My First Concert

If you were not aware, I am an obsessive list maker. I have a list of every book I have read since the beginning of 2005. It actually went back further, but the prior list is on a dead Palm Treo 300 (millennials, look it up). I keep a Master List of long range (maybe some short) home projects. And of course, I have a complete database of all my comics, but that was created mainly with the object to sell them all.

Anyway, the other day I started thinking about resurrecting a list of all the concerts I had been to. In the old days (pre-internet), this was hard to do. If you didn’t have a ticket stub, the only way to get the dates right was to go through newspaper microfilm. Which, while cool in and of itself, was amazingly time consuming. With the internet, this is a lot easier. Granted, there is misinformation out there. I have personally corrected some concert information about Genesis on a dedicated website by supplying, you guessed it, microfilm newspaper images. But this blog entry is not about the entire list. In the first place, it’s not done yet. As I write this, I have only completed through October 1979 (which gets me to 23 concerts). No, this piece is about my very first concert.

On June 18, 1971, I joined a couple thousand like-minded music fans at Clowes Hall to see Spirit and Rastus. Spirit were on tour with their inarguable masterpiece “Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus”. The opening act, Rastus, were a regional horn band in the mold of Chicago or Tower of Power. Believe it or not, I went mainly because I wanted to see Rastus.

First, let me set the scene. In mid 60’s Indianapolis, the only decent “pop” station was WIFE (1310 on your AM dial). It was a Top 40 station, and was our only alternative. Then in 1968, along came WNAP (93.1 FM). “The wrath of the buzzard” was a revelation! In addition to being IN STEREO (assuming you had one), it played album oriented rock as well as the hits. This is where you could hear stuff by Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and even King Crimson! Heady days indeed. And for quite a while in my teens, they would play complete albums every night at midnight. A perfect opportunity to build a collection of badly home recorded cassettes (Kansas’ first album, Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs”, “Mysterious Traveler” by Weather Report, and of course the mind-blowing “Genesis Live”). But that’s a story for another time. Let’s get back to 1970-71, when I was in 8th grade.

There were a couple of my friends who were into music like me: Jim Gerrard, Jim Bracken, Chuck Madden, John Litel. We would talk about albums we liked and sometimes listen to each other's albums at the other’s houses. At some point during the school year, WNAP started playing “Warm” by Rastus, and I think it was Jim Gerrard who went out and got a copy of their album. Eventually, so did I. Our consensus was that Rastus was like Chicago, only cooler. Because what you like is cooler than what the mainstream thinks. That’s the way it works.

Rastus was a really tight horn band formed in Cleveland in the late 60s. They played frequently in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and thereabouts. Their first album was actually recorded in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Well, the studio tracks, at least. Because, of course, the album had two sides of live music, too. I did not know it at the time, but almost all of the songs they played were covers. Of course, I had not heard many of the originals. Even though Keef Hartley played Woodstock, he didn’t allow the band to be recorded. So Rastus’ “Sinnin’ for You” is the first version of the song I ever heard. Same thing for their killer version of Brian Auger’s “Black Cat”. And so on. Regardless, I loved this album and played it to death.

At some point, I learned on WNAP that Rastus was going to perform in Indianapolis, opening for Spirit at Clowes Hall. Clowes Hall! I can walk there from my house! So once I had accumulated the appropriate amount ($5, $6?), I walked over to the box office and bought a ticket.

So on that Friday evening in June, I walked the two or three blocks to Clowes, settled into my balcony seat and waited for the show. Rastus were everything I had hoped for. What a show! Then came Spirit. Although I acknowledge it today as a masterpiece, back then the only song I had heard off of “Twelve Dreams” was “Nature’s Way”, which I did like quite a bit. I just hadn’t heard any of their other songs and didn’t know what to expect. I certainly thought the bald drummer was interesting. But then I was confronted with the scourge of 1970’s rock concerts: the interminable drum solo. I couldn’t stand it. I got up and walked around the concourse. Eventually the show ended, rather forgettably, I am sorry to say, and I walked home. End of story. Or maybe not.

Many years later, we used to have a party game/conversation starter where everyone would say what their first concert was. By this point, “Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus” had developed an almost legendary reputation. When my turn came, I would get a lot of credit from others for having seen Spirit on that tour. I would usually (usually) admit that I was not as cool as they thought, and that I actually went to the concert to see the opening act. By the way, this is not the only time that happened, but we’ll leave that for another time.

Oh, and for the music historians out there, this was the same night that Carole King played her first ever concert in front of an audience, at Carnegie Hall of all places! Now that would have been a cool first concert. But still…

If I can figure out how to accept comments, let me know what your first concert was.