It was The Credibility Gap. Link goes to cartoon version since the original was from a radio show circa 1970 later put out as an album track. The troupe was Harry Shearer, Richard Beebe, David L. Lander and Michael McKean, obviously the genesis of Spinal Tap.
This summer Squeeze and the B-52s toured together. All the local promotion was for the B-52s. If you weren’t paying close attention you wouldn’t know that Squeeze was on the tour. But I checked the Internet first and found out that they were alternating leads. Sure enough, the day I saw them the B-52s came out first and the venue was still half empty. I’ll bet there were huge numbers of highly pissed people who showed up late to miss the opening act and got screwed.
Neither one exactly a legend, but back in the days when I was going to about any concert that came around, I saw the Greg Kihn Band open for Rick Springfield. I would have thought Springfield would have opened, but it was Kihn. Most people left after Kihn finished, leaving lots of empty seats with the majority of the remaining audience teen girls and old ladies.
I saw that show in Saratoga Springs and as everyone expected Squeeze went on first to a half- filled venue. I didn’t know they were taking turns. A lot of weirdos in beehive dos who showed up halfway though Sqeeze’s set don’t know how lucky they were to see the show on that particular date.
Cute, but a direct ripoff of the Credibility Gap. And they acknowledged the homage. Their skit ends, “Write? If I could write, I wouldn’t have to steal this bit!”
If you think that’s strange, consider this: on their previous tour of the US, The Who opened for Herman’s Hermits. Seriously.
No cite for this rock and roll anecdote either, but IIRC Pete Townshend has said that seeing girls in the audience going crazy for Jim Morrison on that tour is what gave him the inspiration for the song “Sally Simpson”.
Elvis was, and still is, a significantly larger draw than Lewis. By a massive, massive margin. Lewis was later supposedly arrested trying to break into Graceland. He was blessed to be able to open for Evis.
I went to a concert where ZZ Top opened for Aerosmith. I was fine with that ordering, as in my mind ZZ Top was even more of a has-been band than Aerosmith was at the time (this was only like 2 years ago I think, 3 tops). But yeah, there were probably a fair amount of people who came primarily to see ZZ Top and may have even left when Aerosmith came on because they are more of a manufactured pop-rock band than ZZ Top ever was.
Aerosmith, manufactured? I don’t get that at all. These guys have been together since 1970 and have gone from fame and fortune to drug addiction and despair and break up, and back to fame and fortune again.
