Concert Regrets

One of the things about learning to brew your own beer from somebody is you better get along with them because that first session takes hours! Thankfully, my first brewing session meant I was able to hang out with my buddy Jeff. Killing time in his garage on a brisk Saturday afternoon in early October, sitting around the kettle as my winter spiced ale brewed, the conversation wandered at that nice, familiar pace that only comes from having been friends for over 20 years. Of course, considering our history, music was a big topic of the day, including concert regrets. I have two concert regrets – not shows I wish I’d never seen, but shows I missed.

My Number One with a Bullet is Roger Waters’ Radio K.A.O.S. tour stop at Blossom Music Center in August of 1987.

It was the summer before my seventeenth birthday, and I was working a couple of jobs, including mowing the lawn at the local community park and busing tables at a crappy restaurant. Up to that point in time, I had only attended two concerts – David Lee Roth the previous fall, and Mötley Crüe earlier in the summer of ’87. I seem to remember it being a combination of my own money management issues and my parents not being all that comfortable with my concert going activities yet as the main reasons I was unable to attend the show. I’m sure the normal teenage notions of independence and arguing with my parents about “freedom” and “space” came into play, too.

I don’t remember who I was even going to go to the show with, but I knew even then that this was a show I really needed to see. And, by all accounts, it was a spectacle. Radio K.A.O.S. wasn’t a huge hit, but it was and still is one of my favorite albums. (I did an in-depth piece on it back when I wrote for PopMatters. You can check that out here.) Waters took DJ Jim Ladd on tour with him, and the show was staged as a giant radio show, complete with phone booths set up around the venue for audience members to “call in” and ask questions. Of course, it was never filmed and the likes of it will never be seen again, but, man, I think it would have been amazing.

Of course, a month or so after the Roger Waters show, I did see Boston at the Richfield Coliseum. I’m sure my parents’ fears and my money woes were cast aside because I saw the concert with my older sister, my health teacher (who my sister was dating at the time), and my best buddy Mark. I wouldn’t attend my first concert at Blossom until a year later when I saw The Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, and John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band on a triple bill the next summer. And, for what it’s worth, I did see Pink Floyd on their Momentary Lapse of Reason tour in the fall of ’88, so I guess that’s something.

My other concert regret is a little different and much more recent, so the wound is still fresh. Jack has been taking private drum lessons for just over a year now, and he just started up with fifth grade band this school year. He loves percussion, and I’m always eager to share anything I think he’ll appreciate – like The Black Keys, The Who, and Rush.

So when I saw Rush was touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of Moving Pictures, I knew I was going to take Jack. I was able to get in on the presale and get us some amazing seats in the lower bowl, stage right, near the stage. I was ridiculously excited. Then, after purchasing the tickets, I realized that there was a good chance we were actually going to be in Hawaii the day of the show.

This was a trip Tracy was trying to earn through work, and you don’t turn down free airfare, five-star hotel accommodations, and all food and entertainment included. I get that, and I was not then, nor am I now, ungrateful for the opportunity to return to the islands and enjoy a fantastic family vacation. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there is a tiny little part of me that is still disappointed that Jack and I didn’t get to share that concert-going experience.

I have seen Rush numerous times throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but this was different. The band was playing Moving Pictures in its entirety, I was taking my kiddo with me, we had killer seats from the pre-sale, and the band was taping the show for release on DVD and Blu-Ray. I have never, to my knowledge, attended a show that has been officially released like that, and even though we weren’t at the show, you damn well better believe that Blu-Ray is on my Christmas list this year!

First Communion

David Lee Roth
29 September 1986: Richfield Coliseum, Richfield, Ohio

The first concert concert I attended was David Lee Roth at the Richfield Coliseum. I went to the show with Courtney. She was a few years older than me and had just moved to the school district. My dad was in the local Lions Club chapter and I believe Courtney’s dad joined when they moved to our area. I seem to recall meeting her at one of our dads’ Lions Club family functions.

My musical tastes and my parents’ rarely cross, but especially then. My older sister Karen was into popular music – I remember her going to Rick Springfield and Jack Wagner and Corey Hart concerts in high school, all pretty tame. I am, however, grateful for the music Karen exposed me to and my subsequent appreciation for early ’80s pop music. From there, though, I moved on to a cocktail of hard rock and classic rock, a fairly natural progression for mid-’80s Midwestern adolescent. Rush, Boston, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, The Doors, Mötley Crüe, Led Zeppelin, and, of course, Van Halen.

I was a huge Van Halen fan in middle school and early high school. While I was ok with the Van Hagar incarnation (and saw them a couple of years later headline the Monsters of Rock Tour), it was the original lineup that always made me giddy. And, although Diamond Dave’s output took a nosedive after Eat ‘Em and Smile, that first solo album was a lot of fun.

