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Today 36 years ago I went to my first rock concert. What was yours?


Disturber

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Kiss and Uriah Heep at the Lakeland Civic Center on December 12th, 1976.  Ace was electrocuted.  Every Kiss fan knows the story behind the song "Shock Me" on Ace's solo album.  They started Detroit Rock City and Ace tumbled down the last six or seven stairs.  The lights came back up and we waited about fifteen minutes.  They started over with Ace sporting a head bandage for the first three or four songs.  Then, he ripped it off and played the remainder of the show.

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21 minutes ago, princeofdarkness56 said:

I would love to have seen Glenn Miller. 

I saw The Buddy Rich Orchestra at the Peabody in Daytona Beach in the eighties.  Our drummer was into him big time.  Best drummer I ever saw.  Ever. 

And I've seen Peart, Phillips, Powell, Paice, Aldridge and many other great rock drummers.  Buddy would smoke 'em all.  Such fast hands.  So little wasted movement.

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18 minutes ago, The Shark said:

I saw The Buddy Rich Orchestra at the Peabody in Daytona Beach in the eighties.  Our drummer was into him big time.  Best drummer I ever saw.  Ever. 

And I've seen Peart, Phillips, Powell, Paice, Aldridge and many other great rock drummers.  Buddy would smoke 'em all.  Such fast hands.  So little wasted movement.

Peart?  Phillips? Powell? Paice? Aldridge?
Children!

"I gotta go up there and be embarrassed by you motherfuckers? I played with the greatest fuckin’ musicians in the world. How DARE you play like that for me.
How dare you call yourselves professional! Assholes!! You got nowhere to fuckin’ go the next set ’cause if I hear one fuckin’ clam from anybody, you’ve had it. One clam and this whole fuckin’ band is through TONIGHT. Try me!
You try one fuck-up the next set and when you get back to New York you’ll need another fuckin’ job. COUNT ON IT! Now get outta my fuckin’ bus!"

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29 minutes ago, The Shark said:

I saw The Buddy Rich Orchestra at the Peabody in Daytona Beach in the eighties.  Our drummer was into him big time.  Best drummer I ever saw.  Ever. 

And I've seen Peart, Phillips, Powell, Paice, Aldridge and many other great rock drummers.  Buddy would smoke 'em all.  Such fast hands.  So little wasted movement.

I played drums 6th through 8th grade.  Buddy Rich and Louie Bellson were talked about when I saw them on TV, I was amazed by both of them.  Phenomenal.  

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18 minutes ago, Ed Rechts said:

You and I are probably the only people who can recite that by heart. That is only one of his classic rants, too. His tirade about white t-shirts is forever epic.

I can't claim to know much of it by heart, but I've listened to those tapes a dozen times and they're always entertaining. 

The man spoke (and yelled) the way he drummed: with authority, control and with perfect timing.  

Seinfeld is a big fan of "the tapes" as well, quoting Rich in the "Opposite George" episode (the movie theater scene - "Try me! 'cause I would LOVE IT!"), and the episode where Banya keeps following Jerry ("Lets see how well he does without any assistance.")

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I remember the date,  July 28th 1981, Orpheum Theatre Boston,  somehow scored front row balcony

seats... and it was an old style theatre, so the balcony was very close to the stage (maybe the equiv

of 15-20 rows).  Iron Maiden (Killers tour) and Judas Priest (point of entry)  my face is still ripped off. 

If that wasn't metal enough,  my mom dropped us off and picked us up.  

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2 hours ago, scottcald said:

At least no one's waxing nostalgic about seeing Glenn Miller or Guy Lombardo as their first show.  😀

Well, I remember the premiere of Ludwig's 9th...  great stuff, but he was not at top form himself - lunging around, arms flailing, still going on after the music stopped... probably a hard night on the tour bus getting to Vienna...

Then a number of years before that, I was there whnr Grok and Urk performed their latest release "Adagio for Rock and Femur" at Red Rocks in Colorado (of course back then it was called Red Boulders).

 

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4 hours ago, scottcald said:

At least no one's waxing nostalgic about seeing Glenn Miller or Guy Lombardo as their first show.  😀

Well... back in junior high around 1977 the Harmonica Rascals played a ticketed show in the gymnasium one evening.  That was my first "concert." 

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8 hours ago, scottcald said:

At least no one's waxing nostalgic about seeing Glenn Miller or Guy Lombardo as their first show.  😀

Having known some "back in the day" big band enthusiasts, they were more into Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson...Miller and Lombardo, not so much. Even Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk led big bands from time to time. 

