Most memorable concert moments

The best shows I've seen would have to be Further (what became of the Greatful Dead) and Roger Waters. Iron Maiden was amazing too.

 

April 2005

Slipknot Subliminal Verses Tour Madison WI.

Misty (wearing a huge red faux fur top hat) and I were meandering through the crown while Slipknot was on a set change break.

Misty (who was behind me) yelled out "Hey! That's my hat!.....gimme my hat back fucker!"

I quickly turned around to see that the Slipknot band member #6 Shawn Crahn took Misty's red faux fur top hat off her head and proudly put it on his head. Shawn quickly was making his way back up to the stage wearing Misty's hat with security in toe.

Misty pushed through rear security forces, ran up behind Shawn and grabbed it back off his head.

I was laughing.
Misty was pissed.
I asked Misty if she knew who that was?

Misty said " IDGAF who it is, that was my hat!"

The many memories.........

 

If you remember concerts you didn't take near enough drugs...

 

Been to Hundreds of concerts in my Life (still go to a Few ) For some reason this one stands out ! At The Echo Arena

 

Did not expect Slipknot to be mentioned in this thread

 

I waited patiently for you to say that Asmo....

You have the best Slipknot radar on hf

 

It's a curse, not a blessing

 

Rage Against the Machine on The Battle of Los Angeles tour or as it was dubbed that night "The Battle of Oakland". Never saw (felt?) so much raw energy from a concert. Here's a bootleg of it with decent sound quality, considering the date.




First time seeing The Chemical Brothers, on Ecstasy. This almost didn't happen because earlier in the night, I got caught by an undercover sorting out Rolls for the people I was with but somehow when he escorted me to the booth to take down my info and potentially arrest me, I had convinced him that I ditched the pills and I pulled some sleight of hand when he asked me to empty my pockets, so he wouldn't see the remaining Ecstasy Pills I had. He just ended up kicking me out, I was able to get back in though.

Chemical Brothers are a really unique experience among EDM because I think they use sequencers, samplers, controllers, etc. and don't technically "DJ". They pretty much adhere to the continuous stream of music during a set like most EDM, but it feels more dynamic, they'll have like multiple vocal tracks being played over a beat from one song with varying melodies from others. This provided an awesome experience of simultaneously knowing the songs but hearing them all for the first time, an approach that I think works much better with Dance music than when Rock Bands attempt stuff like that.


I saw The Rolling Stones on Halloween, when I was young with my parents. This was the first concert where I was really in awe of the sheer number of people that come to enjoy live music and the spectacle that The Stones put on was unlike anything I had experienced. Jagger coming out after an intermission with a black outfit and top hat to sing "Sympathy for the Devil" on Halloween. Great Stuff.

 

I have a few:
My 1st concert - Humble Pie circa 1972
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon Tour - Summer 1974 in an outdoor venue
Emerson Lake & Palmer - I was at the last show they did with a full orchestra in support of Works Volume 1 in 1977 or 1978

 

Chapter 12: Janis



“There I Stood On The Edge Of A Feather, Expecting To Flyyyyyyy.” Buffalo Springfield



The expectation, the “hope” that things could be different. That was at the guts of the hippie ethos, running through the carabineers of the hippies climbing Half Dome, infusing daisies stuck in rifle barrels, fortifying free meals handed out by the Diggers in Yosemite and the Haight. We weren’t working toward change, we were trying to change ourselves. For the Nixonite, the corporate heart attack, and the academics frozen in the thrall of Herman Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game,” we had evolved from a predictable retelling of the story of rebellious youth, into a pernicious narrative, to a tribal people sometimes worth killing.



Beatles, Stones, Cream, Kinks, Doors, Spoonful, CrosbyStillsNashYoung, Airplane, Donovan, Dylan, Jimmy, Otis, Temptations. “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters” BD: and on and on. In trails it flowed, trails that could track a hand across a room, in rapturous freezes and unfreezes of a brain that jumped over the moon. Chambers Brothers too. There was no better song to start an acid trip than "Time," by the Chambers brothers.



It wasn’t all peace and love. Some will always prefer the sharp stick in el ojo. G. Gordon Liddy was a hyper patriot, one of the outer cogs of the Watergate scheme to bug the Democratic National Convention. He allowed that he was o.k. with standing at attention on a corner, volunteering to be gunned down, to take one in the brain pan for Richard Nixon, for the country, if it would help hide the truth. Roiling times were quickening. I was in a bathroom stall at a truck stop. Etched on the gun metal gray walls were the names of people who had been there, right there, in that stall, on a given day. Imagine that. Also this, in written with a black felt marker, same wall:



“I spied a hippie in the snow.

His arm was broken, that I know.

I coaxed him in with crusts of bread,

And then I broke his fucking head.”



Didn’t matter. She was coming. To Fresno, to Seland Arena. A local columnist had snidely commented that she was just another white girl trying to sing the blues. Another condescending cocksucker heard from. Uninvited to the “be” in, he'd found succor in too many beers and old school sanctimony. Maybe he was deaf. In her west Texas high school she’d been voted “ugliest guy,” for Christ's sake. In fact she was plain, except for the acne that marred even that dubious description. Her smile subsumed all that. Texas had chewed her up and spit her out. Janis Joplin had spit back, and sang about it.



Janis sang what was called “acid” blues or “psychedelic” blues, both or either in a sort of “rock” blues style. She had too much in the tank for regular down-and-out blues all the time. Her band, “Big Brother And The Holding Company,” just had to keep up, to hold on, hold on, then “take it, take another little piece of my heart now baaaby.” She would belt out “Ball And Chain,” then pick up the mike between songs. I remember vividly her huffing and puffing into the mike, sucking wind in an effort to re-inflate lungs that would act as a mammoth mainsail at the next song’s launch. Hardly audible, “Thank you . . . thank you, and now I’m going to be your gator baby, crawling for your love.”



