The first one I saw without my parents was Def Leppard with Tesla.
Pretty damned cool. I love it when the opening band upstages the headliner.
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all,
but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
– Demosthenes
I was like 13 or 14. I won two tickets to see Alice Cooper with The Rockets. Coop was at a low-point in his career (this was like the very early 1980s, before he had a temporary resurgence with the song “Poison”), and he was actually playing outdoors at a drive-in movie theater in the tiny town of Alpena, Mich.
I took one of my brothers. My Mom drove us (about a 1:15 drive) and waited in the parking lot in the car until it was over. She could be pretty cool sometimes.
Anyway, it was good. Alice is one of those acts that you don’t fully realize how many songs he does that you like until you go to a concert and hear them all back-to-back.
“We are here for this – to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to withstand the blows and to hand them out.” Primo Levi
Linda Ronstandt, Eddie Money, and Orleans in the late 70s, I think it was Angels Camp, California. Don’t remember much about it except smoking too much dope and laughing a lot.
I can’t summon any details of various symphony visits in my youth, but my first pop concert was the Beach Boys on their Sloop John B. tour at the Houston Music Hall (c. 1965). Openers were Neal Ford and the Fanatics.
The Beach Boys had less equipment on stage than my own garage band had just a few years later. I went with my older sister and some of her friends who, as did the rest of the mostly female audience, just screamed through the whole thing.
Chicago, in the late '70s. The only song I remember is ‘Colour My World’ sigh.
That, and getting really lost going home, ending up about halfway to Corpus Christi (for those who don’t know, I live in San Antonio) before turning around, was 3 hours late getting home, and watching my Mom blow a gasket from worry.
You sing in my consciousness like a counterpoint to my life.
L.L.
Oh dear. Robert Palmer, just after his Power Station days, with a band called Bourgeois Tagg opening. At the Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, NY, when I was 14. Think I’ve still got the obligatory t-shirt from that one somewhere…
Gamera is really neat, he is full of turtle meat, we’ve been eating Gam-er-aaaa…