Thanks to Disneyland's frequent and fabulous jazz nights in the '70s, I saw Buddy Rich & band four times there between 1972 and 1976, Don Ellis twice, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton, Ramsey Lewis, Quincy Jones, Sarah Vaughan, and--at a couple of jazz clubs in Redondo and Hermosa Beaches--Mose Allison, Louie Bellson and band, and the L.A. Four (Shelly Manne, Ray Brown, Bud Shank, and Laurina Almeida).

As for Buddy Rich:

 

 

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Kiss - Filming of Kiss meets the phantom.

My brother won tickets on the radio, tickets to magic kindom during the day and then the concert that evening.

Second was Journey (Evolution tour) and Thin Lizzy (Think it may have been Black Rose)

 

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Man, who can recall that many years ago? Probably the Animals in the early mid-60s. I think the tickets were $3.....Within a few short years thereafter, there were a bunch of others, including Blind Faith and Iron Butterfly and one of John Mayall's groups of all stars.  Pickings were sometimes a bit slim when not in a major market area. I missed the initial Zeppelin tour, but did get a chance to play the same guitar Jimmy Page borrowed from a local store (ES-335) to use on stage when they played in Portland. (They may have actually been booked as the "New Yardbirds"). Shoulda bought the damn thing, but did not have the $250 (!!!) asking price.....

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15 hours ago, scottcald said:

At least no one's waxing nostalgic about seeing Glenn Miller or Guy Lombardo as their first show.  😀

When I was a little kid my parents took me to see Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Al Hirt and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass (not all at the same time)

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1981 - 16 years old - Loverboy opened for Ted Nugent. Man it was in a hockey stadium in the winter, we had our winter duds on and sweated it out. The dope smoke was thick, the music loud, and I loved it. Still have the M size t-shirt. Loverboy was just getting real airplay at the time and Ted was in full Wango Tango mode. A hot girl asked if she could hop on my shoulders, it was a good night for a young buck.

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Late to the party, however, my first that I remember was the Rockpop in Concert for German TV. Great bands. Gary Moore had a classic linup with Paice, Murray and Eyre. Loverboy and Tom Petty were a great discovery for me then. AFOS  had been a great to me at the time. The others known but no favorites.

One guy recorded the airing of the time and listing it all up.

https://concertarchiv.net/Rockpop-1982-4.htm

ETA: Went there again a year later with another great line up.

https://concertarchiv.net/Rockpop-1983-2.htm

The fun part was that we, a friend from school and I, went there on one little motorbike crossing half the country. It took us almost all day to go there for the speed of the bike. Had been sleeped at my aunt and went back on the Sunday. For some reason the bike became slower and slower on the trip. Turned out later that the combustion tube had been slicked from the burned oil of the 2-tackter engine. Had to park the bike with my friends house and took the train for the last kilometers back to boarding school. Great memories. Love this threads.

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Okay, do 'caravan tours' count? In that case, back me up a couple of years from the '68 Cream concert  to '66, which was when I attended my first concert with multiple acts performing at the state coliseum in Montgomery. Those shows were known as "Big Bam shows" on accounta they were sponsored by WBAM radio. The same family that owned the Big Bam also owned WAPE in Jacksonville (the Big Ape), and WVOK in Birmingham (The Mighty 690) and such tours hit all three locales. They were bi-annual but I caught only two in the years they were presented (ca. '65-'70 IIRC). 

Artists I heard at those two shows included Sandy Posey, the Animals, the Blues Magoos, Jerry Lee Lewis, Herman's Hermits, the Buckinghams, the Cyrkle, Lou Christie, the Royal Guardsmen, and some others (probably less famous) that I can't recall.

I thunk the Blues Magoos were noteworthy on accounta Mike Esposito played his Esquire down around his kneecaps. "New York psychedelia" seems to have been a pretentious term, but they killed on a cover of "Tobacco Road" (sounded better live than the album version).

And following the Kiss makeup removal revelation in the early '80s, I wrote that the band was "...uglier than the Blues Magoos! Uglier than Richard Hell & the Voidoids!"

 

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Man, you people are geezers. Did y'all get there on horseback???

tenor.gif

 

 

Feb 27 1985...at age 12.

KISS with Queensryche  opening. My older sister had to take me. Pretty sure my parents waited in the parking lot ready to rush in, haha. In the chaos after the show, some dude was trying to sell bootleg KISS Army jackets and I was trying to look at them, along with a sizable mob. After a couple minutes of trying to see what the dude had, my sister told me to forget it. As we walked to the meet up with the parents, she handed me a rolled up bootleg jacket that she had "liberated". 

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