Tuesday, September 19, 2006

My First Concert

In 1967, I was in 7th grade, and I knew very little about the music scene (or anything else for that matter), other than that I really loved music. Up until the year before, I actually thought that the older guys across the street that had a cover band and played "Purple Haze" in their garage WERE famous and on the radio. My sister and would sit on the curb that summer, in the evenings, as these guys cranked it up! We would sit and listen and watch them practice along with a light show (flashing colored lights) as we were not allowed to go across the street. They'd play all the popular "acid rock" of the day and we'd think it was sooo cool.

The spring of 1968, I was in St. Agnes school, and a couple of my buds had older brothers and sisters that turned them on to some cool music. Remember, FM music had barely begun. Going to someone's house to hear Johnny Winter or Big Brother and the Holding Company, singing grungey blues songs was not what was part of the mainstream culture like it is today. I had a little transistor radio, and I'd listen to the Beach Boys, Tommy James and the Shondells, the Brooklyn Bridge etc. Pretty lame mainstream Pop music. I really started to form my musical opinions at around this time.

Then, on an altar boy trip to the Jersey Shore that summer, ( yes I was Catholic School Altar Boy - what a disappointment I turned out to be -sheesh!)



I spent $8 in quarters on the spin wheel on the boardwalk, almost my whole savings, to win a $3 album. It was Iron Butterfly, Heavy.

Look, this was pre-Zeppelin, although Page and JPJ were in my ears in some of my favorite POP songs like Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man. Since I was into Iron Butterfly before Led Zeppelin, the whole LZ is a rip-off of IB type controversy, and who would outlast who, raged even then. The Zep rose and Butterfly flew off into obscurity.

Anyway, that spring I heard for the first time, the music-changing epic called In-a-gadda-di-vida. It was 17 minutes long, a whole album side. And it was a hit! I thought it was a really cool song, In a garden of Eden, baby! Get it? It was heavy, trippy, had a massively inane drum solo in the middle, and exploded at the end like a pre-Dazed and Confused. In my naivete, I tried to share this music with my Bucket-Headed Dad, (think Ralph Kramden of the Honeymooners). Being a good Catholic boy, I tried to pitch the whole Garden of Eden angle. He was havin' none of it. I still remember playing it for him on our console phonograph with stereo speakers, 4 inches apart behind the cloth. I used to sit between the speakers to get the full effect. On some of the older scratched records, the needle would skip so bad that we used to put a bottle of modeling paint on it to weigh it down. Eventually the weight of the needle smoothed out the scratches AND THE GROOVES so that all you could hear was white noise.

So in class one day, my buddy Jay says that Iron Butterfly was playing at the local high school. Cream had just played there, last month and Chicago was up-coming. There was no such concert scene outside of major cities in these days, although looking back it seems almost unreal. Tickets were $3 and I had saved up for whatever. I bought the ticket and that night raced home to get permission to go. I told my Dad and Mom and they hit the ceiling. "You spent $3 on a CONCERT TICKET!!! $3 DOLLARS!!! And this crap music!!!!" and on and on and on... my Dad, the ever-creative disciplinarian, finally relents, and gives me permission and a ride to the high school. BUT, I was told, " If you are going to a concert you'll dress nicely, respectfully..." He made me wear a suit and tie. I can still remember it, orange-brown jacket with some sort of plaid or striped tie, nice shoes and my short "opie" haircut.


(that's me on the left)

Just AWFUL! I do remember as he dropped me off a couple of blocks from the school, all the kids walking toward the gym, all hippie-decked out. Me with my suit on (I took my Jacket off, and draped it over my shoulder to try to be cool). I even loosened my tie.

Once inside I could not find my friends, so I just sat in the balcony on the floor, legs hanging over, arms draped through the metal rail. I must have looked the oddball, with all these stoned out hippie chicks, biker dudes, beads and bell bottoms and me in my near orange brown suit jacket. IB wailed away, with one of those colored-water-in-vegetable-oil-psychedelic-light-shows that were the rage in the day. At the end of what has become a legendary 45 minute Innagaddadavida, the flashpots explodes and flames leapt upward lending to the sinister tone. The look of horror on the Nun chaperone's faces was priceless, no matter how "down with the kids" they were trying to be. Between that and the reefer that filled the gym (I had no clue at the time. I couldn't understand why these hippies needed to burn incense wherever they went. How annoying!)

It rang in my head, for days after, but it put the live music bug in me. I didn't go to any concerts really until 3 years later, when I saw Slade. Of course I saw the mighty Zep twice, once in 75 and again in 77, but my only regret from those innocent days was that I didn't get to see Jimi Hendrix. That's the story,

PS The last major act to play at that catholic high school was Black Sabbath, my sophomore year in high school. I wanted to go but I had a baby sitting commitment. What a MAROON!

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I was at that concert too, also in the balcony but without a suit. I think I saw you.

12:04 PM  

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