I attended a conference recently where I sat at a table with five other people, and the young lady leading this particular session had given us all an assignment to complete. It was an exercise in communication, where we would be pairing up and taking turns speaking and listening with our partners based on the instructions provided by the facilitator via little slips of paper she passed around. My partner spoke first, with directions to explain, in detail, what her favorite sandwich is, and why. What she didn't know is that the directions on my little piece of paper told me to conspicuously appear disinterested and attempt to change the subject. I got the fun part. As she was telling me about her favorite sandwich (I was playing my part so well, I can’t even tell you what kind it was), I was staring out the window, thumbing through my phone, writing a few notes in my notebook, then finally interrupting to ask if she knew the score of the previous day’s baseball game. I was really rude and inconsiderate, if you can imagine that, but I was just playing my role.
Then it was group discussion time: How did it make you feel when your partner was obviously not listening to a word you said? My partner was not happy with me, to say the least, but then it was payback time. It was my turn to speak while she reacted according to the instructions on her little piece of paper. And my subject? “Talk about the experience of attending your first concert”. Okay. And she thinks she’s going to be able to ignore this story, no matter how hard she tries? The lady was about half my age and might have no idea who or what I was going to be talking about, and even if she did she may have thought I was making things up just to hold her attention, but I knew there was no way she was going to want to miss this. You think you can feign indifference to what you’re about to hear? Good luck, honey. Here we go.
I remember that day vividly, and always will. It was August 4, 1977. A Thursday. It was warm and dry; a day for relaxing and resting. We were on vacation, and my brother and I and our two friends were staying in a hotel with my parents, grandparents, and my other siblings. We’d just gotten in from a long day of travel, and the old folks were talking about hitting the sack early that night. Sounded like a good plan. For them. Would it be ok if we went out for a bit to do a little exploring before we turned in?
“Sure. Just get to bed at a reasonable hour. We’ve got things planned for tomorrow, and you’ll need to be rested up.”
“Gotcha, dad. Thanks.”
We’d been secretly plotting this night for days, hoping to have the chance to put our plan into action when the time came. Now that we were free, the reality became a little more daunting than the plotting. Our first task was to get out of the hotel. We knew they ran a shuttle to Hounslow, just a few miles east of our hotel, so we grabbed our jackets and room keys, and Big Bro and I, along with our friends Kurt and Greg, made our way to the lobby and asked the gentleman where and when we could catch the next departure.
At that time, Hounslow was the western terminus of the Picadilly Line, but if you could get there, the entire city was within reach. And, according to our map, we wouldn’t even have to change trains to reach Finsbury Park station, some 13 or 14 miles away, which was just a few blocks from our final destination: The Rainbow Theatre. At the time, none of us knew about the theatre’s long history. We had no idea it was the place where The Beatles had taken up residency in late 1963 for their Christmas show, and that anyone who was anyone had played there in the years since. We didn’t know that Fleetwood Mac, Elton John and Bob Marley had all played there in the previous few months, or that this was the place where Jimi Hendrix first set his guitar on fire ten years earlier. We only knew that tonight Little Feat would be playing the last of four consecutive nights there, and this was our last chance to see them before they went back across the pond and were gone forever.
With probably 20 station stops along the way, that train ride to north London took over an hour, and even though all of that time had been factored into the plan, there wasn’t much room for error. In what in hindsight must have been a case of wishful thinking, we had guessed that by the night of their fourth show of the week tickets would be a little easier to come by, and were expecting, or at least hoping, to run into a few scalpers between the station and the theatre. Amazingly, though at the time it just seemed like excellent planning, our speculation proved correct, and I don’t remember much haggling when we approached the scruffy twenty-something, he named his price, and we all dug into our pockets for our share of the total amount.
It was a little eerie the way it had all gone to plan, and I may not have been the only one surprised that we had actually made it that far. We had secretly been discussing the possibility for days, but to actually be approaching the theatre doors now, with tickets in hand, wasn’t something I think I had truly believed would ever happen.