She blew out of town then, for the next installment of the Perils of Janis. As the sports types say, she left it all on the field, “blowed inside out and upside down,” BD She did a couple more albums, then crashed and burned, in a dazzle of whiskey and Janis. Janis Joplin's performance--and I saw a shit load of rock names--was the best I would ever see. As Kerouac might have put it, she was "too beat" for this world, too beat up, and too beat down for this reality.

 

December 13, 1979, the LLoyd Noble Center, Norman, OK. Neil Diamond.

OK, yes I like Neil Diamond but he's not really what made it memorable.

My wife had a best friend at the time. They worked together as bookkeepers. And she was just about the cutest little gal I've ever met. As it turned out her husband also worked for me in sales.

She had a friend in the music business. Looking back, I believe he might have been more than just a friend. He gave her four front row tickets to that concert. She invited me and my wife to join them and, as it happened, her husband became ill and it was just the three of us attending.

A little background now...

My wife and I had dabbled in swinging around that time period and my wife had told me how her friend found out and wanted to hear all the juicy details. So, I knew this cute little gal was probably a player. In fact, she and her husband had attended my 30th birthday at our house a few months before the concert. It was by no means a swinger party but we did have some X-rated movies that were being played while the party went on. Every time I saw this gal, she was glued to the TV screen and those movies. That further confirmed my suspicions.

OK, back to the concert...

Neil was fantastic. I could tell that my wife, her friend, and every gal there were transfixed on Neil's tight pants and that obvious bulge. Well, OK, there were some guys as well.

Well, no, she didn't go home and sleep with us that night. But I sure got to enjoy the tight hugs and playful caresses of two gorgeous young women that night.

A couple of years later she and her husband were going to join us and attend a basketball game at OU. We were all going to meet at the dealership I worked at. She showed up first. It was the first time that she greeted me with a tight hug and a wet kiss. I knew something was up. She was just about tell me something that she had preceded with, "it's something personal".

But before she could continue, my wife arrived and the conversation became light.

The gal was more flirty with me than ever before that evening at the game and after when we went for drinks and a meal. After my wife and I got home, my wife told me that her friend had confided in her, during one of their trips to the lady's room, that she and her husband were going to divorce. That's when I understood. The gal was torn between loyalty to her friend and her desire for the kind of life that I might offer.

OK, no, I would not have left my wife for her. And I would never have led her on just to have my fantasy fulfilled. But I've often regretted never haven known the pleasures of that little cutie.

 

Saw Slipknot on their tour for their first album at the Hordern in Sydney, pretty sure it was 1999, as I remember him saying 99 the Year of Slipknot

Was an awesome concert, in my top 3, top 5 maybe



But best concert ever was Slayer, one of those ones where they played the whole Reign in Blood album, Luna Park in Sydney, think it was around 2007, that was nuts, crowd went absolutely bonkers, couldnt move my neck for a week

 

Zeppelin Earls Court 1975 was a good concert ! went down to London on the train (one of the few times I have been to our capital city )

 

I also saw Slipknot a few times. I was not impressed. They had the one song about fucking everything I stand for and the other song where he says he will "slit your throat and fuck the wound". Colorful language.

 

April of 1979 I was Rod Stewart. I didn't WANT to see Rod Stewart, but my girlfriend was unable to get Kansas tickets for a later date. To this day I don't know how her logic worked. Nor mine for actually going. She also bought tickets for a friend of mine named Steve at the behest of his girlfriend. So we're in the Jefferson civic center in Birmingham (LONGER story as to why I was in that city)

The lights are up, the seats were actually good and people were throwing frisbees all over the place. Steve caught one and immediately stuffed it under his seat. He said it was a souvenir. The lights finally go down and the stage is lit and out comes the band, yadda yadda (culturally-appropriated term I'll wager).

Then, in the middle of the set he's singing "Do You think I'm sexy" and someone flings a tube top at him. So of course Rod Stewart put some unknown southern girl's tube top on his head and kept singing. Steve said something like "Oh fuck this", stood up and sent the frisbee toward the stage.

In the dark you could barely see it. Then it hit the halo of light around the stage. It was like a guided missile. It hit Rod in the shoulder, he dropped his mic and the music stopped. Then he shook it off and resumed the song. We got up and left because I was sure Steve would be arrested if we stayed in our seats.

It was later that I learned Steve was a frisbee freak and could break eggs and other weird shit, with a flying disk.

Most of the other concerts were a haze. I remember places, Texas Jam, Aloha Stadium, the Cow Palace, but only a bit of who played where. Saw The Who too!

 

Saw Joe Strummer with the Mescaleros about a year before he died. He came out for an encore of London Calling. Everyone in the Metro (Chicago) was jumping up and down, singing along, fists in the air. It was incredible.

Also saw Disturbed open for Danzig before they got big. Danzig was great. Disturbed were fucking ridiculous. It was hilarious, though.

 

Grateful Dead 50th anniversary shows were one of the highlights of my life. Not just the shows it was the whole culture of the event. A non-stop good time.

 

Smoked it up with Ministry in Eugene and saw their last show in Portland. Tried to see Hendrix at the shell in Waikiki after getting primed on window pane. Blew his amps--0 show. Jethro Tull played straight through Thick As a Brick and then--änd for our second song", Chambers Brothers, Janis, Dylan and several others. The one I'll be forever sorry that I missed was Monterrey, 1967.

 

Man o Man, would've liked to have seem Hendrix on window pane.