,” he recalls

“In the end, I had to get the head of security to OK it, which is the reason I still have what I call my crème de la crème ticket, to this day,” he says, flipping over the Beck ticket to prove his yarn.

Pete Howard is the proprietor of Poster Central, an online store specializing in music memorabilia, including concert tickets from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Reached at home in San Luis Obispo, Calif., Howard says while fully intact, unused specimens are preferred by hobbyists, stubs can definitely be a ticket to riches, as well.

“Generally the bigger the name the better, in terms of value,” Howard says, pointing out it is best if a performer’s name appears in full on the stub portion of a ticket.

“If it’s a Rolling Stones stub, for example, and ‘-ing Stones’ is all that shows, that’s not bad. But many times the name doesn’t show at all and collectors only know it’s a stub of their hero because of the person they got it from and/or day-to-day databases that exist.”

Howard cites Elvis Presley concert stubs from the 1950s as the most valuable he’s encountered, with some commanding as much as US$2,000, depending on the condition.

“The Beatles are right behind, but both markets are slowing down as those artists’ true fans age out,” he says.

For his part, Bedernjak, who regularly posts anecdotes tied to his stubs on social media, can’t fathom the notion of possessing a ticket or stub from a show he didn’t experience in the flesh.

Nor has he done an ounce of investigative work to see if anything he’s kept — be it a Rush stub from October 1978 or one from a Mötörhead show in May 1981 — is worth more than the paper it’s printed on.

“I do collect certain things like record albums and rock magazines, but I don’t consider my tickets to be a collection,” he says, fingering a pair of Van Halen stubs, one from 1979 (“life-changing,” he calls that show) and the other from 1984.

“To me it’s my personal stuff. This is my life, right here.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca