This is an older post from several years ago. I'm bringing it back for a couple of reasons. (1) I'm considering consolidating all my old blog posts into one location and, (2) because someone who had read it before requested it. So here it is, warts and all!
Trying to remember all
of the concerts that I have experienced made me think about some of
the circumstances surrounding these events. I call them events, not
in the same way that promoters refer to them as events but, in the
sense that, in those lost days from the 60’s to some point in the
90’s, they were truly events, milestones in a teenager’s life.
It was a chance to go see the artists that you’d idolized and
listened to on recordings endlessly and only occasionally got to see
on television.
You could read about
them in magazines like Rolling Stone. Back then, Rolling Stone
magazine was an important and relevant publication, worthy of the
money you spent on it. It was an edgy magazine with great articles
and writers, and the musicians were interesting trend-setters and
experimenters. Rock and roll music was still in its adolescence and
was not yet accepted into the mainstream and was frowned upon by most
of society. Information on musicians used to be hard to come by,
especially if you lived in the outlands. There were no 24 hour-a-day
music channels on television and they weren’t the mainstream social
entities that they are now. Today, Rolling Stone magazine is not
worth putting in the bottom of a bird cage. It has been sold and
sanitized and filled with talentless, plastic poseurs who put out
pre-fabricated recordings of meaningless tripe.
Most of these concert
events were wild road trips with caravans of friends in different
vehicles, loaded with passengers and party supplies, roaring along
the highway blasting music and pre-gaming for the show. I figured
that there were some that would be worth writing about. Here is one.
I had been out partying
with a couple of friends all night and, with the arrival of morning,
the glaze of the night before became painfully apparent. We had been
smoking and drinking for hours and the grimy crust of an all-nighter
hung on us like a parasite. We had drunk beer and wine all night and
smoked ourselves into a near catatonic state. The sun was coming up
and we were faced with the decision to find somewhere to rest or to
keep going. We were just sort of cruising around and winding down
when an advertisement on the radio announced that The J. Geils Band,
Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top were playing at Tulane Stadium in New
Orleans that night. Well, that was only about two hundred miles
away, three hours driving time, give or take and, at the time, ZZ Top
was the big dog. They were outselling The Rolling Stones and were
traveling with the world's biggest sound system packed in nine semi
trucks. The tickets were $12.50 each at the gate, remember this was
1976. My buddy, let's call him Rat because many years later that's
what his nickname turned out to be, said, "I'll buy the tickets
and pay for the gas if we can take your car." That sounded just
about as reasonable as it could be, to a sixteen year old who'd never
been to New Orleans, so I agreed.
We spent some time
around town picking up a couple of other friends along the way, we’ll
call them Willie and Randy. See how this is already starting to
become an “event”? At the time I was driving a pretty ragged out
'67 Chevy Malibu with worn out shocks and a really good stereo system
(typical '70's style). The shocks were non-existent so anytime I had
passengers in the back seat the tail pipe would drag when you hit a
bump. In the 70’s you could get away with driving a car like that
and even be very successful with the ladies. Then, not many kids our
age were driving cars that were as good as or better than their
parents, unlike now. After stocking up on more party supplies, we
were off, I just didn't know how "off" we were going to be
before it was all over with.
Being only sixteen, I
felt like the only proper thing to do in this situation was to let my
parents know where I was going. I also knew that, given the chance,
they'd probably forbid it, so I was elated to spot my younger brother
playing in the yard when I drove up. He was four at the time and I
figured that he was more than capable of delivering the message so I
leaned out the window and said, "Hey! Tell Mom and Dad that I'm
going to New Orleans to see ZZ Top, I'll be back tomorrow," and
then I left. I was feeling really responsible and good about myself,
having done the right thing.
The first indication
that we may be in for a less than pleasant experience was when,
before we even cleared the city limits, we were pulled over by a cop.
Rat was driving because I was still sort of blown out from the
previous evening's debaucheries and besides, he knew The Way.
I was hunkered down in the passenger seat trying to be invisible when
the cop thrust his huge head into the car to look us over. I can
remember squinting up at him through red, puffy eyes and seeing the
little alligator style, roach clip that I had clamped on the visor
rubbing all over the top of his cop hat. I just tried harder to be
invisible by closing my eyes and squishing lower into my nest. He
made some comment about us needing new tires and let us go on our
way.
"Jesus!" I
thought, "I can't believe that lunatic is just going to let us
go, doesn't he realize that he'll be responsible for whatever happens
to us from this point on! Oh, well, whatever happens will be on that
crazy bastard's head."
The next time that I
opened my eyes we were somewhere in the bowels of downtown Mobile,
Alabama. I looked up with one eye and saw a One Way street sign
slide past my window with the arrow pointing toward the rear of my
car. I sat up and looked around. I was disoriented and needed
desperately to get my bearings. I was also a little concerned about
the sign which seemed to be at odds with the direction we were
taking. I considered the possibility that it could be an omen.
"Hey. Rat. That
sign said One Way"
"I'm only going
one way" was his reply.
"Oh."
That sounded like a
reasonable answer.
We were in Mobile to
stop by someone's (I forget whose) sister's house. Why? I don't
know. I guess to raid the refrigerator and see if there was anything
we could steal because that’s probably what we did. After about an
hour we were back on the road, finally, some interstate travel.
The closer we got to
the venue, the more carloads of "heads" and young people we
saw. In one of these cars were some cute, girls who were about our
age. They pulled beside us and held up a bottle of Jack Daniel's
whiskey. We didn't have whiskey but we did have weed, so we held up
a joint. They motioned for us to pull to the side of the highway and
we sat beside I-10 sharing our weed and their whiskey. They were on
their way to the same concert so we had plenty to talk about. After
this short interlude we resumed our noisy, sodden journey.
When we reached the
Tulane area of New Orleans it became apparent that there had been no
provisions made for parking this many vehicles. We got as close as
we could and just pulled up onto the median or 'neutral ground', if
you’re using the local patois, in the middle of Tulane Avenue. We
weren't the only ones doing that, Tulane Avenue had turned into one
long parking lot with crowds of concert goers walking along the
sidewalks carrying bottles, backpacks and ice chests. This was the
party! We were there! We got out and locked the wreck up and fell
into the procession. We were walking behind a guy who was carrying
two plastic gallon milk jugs with some murky looking liquid sloshing
around in them. Assuming it was wine we asked for some and in the
post hippie spirit of the mid-seventies he was happy to oblige.
After taking a few good pulls on the neck of the jug, I think it was
Randy who said,
"Man, that's some
shitty tasting wine!"
"That's not wine,
it's mushrooms." Psilocybin, woops.
"Oh."
That didn't faze us,
being the veterans that we were. It just set the tone for the rest
of the day, weirdness.
As we approached the
gates where the crowd was being bottle-necked into the arena it got
tighter and tighter. Randy, who was a couple of years younger than
us and much smaller, said that his feet weren't even touching the
ground. He was just mashed up in the crowd and being swept along. I
reached over the shoulders of several people and got a hand on him to
try and keep him from being separated from us. We finally got inside
and found some seats in the stands to call headquarters. Anyone who
was ever at an outdoor concert like this in the seventies knows that
it is a non-stop hedonistic orgy of excesses and this one was no
different. The gates opened at three and J. Geils wouldn't start
until around seven. Loud music was blasting from house-sized
speakers and everywhere there was fun. F-U-N fun. More fun than is
allowed, more fun than is legal, more fun than we should be having.
So much fun that it could scare the shit out of you. Smoking,
drinking, tripping, fighting, puking, necking, running, shouting and
dancing. Fun fun fun. It was as if someone had opened the back door
to a lunatic asylum and let them all out into a fenced yard to romp
in the evening air. Small town Alabama was never like this, even on
Saturday night. It was a lot to take in.
The J. Geils Band got
started a little before it got completely dark and put on rollicking
good show. Peter Wolf was dancing and scat-singing like an amped-up
version of King Louie from the Jungle Book, yes, like an orangutan
ripped to the tits on crank. I never knew that the human body could
move that way.
Soon, after they
finished their set and left the stage trouble started brewing. We
saw a commotion and looked into the crowd on the ground in front of
where we were sitting and saw a blue knot sliding through it. It
looked like a big blue porcupine because on top of the blue mass were
all these spines sticking up bristling and moving. Then we realized
that the spines were night sticks being wielded by the New Orleans
City Police who were moving through the crowd stomping the shit out
of everything too slow or too stupid to move. What got all this
started we never knew, but as soon as the crowd in the upper seats
noticed what was going on it turned into a bottle throwing
competition. Bottles floated out of the night sky from every
direction aimed at the blue mass of law enforcement storm troopers
down there. After the aerial assault had gone on for a while and the
cops had slowed their beatings down in favor of covering up their
heads, someone came on stage and made a statement over the P.A.
system.
"Hey, everybody,
calm down! Calm down! We're all out here trying to have a good
time, now, don't ruin it, just calm down…and will the New Orleans
City Police please leave the stadium!"
Holy shit! Really?
They can say that? And get away with it? It was an epiphany! If
you have a big enough crowd on your side and a microphone plugged
into a big enough P. A. system, you can get away with saying all
kinds of stuff.
At the sound of this
last part of the announcement the crowd erupted in a deafening roar
of approval. This went on the entire time that the police worked
their way back out of the crowd like a bunch of whipped dogs. I
still don't know what sparked that whole incident off and I don't
know how asking the New Orleans Police to leave the stadium really
worked, but it did. Many years later I heard that one of the cops
had been paralyzed by someone dropping an ice chest on his head from
the top of the stands. I don't know if this is true or not, I hope
not, that’s somewhat severe. I also heard that this incident had a
lot to do with the closing of Tulane Stadium and that they didn’t
have any more concerts there after this one, I don't know if that's
true either, but it did close. What I
do know is that they
had one there, one time, and we were there.
A little later another
announcement was made stating that due to some airplane trouble
(ironic, isn’t it?) that Lynyrd Skynyrd would not be able to make
the show that night. It was a terrible disappointment because I
never got another chance to see them before their plane crashed in a
swamp in Mississippi a year later. But to make up for it ZZ Top came
on and put on a hell of a show.
Three spotlights hit
the stage illuminating a cactus with a vulture (I think it was a
vulture) perched on it to one side of the stage, a bison on the other
side of the stage, a guy holding up what we assumed to be a
rattlesnake in the center of the stage and long horn steers all on a
huge Texas shaped plywood stage. Then, they introduced ZZ Top.
If there had been a roof on the place it would have been blown off.
This was their 1976 world tour, back when they were still just a
little old band from Texas and they were blues fueled, raucous and
kicked ass. They started out just like the live side of their album
(some of you will recognize the term “album side”) Fandango with
"Thunderbird" and rocked the rest of the night.
ZZ Top wound up
returning to the stage for seven encores that night for over 50,000
fans. At the end of the last encore a curtain was lowered
with "Adios Amigos" emblazoned across it to the strains of
"Tumbling Tumbleweeds" playing over the P.A. system to
usher us all peacefully out into the New Orleans night.
By then we were
completely wrung out and exhausted. We made our way out of the
stadium and back to the car in the middle of the median where we had
to sit and wait for traffic to clear before we could move. It was a
pretty long wait if memory serves. On the three hour drive back Rat
decides that he's had enough and wants to pull over to sleep, after a
brief argument I took the wheel and brought us back home without
incident.
It was a wild ride on a
wild highway and one of those experiences that helps us to become who
eventually turn out to be. That is life, that’s what life is. It
is a series of experiences each of which changes you in some way to
make you the person that you are
right now. Ten minutes from
now you may have had an experience that turned into a different
person, that’s who you’ll be then. There are an awful lot of
instances of questionable behavior and wrong turns stowed away back
there in my youth, some of it dangerous and irresponsible. Everyone
likes to think about going back to their youth and
knowing then
what I know now, but you know, if a person were to go back and fix
all of their mistakes they would surely be an entirely different
person. In some cases that may be an improvement but in most I’d
say, probably not.
They began demolition
on Tulane Stadium in November 1979, but in my mind it will always be
there on July 17, 1976 the place where, at sixteen, I was part of the
biggest party in New Orleans for one night. I won't ever forget my
first trip to New Orleans to that concert thirty-one years ago. My
mother won't let me.
The names have been
changed to protect the lawless, criminal swine who took part in
this shameful episode but the dates, places and events are all true.
Keith
Browning - 2007
 |
| I still have this but I have no idea where my keys are |