We joined the short queue and presented our tickets on the way in, then instinctively took the stairs to the balcony to find a seat in the old place that had been strictly a movie theater until the late 50’s. The house was pretty well packed by the time we got there, and our general admission tickets didn’t reserve us any particular seats, but we were able to find four together in the top corner, and nobody complained about having the worst seats in the whole place.
Of course, the show didn’t start on time. They never do. But after 15 or 20 minutes of watching roadies fiddle with the equipment and check the microphones one last time, the band came on without introduction. We heard the distinctive opening guitar riff of Walkin' All Night before the place went nuts. I can still remember Lowell George in his white overalls, but the rest of the stage was packed with so many drums and drummers, keyboards and keyboardists, guitar players, backup singers and horn players that, other than Lowell’s constant presence in the spotlight, I couldn’t keep track of who was doing what. Some of the songs we recognized, and some were new to us, but they all sounded better than any of the recordings we were familiar with. With the full orchestration of the dozen or so musicians on the stage, the whole thing was amazing enough that the youtube video of that very night still gives me goosebumps. It was over two hours later that the band finished their third encore with Teenage Nervous Breakdown, and when it became apparent that there wouldn’t be a fourth, we all knew we’d better make a break for it and get back on that train.
If anything, the ride home seemed to take even longer than our ride to the theater, but this time we had something to talk about. Our plan, so far, had worked beyond our wildest expectations. We’d gotten to the right place at the right time, procured our tickets at a reasonable price without much hassle, and were on our way home after enjoying a few hours of the most incredible live show any of us had ever seen, or likely ever would. When we arrived back at Hounslow it became apparent that the last scheduled hotel shuttle had already run for the night, but when we made a quick call to request a pick-up from the station, the hotel didn’t hesitate to send their van back out to give us a lift. I don’t remember the conversation that passed between the four of us and the driver, but I do remember him being a good-humored old man who was more than happy to be able to play his part in our little scheme.
Back in the hotel, we took the elevator up to our rooms and did our best to rest up for the following day’s activities, and that was that. The show had been everything we thought it would be, and the fact that the old folks were none the wiser made it even better. It wasn’t something we could openly discuss while our vacation continued, but the whole experience was something we could, and would, share without any conversation necessary.
So, technically, if you want to hear about my first concert experience, that’s the end of this story. But, not-so-technically, there’s more to tell, because that first experience was soon followed by an equally memorable one that will forever be linked with it in my mind.
We’re still on that same vacation, just over a week later. It’s a Friday, the 12th of August. The old folks are going off to dinner with their friends, leaving all of us “children” to entertain ourselves. In hindsight, that fact is a little surprising in itself, given that my brother’s friend Clive would be our entertainment director for the evening, and the old folks seemed to be just fine with that.
If you’re old enough to remember the summer of ’77, you may recall that punk rock was just hitting its stride, and lots of young people were adopting the look and attitude of the punks, if not the authentic politics and lifestyle. The principal instigators in the preceding months had been the Sex Pistols, whose unsavory and downright violent behavior had made them wildly popular and placed them front and center of that culture.
Already that year the Pistols had been fired by their first two record labels due to their propensity to cause chaos wherever they went, so by August of 1977 they had achieved all of their notoriety before they had even released their first album of music. They had released a few singles, one of which was the massive hit God Save the Queen, which was kept out of the #1 spot on the charts by some careful manipulation by the authorities, even after it had been banned from radio play by the BBC. But, especially after they fired their bass player in February and replaced him with the ultimate punk, Sid Vicious, the band was becoming a victim of their own success. By the end of that summer, they found it almost impossible to play any live shows. Any club that booked them would immediately come under fire from the local citizens, who were not going to have their kids running around with safety pins through their noses.
Thus was born the idea of the S.P.O.T.S. (Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly) Tour. By booking their gigs with club proprietors under assumed names, the band could tour the country without anyone knowing. Except the kids, that is, whose words would spread like wildfire amongst themselves, and who would be ready to pack each venue. According to the official history, this tour didn’t begin until the first show in Wolverhampton on August 19, where the band would play under the name S.P.O.T.S. This was followed by shows in Doncaster (Tax Exiles), Scarborough (Special Guest), Middlesborough (Acne Rabble), Plymouth (The Hamsters) and Penzance (A Mystery Band of International Repute). However, I have reason to believe that the official account has left out the real first stop on that tour, at the Youth Centre in Weeke on August 12.
