From my own personal standpoint, it was a small college gym that AFAIK has never hosted a rock concert before or since, and it was Cheap Trick a couple years after they hit their prime. The only thing I remember about it is that the acoustics were nonexistent.
There’s been a long-standing story from the Iowa City area about how Led Zeppelin performed at the Wheelhouse, a room in the student union that is basically a cafeteria with a stage, after they released their first album. I too was skeptical, but my brother, who lived in Kansas City for quite a while (although not at this time either; I was 5 and he was 2 years old in 1969) said that in KC, they performed at a 2,000 seat theater that was less than half full, and they were booed offstage.
“Dive” is a new play set in a Chicago dive bar. And not in a storefront theater flipped to mimic a bar, but it’s actually staged in Fritzy’s Tavern in Edgewater.
If you live in Chicago and are interested it ends August 1 (I think).
Greg Kihn on the steps of the gym at UC San Diego in the fall of '79. ISTR seeing the Greg Kihn Band three different times over the next couple of years, all for free. The last time was after they’d had their first hit, The Breakup Song, so 1981-ish.
I saw (actually only heard) Fugazi play at the Gamesa Food Products warehouse in Dallas. There were something like 6000 folks in it, and apparently the fire marshal said that was too many. So they had to wait for everyone to file out of the building, then they opened all of the bay doors and Fugazi played. Folks were diving off of Fugazi’s rented Ryder truck in the parking lot.
The Berkeley Community Theater in Berkeley, California is a 3,500 seat auditorium. But it is also attached to Berkeley High School so it is also a public high school auditorium (though an extremely nice one - maybe the nicest one there is in the United States?). I saw The Smashing Pumpkins play there in the year 2000 (not quite at the height of their fame and powers but still a major major act).
Nirvana played some gigs at my college in the late-'80s, including at least once in the dorms. I was attending, and living in the dorms at the time, but don’t think I ever saw them.
I guess the strangest I did see was folk singer John Wesley Harding in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I like his music, and the concert was listed on his website, so I went. Didn’t realize until I got there that it was in the front room of a sorority house. They’d moved the furniture and everyone just sat on the floor. Ellis Paul was the opening act, and he’s gone on to some success in folk circles.
Back in the 90s, .38 Special played at a high school in a smallish town outside of Raleigh. My wife, my best friend, and I got tickets somewhere. We ranged in age from 35 to 42 and I do believe we were the oldest people there. The band played in the (rather old) gym and the bleachers were the seats. Festival seating. We got some awkward vibes from all the HS students there, almost like this was some kind of HS event and we crashed it. In fact, I was a little afraid that my buddy was going to get irritated to the point that the news would be reporting, “Local 35 year old man puts 16 year old boy in hospital.”
.38 Special was past their prime at this point, but it was a good show and the sound was not bad at all.
BTW, I’ve been a fan of Cheap Trick since I lived in Chicago when they got off the ground. They would play ANYWHERE…and they pretty much continued to do this for more than four decades.
About ten years ago, I saw Yo La Tengo in the Kulturkirche Nippes, Cologne, Germany. It’s an intact Lutheran church that doubles as concert venue. For the concert, the pews had been removed and it was a standing concert. They even had a bar that sold beer. It was an acoustic show, and at one point there was a trumpet solo. The trumpeter played it from the pulpit.
In NYC you can sometimes see fairly well known acts performing in small venues. I’ve seen Dick Dale a few times in places like that, and he was loud enough to make your ears bleed.
I’ve also had the experience of seeing Junior Brown (who I consider a big act) in a big 10,000 seat theater, and then once at a Native American casino in a room that couldn’t have held more than 200 people.
The Toledo Zoo has an amphitheater. I saw The Tragically Hip play there. Just before they started playing, Gord Downie yelled out “WE’RE GOING TO WAKE UP SOME ANIMALS TONIGHT!”.
I saw Dick Dale about a half dozen times and always in small clubs with one exception. He played a concert in the quad of the junior college I attended and the sound just didn’t sound right at all.
On the other hand, my parents met at the Rendezvous Ballroom where Dick Dale rose to fame. The dance floor there was 12,000 square feet and had a capacity of nearly 4,000.
Bruce Springsteen performed in the gym at our small college in the fall of 1975 at the peak of his initial breakout, shortly after Born To Run was released and he had made the covers of Time and Newsweek.
It was a tour date arranged much earlier or we never would have gotten to see him and the band.
I saw The Tragically Hip’s legendary Fort Henry concert. They were a huge act at the time.
Yes, literally a fort. It’s a big 19th century fortress sitting atop a hill in Kingston, Ontario, built during the War of 1812, and it did see combat, though the current structure is almost entiurely post-war upgrades. (Locally it’s often called “Old Fort Henry,” but there isn’t a new Fort Henry.) It has been a national park and tourist destination since long before I was born.
So in summer 1991 the Hip played a concert there, along with another huge Canadian band, Blue Rodeo, all MC’d by Dan Ackroyd. The Hip were fast becoming Canada’s national band at the time. It was the weirdest venue, with the stage built right on the parade square.
It was, I’m gonna tell you straight up, the best concert I’ve ever been to; both the Hip and Blue Rodeo were absolutely at the top of their game.