Loudest gig for me: Jeff Beck, Who Else! tour 1999. Third row right in front of Jennifer Batten. Earplugs helped a little I but still felt pummeled by the sound pressure.
Honorable (?) mention: Uriah Heep at Winterland, specifically the theremin from “Sweet Lorraine”. A tinnitus-triggering event if there ever was one.
None of the Who shows I’ve been to were particularly loud, but I’ve only seen the post-Entwistle, post-Townshend-going-deaf version of the band. These days, there’s a lot more science that goes into sound engineering and acoustics so that everyone in the arena/stadium can hear clearly - back in the '60s and '70s, they just had to use raw volume.
Fun fact; Bobby Pridden, the Who’s longtime sound engineer, is credited with inventing the first onstage monitors so that the members of the group could actually hear their own playing and singing over all that volume. One of the times I saw them live, Pete asked the crowd to give Pridden a round of applause and quipped “He just turned 71 and he’s been touring with us since he was 5”.
St. Louis, 1969. I was in the 6th row. I thought my glasses were going to vibrate off my face. My ears rang for about two hours after it was over.
The opening act was Joe Cocker. This was just a month before Woodstock, and no one in the Midwest had ever actually seen him perform.
But that night, I heard a band that for me redefined the word “rock and roll”. I remember being knocked out by their… their exuberance, their raw power - and their punctuality.
-Marty DiBergi
How is none?
I remember paying about $40 in 1991 for the first Lollapalooza tour and that was for 8-9 bands doing essentially full sets. It was more the second year, but not much. It seems to me that concert tickets were pretty reasonable until the Eagles revival where they were charging over $100. Then all the big classic bands matched.
Loudest concert for me was Goblin in Cincinnati (Dario Argento’s house band). Apparently, it was supposed to be Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin, but they had some falling out with the venue so they booked the other Goblin that actually had more original members in it.
Best, cleanest sound had to be the Grateful Dead. Outdoors by a lake and it sounded like they were playing in your living room.
My The Who experience was a month after John died. I was so glad they decided to complete the tour, since the usual reason for those tours was “John needed the money.”//Old Groucho voice.
Robert Plant opened, so my closest to seeing Zep.
Counting Crows opened when I saw them at the Hollywood Bowl on that tour. Odd choice IMO, but I became a Counting Crows fan after that when I hadn’t even heard any of their music before.
Not as odd as when George Carlin had a folk singer open for him, or when Taylor Swift’s opening act was a Christian rock band, or when the Doobie Brothers opened for Journey, or Steel Panther (a hair metal parody act that started out as a Van Halen tribute) opening for Judas Priest.
I’m guessing that wasn’t the infamous 1973 Newcastle gig. 
Loudest gig for me was my first concert, KISS is Seattle, 1976. The Pixies were pretty loud, possibly louder, but by then I knew to bring ear protection.
I might as well be the one to mention it. You skipped the most infamous ever. Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees,
I was listing odd opening acts that I’ve seen live. I wasn’t alive yet for Hendrix.
Of course, if we’re talking historical odd pairings, the Who opening for Herman’s Hermits has to be an all-timer. Likewise Elton John opening for the Who on their post-Woodstock tour.
Gotcha. The names seemed like pretty disparate time periods rather than personal experience.
I have eclectic tastes- I like to think I’m the only person to have been ten feet from the stage for both Taylor Swift and Motorhead.
Another odd pairing I saw was when Jake ‘the Snake’ Roberts do a spoken word show at a small venue in Seattle, and his opening acts were a circus sideshow troupe and a pair of local rappers - one a juggalo called “Rondle McFondle” and the other a 500-pound nerdcore guy named “Billy the Fridge”, who introduced themselves as the self-proclaimed tag team champions of the Seattle indie hip-hop scene.
That was a weird show.
Yeah, I saw that combo here in MA. It didn’t particularly work for me, and the audience seemed restless.
The good news is that that was the only concert I can recall where you could buy CDs of the performance by filling out some sort of form, and so I still have those and can listen to them occasionally.
I saw David Bowie with Polyphonic Spree opening. The pairing was odd, but the Polyphonic Spree wouldn’t really match up with anyone - they are not my cup of tea.
I was at a mini-festival in 1997 in the Westfalenhalle Dortmund with a line-up of Apollo 440, Rage Against The Machine, Prodigy and Bowie as headliner. Very odd also, but Bowie was in his short techno phase so Apollo 440 and Prodigy made a bit of sense. But hey, it was a great show. Though I was so exhausted by dancing to RATM and Prodigy that I don’t remember much from Bowie’s set.
There were lots of odd pairings in the 60s and 70s. The most interesting stylistic mismatches I recall seeing were a couple of shows with Lark’s Tongues-era King Crimson opening for Steve Miller and Ten Years After.
The Beatles once opened for the Kinks. It was some sort of multi-band event, and the Kinks arrived late. They walked into the opening notes of Ticket to Ride.
I can just see fans of the latter two scattering for the exits by, oh, minute six of LTA pt. 1.
All Chris.
Ask Bill.
For odd pairings: Michelle Shocked briefly toured with Millions of Dead Cops - they were (strongly) politically aligned, though, so, made sense, despite completely different musical places they were coming from.
Saw Kenny Jones and Co. at the Incredibly Beautiful Kingdome in ‘82, backed up by The Clash and a quite-booed T Bone Burnett. Horrible mushroom experience.
Townshend: "Noice l’il fishbowl playin’ in 'ere".
intestinally destructive loud: Merzbow, Sunn O, Boredoms
I saw Jake “The Snake” Roberts do a spoken-word show in Lethbridge, Alberta, some years ago. His warm up act was a run-of-the-mill standup comic.
But here’s the best part: when Jake and the comic found out that I was the ring announcer for the local pro wrestling promotion, they insisted that I be the one to introduce Jake. And I did, just as if he was entering our ring. “Weighing in at 262 pounds and coming to us from Stone Mountain, Georgia, he’s Jake ‘the Snake’ Rawwwwberrrts!”
Note that I don’t actually know Jake’s weight; I just guessed. But that’s in the best tradition of pro wrestling, amiright?
The Dead were doing something like that when I saw them in 2016 - you could pay that night for a CD of that show to be mailed to you in a few weeks. I haven’t listened to the entire thing all the way through, but now and then I’ll play the awesome rendition of “Casey Jones” that John Mayer did to end the show.