The five of us, with Clive taking the lead, walked the few blocks from his house to the Youth Centre that evening, and he had informed us that there would be some kind of punk event going on. I can’t claim to have been too excited to hear that. I wasn’t familiar with any of the music and the whole scene sounded a bit intimidating. Having my face slashed with a shard of broken glass by some drug-crazed lunatic with spiky hair was not my idea of fun at that point in my life. But I was certainly curious, and everyone else seemed to think this was a good way to spend our Friday night so, as the youngest member of the group, I didn’t have much choice in the matter.
Just to be clear, I’m not in possession of any souvenirs to prove that it was the Pistols on stage that night. I didn’t take any pictures of the band with me posing beside them and I don’t even remember seeing any signs telling us who the band was. It was definitely a punk band, though, and they were wearing the requisite clothing and hairstyles to identify as such. Can I prove, all these years later, that it was the Sex Pistols we all saw perform that night? No. But how many punk bands could there have been, somewhere between their homes in London and their next gig in Wolverhampton, available to play to a building full of teenagers in Weeke?
The crowd was certainly enthusiastic enough to convince anyone that these guys were someone special, and that was the night I learned the one dance I’m still capable of doing: The pogo. An insanely loud gymnasium-sized room full of pogoing people dressed for the occasion isn’t a sight I’ve ever forgotten. And the sight of us, dressed as we were and obviously out of our element, probably stayed with them for a while too. There were lots of spiky-haired people with lots of conspicuous safety pins wearing their Doc Martens boots, though not a single one of them even tried to slash me or stomp on me. I never got close to the stage where, who knows, I may have lost an eye or been pushed to the floor and trampled, but the punks in my vicinity were very mild mannered.
Four days later, we were still on that vacation, riding around the countryside in our van, when we heard over the radio that Elvis Presley had died. I was too young to ever have been much of an Elvis fan. To me he was just a guy in the cheesy movies they’d show on TV on weekend afternoons. I knew he’d been a big deal, but didn’t really understand why. A few months later the Sex Pistols finally did release their one and only studio album, but just a few months after that, they broke up after playing a final show in San Francisco. (The Beatles had played their final show in San Francisco, too. What is it about that place?) That may have been the end of this story, except for a few more strange things that we never saw coming.
As it turned out, unbeknownst to us, all of those concerts by Little Feat in August of 1977 had been recorded for inclusion on their first live album, and four of the songs from their Thursday night show ended up making the cut. That album, Waiting For Columbus, was released the following February. A few months later, my mom was browsing through a record store looking for a gift for my 8th grade graduation when she heard the instrumental jam in the middle of Dixie Chicken playing over the speaker system. Liking the song, and assuming I’d like it too, she asked the guy at the counter to give her whatever it was that he was playing. She had no idea who Little Feat were, but when the time came, I opened that gift, and every one of the millions of times I’ve listened to those recordings I listen for our voices in the crowd between songs, knowing we were there somewhere.
Of course, I could never tell my mom that I made up part of that crowd you can hear cheering on that record or that, walking through that record store, part of what she heard may actually have contained my indistinguishable voice among thousands of others. But if she had been there two minutes earlier, or two minutes later, she would have heard something much different and I’d have ended up with a Foreigner album, or maybe Bruce Springsteen. A year later Lowell George died of an overdose and Little Feat were never quite the same, but they’re still around and I saw them in my hometown a few years ago. They’re still worth the trip, though this one was much easier, and not quite as exciting as the first time I saw them.
Those eight days in the summer of ’77 were my rock and roll fantasy. I witnessed at least part of the making of the greatest live album ever, then got to see one of the most notorious musical acts in history play live just a matter of months before they called it quits.
The young lady who was my listening partner for this exercise ended up having a different assignment than I was given. Her slip of paper instructed her to listen intently to everything I said, nodding her head as I spoke and encouraging me to keep going. So, I’ll never know if her reaction was one of sincere interest or if she was just following directions. I may have only been successful in convincing her that I’m really, really old.
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