Best CONCERT ever seen.

Frank Zappa, Stanley Theatre, Pittsburgh PA
November 13, 1980.

RIP Frank, you are missed for your music, your wit and your defense of our 1st amendment rights.
 
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The Beat Farmers. Cow punk. Sometime in the late, hazy 80s. Old 9:30 Club DC. Country Dick Montana had them turn down the club lights and sat down with the crowd, passing around a bottle of tequila.

Grateful Dead. June 14, 1991. I went with a beautiful, Italian brunette w/ purple-tinged sunglasses. She's now my wife.

Blasters at Grad Happy Hour @ UVa.

Black Crowes touring SH&MC. DAR. Smuggled bourbon in and our gal pals yelled "Paint it Black, you Devil!"

The La's. WHFS Festival. @grillebilly was there. I was more messed up than the lead singer for the La's. Somehow managed to cook lobsters on a grill.

Honorable mention to the Soup Dragons in 1990 at the 9:30. Sweaty.
 
Manhattan (Hell`s Kitchen), and Staten Island...
Dated a tough Irish girl from HK, tougher than most guys I knew. Also lived on Grymes Hill near Wagner. HK is no longer sadly. Now it is expensive hi-rise condo instead of low rise tenements. Used to be everything from 8th and west was for working class people. I have been in So Cal for over 30 years but am still a NYer at heart.

Guess I should stop diverting this thread....... It was great though growing up in NYC when it comes to seeing live music. Everyone played there.

It was the Schaefer not Miller beer at the Rink. Not sure Schaefer beer exists any more? They used to hand out this schedule that looked like the fold out baseball schedules the banks gave away (Manufactures Bank sold mets tickets). Around the end of the school year we would see the schedule for the whole summer.
 
Very first concert was Steppenwolf at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Mountain opened. Had to be '70 or so. Little Feat at Lisner Auditorium, The Airplane at William and Mary Hall, The Who at the B-more Civic Center, Quadrophenia tour. Santana at the Greek. Led Zep at the Forum. Eggles, Hell Freezes Over...

Funny, I never saw the Dead in concert.
 
Dated a tough Irish girl from HK, tougher than most guys I knew. Also lived on Grymes Hill near Wagner.

It was the Schaefer not Miller beer at the Rink. Not sure Schaefer beer exists any more?

So….you dated Kaitlyn O`Rourke TOO, eh ? :)
Grymes Hill was the Westchester County of Staten Island....(did you know any of the Penino brothers, they lived right by LaTourette Golf Course ?)

The last Schaefer gig I attended was Al Kooper and The Blues Project reunion, great show, seems like another lifetime ago....
 
Growing up in seventies i got to see a lot of good concerts. But the one that stands out to me was 1978 at the superdome in New orleans with Van Halen, Dobbie Brothers and Rolling Stones. To me the Dobbie's out performed them all. Van Halen sounded terrible and I was probably was not in condition to appreciate the stones by the time they took the stage. What stands out about the trip was getting left in N O's by my buddy. I had hooked up with a girl and went home with her after the concert. When she dropped me off at my hotel the next morning she asked if she should wait on me and said no that there was no way my buddy would leave me. Well when I got up to the room maids were already cleaning it. I was still believing he had just gone to breakfast or something. Well an hour later I finally decided he was gone. Long story short we lived in Alabama 6 hours away. I didn't have a penny to my name. I had to borrow a dime just to make a collect call to my uncle (parents were out of the country) he paid for plain ticket but I still had to get to airport 30 minutes outside N O's. All I had was a gas CC but cabbie took me for a tank of gas. I was sitting on my friends door step when he got home. One hell of a fight. LOL, still my best friends to this day.
 
My first major concert was in 1963 my mom took me to see Pete Seeger at Town Hall in NYC. I had to get all dressed up.

My first R&R show was 2/13/1970 at MSG Sly headlined and Fleetwood Mac opened with Grand Funk stuck in the middle. Richard Pryor came out between acts to tell jokes. I was too young to appreciate how amazing of a show this was.
 
Sometimes a concert will stand out because of something that happened during the show...some have posted about this.

1975 MSG Black Sabbath debut with Aerosmith opening act. I remember people before the show and in between acts throwing multiple M80s and Block Busters from the blue section which exploded in the air. It was a VERY rowdy crowd I had never seen so much black leather and tattoo's in my life!

We were seated in the orange seats just off center. Sabbath takes the stage and you could feel the energy in the building rising. A couple or songs in, Mid song, I see something in the air on a line drive headed towards the stage. Its a beer can and I can tell it's full by how fast it was going end over end. It hits Tony Iommi dead center in his forehead!! The band stops playing. Tony is still on his feet, they all rush to see if he is OK and surround him. The Garden goes silent then a buzz of people talking. Tony pushes the band members away and you can see the blood...he goes into a solo with the blood flowing down his face. A few minutes later he stops and gets walked offstage. Ozzy is livid and storms back to his Mic. screaming cursing the crowd out like nothing i had ever had heard before. Then leaves the stage.

The crowd was tense and we thought a riot was going to start any second. After about 25 minutes the band comes back to the stage and resumes the concert.

I remember thinking Thank God! The crowd then settled in and enjoyed the rest of the show. One of the highlights was during "Iron man" there were stationary robotic figures bracketing the stage. During the opening line " I AM IRON MAN " the mouths opened and fog machines pumped enough fog out to fill the entire floor section with a thick layer of fog. It was a sight to behold!!

At 15 years old I we were glad to have survived that night in one piece...
 
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Sometimes a concert will stand out because of something that happened during the show...some have posted about this.
..

Yeah, for sure ! We experienced a couple of those shows, like:

August 1974, the CSNY show at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City....during the set, Ron Delsner (or maybe it was John Scher, it was either one of those promoters) came to the stage, and had a brief conversation with the band. A few seconds later, Graham Nash made the announcement that President Richard Nixon had just resigned his office, disgraced by the Watergate affair.
The crowd went apeshit, and the band launched into "Long Time Gone"....

In the late 1980s, Sting (!) appeared on stage with Frank Zappa, and absolutely stunned the audience with a superb version of "Murder By Numbers"....

Then, another crazy Roosevelt Stadium show, it was Garcia`s 30th birthday, and both the group and the audience were amped up a bit more than usual. The Dead played for several hours, then had a really wild intermission show, with a martial arts/mystic type of deal, with a guy laying on a bed of nails, with another dude breaking cement blocks on the first guy`s chest with a sledgehammer. This proved to be a bit too much for some folks in the audience, there were a few freakouts. It was either The Band or The New Riders that were also on the bill, they put on a good set.
 
Pink Floyd at the Cobo 1973. ( Detroit). Hooked ever since. David Gilmour is my 'Reference' guitar player. Heh...Heh
 
Duke Ellington Sierra College, Rocklin Calif. 1967 ish. My parents dragged me along. Entered the college hall with a bad attitude, left three hours later with a new love of music. A love that continues to grow, even today.

Dirk
 
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