With the Eat ‘Em and Smile concert just days before my sixteenth birthday and that I was going with someone older my parents seemed to trust, they relented and let me go. I don’t remember too much about the concert, to be honest. I vaguely remember the glam (now seemingly camp) metal group Cinderella opening for Roth. They had a few songs with videos that were in fairly heavy rotation on MTV that were up my alley at the time.

The now-long gone Richfield Coliseum was a cinderblock affair set in the middle of nowhere, about 20 miles south of Cleveland, and the only venue in Northeast Ohio outside of the Blossom Music Center amphitheater nearby in Cuyahoga Falls. These venues would be the site of the bulk of my mainstream concert-going activities until discovering modern rock/college radio acts in the late ’80s and the smaller downtown Cleveland stages they hung about.

Courtney got our tickets. Our seats were probably about two-thirds of the way down the floor, on an aisle, next to the front corner of the mixing board. The metal folding chair may or may not have been red cushioned, but even 25 years later I can recall that feeling of heady excitement standing on the deathtrap, straining for the best possible view of Diamond Dave while doing my best to not lose my balance and be eaten by the chair Snoopy style à la A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Much like Cinderella’s set, I couldn’t tell you specifics about what Roth and his band played that night. I don’t remember any of Steve Vai’s solos or Billy Sheehan’s playing. What I do remember was being struck by the somehow intimate experience of sharing the night with 20,000 strangers. And that communal feeling extended beyond the night of the show. I remember buying my first concert t-shirt and wearing it to school the next day. I was suddenly in a club – exclusive to those that had been to a rock show, a concert at the Coliseum. I had credibility of sorts. It was a very cool feeling.

I lost track of Courtney quickly after she graduated, but I will always be grateful for her role in finally getting me to my first rock show.

I may not be a huge David Lee Roth fan these days, but that first experience of witnessing music I love live – the raw power, the transcending energy, the sense of community – was transformative. For a kid to whom music was so important to anyway, the live experience forever altered how I both perceive and listen to music.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

David Bowie
20 June 1990: Richfield Coliseum, Richfield, Ohio

Before moving to Central Florida in August 1990, I had some incredible concert-going experiences growing up in Northeast Ohio. By virtue of my connections at the record store I worked at, I knew the box office manager of the Richfield Coliseum, the main concert venue in Northeast Ohio at the time (and the home of the Cleveland Cavaliers from 1974 until they moved to Gund Arena – now Quicken Loans Arena – 20 years later). So I had connections for good concert seats, and I took advantage of the opportunity twice: once for front-row, center seats for the Cure’s Prayer Tour on August 29, 1989, and again for David Bowie’s Sound + Vision Tour on June 20, 1990.

This was at a time when it wasn’t easy to get pictures at a show; you didn’t have cameras built into your cell phones. Hell, you didn’t have cell phones. I attended the Bowie show with the box office manager, and snuck in a camera (he knew I was doing it). During the latter half of the show I pulled out the camera and snapped off a quick picture. Almost immediately, security started towards me, intent on confiscating the camera, but a member of Bowie’s road crew who we had befriended at the front of the stage intervened and called off the security dogs. I was then free to snap as many shots as I wanted. At one point, the road crew guy even motioned for Bowie to come up and pose directly in front of me, resulting in some spectacular photos (the best ones are below) – and I can only imagine how much more impressive the photos would be if I’d had a half-way decent camera at the time.

During the encore, after I had blown through the entire roll of film (yes, film), Bono joined Bowie on stage for an incredible rendition of “Jean Genie” mixed with Van Morrison’s “Gloria”. I do wish I’d had film left in the camera, but I was so mesmerized by the fact that not only was I staring Bowie in the face but also Bono, I probably wouldn’t have been able to take a good picture.

After the show, we chatted with Bowie’s road crew some more, and I was able to snag the setlist directly off the stage. I have kept that setlist, along with the guitar pick, ticket stub, photos, and negatives from that night in a cigar box for 20 years. Recently, all these memories and the desire to dig out the physical evidence of that long ago night were stirred up by a Twitter conversation with friends and couldn’t be ignored.

I tried directly scanning the negatives into our photo software, but couldn’t get a clean print, so I ended up scanning some of the photos I had developed two decades ago directly into the computer. At the time I took the photos, I had no idea about photo composition or lighting or the proper use of a flash, and considering the quality of camera I probably had, it’s a miracle any of the photos came out at all. A couple of them are horrible, but a handful, amazingly, actually look pretty good.

When I have mentioned attending the Sound + Vision Tour to older Bowie fans and rock snobs in the years since, I’m often met with derision, but seeing Bowie that night with his then-musical director Adrian Belew, and a Bono encore... well, that was religion to me.

(As a cool side note, five-and-a-half years before I would meet her, my wife was also in the house that night, taking in the show from the rafters seats.)