On one hot June day in 1985, a 17-year-old Brian Halligan walked out to a Cape Cod road, scrawled “Saratoga Springs” on a piece of wood, and stuck out his thumb.
He and Eric Olson, a fellow high-school student and his partner in a painting company, had decided to follow a certain band on tour. Their car, a battered Subaru Brat with a broken starter, wasn’t exactly road-trip-proof. So they thumbed rides from the eastern tip of Massachusetts to the Adirondack foothills, camped for a couple of nights near the venue, took in the tunes, and then hitchhiked home.
