12/7/22
Newsletter #181
The Crack of Dawn
In 1975 my late buddy Jim and I went and saw the Rolling Stones at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Having read a number of books about the Rolling Stones I know that they considered their 1975 tour a the low point of the group, and their worst tour. They did have Billy Preston with them on keyboards and he was terrific. Jim and I were trying to smoke some messy, disgusting crap called honey oil that was all over our hands and faces. As the sold-out crowd waited for the show to start, beach balls and frisbees were sailing back and forth across the stadium. Jim said, “I’d love to catch a frisbee.” At that exact moment a frisbee nailed him in the bridge of his nose causing him to scream in pain. Having bounced off Jim’s face, someone in another row caught the frisbee. Jim was in serious pain, touching his nose and looking at his hand to see if he was bleeding. I, meanwhile, was laughing so hard I thought I’d have a stroke. I said, “ask and ye shall receive.”
In 1980 my late friend Rick – I certainly have a number of tardy friends – discovered rock & roll music at the age of 30. Rick was a movie fan to the exclusion of everything else, except Broadway. But he didn’t know any rock songs, unless they appeared in movies. Then he saw the documentary, No Nukes (1980), which is an unexceptional rock concert movie with 20 astounding minutes of Bruce Springsteen at his very best. It just so happened that the day of the No Nukes concert was Bruce’s 30th birthday. My buddy Rick completely fell madly in love with Bruce Springsteen. I already liked Bruce, but it was odd watching my fully-grown friend who had always had disdain for rock & roll become a full-blown Bruce Springsteen groupie. He went back to the little movie theater on Sunset Blvd. where No Nukes showed for about two months every single night and the folks at the theater let him come in and watch the 20 minutes of Bruce for free. I went with him a couple of times. It’s a terrific concert clip of Bruce, but watching Rick in almost orgiastic awe was hysterical.
So, like an anthropologist, Rick concluded that maybe this rock & roll thing wasn’t as bad as he thought it was and perhaps deserved a bit more investigation. He concluded that since the Rolling Stones were the biggest rock band they would give him a clear indication of what rock was like, without Bruce Springsteen. The concert was at the L.A. Coliseum that holds 100,000 people. It was standing room only down on the field, no seats, and people were jammed in together like a Japanese subway train. Rick said that it was all basically white male and female shit-kickers who were all noisy, loud, drunk and pushing to the point where it seemed dangerous. Rick had never been in such a crush of a crowd, and he found a tad frightening. The opening act was an utterly unknown band that Mick Jagger had discovered called Prince. The drunk, smashed-in crowd became so obnoxious and impatient for the Stones that they threw their beer bottles at Prince and booed him off the stage. Rick was both astonished and horrified by this behavior.
The Rolling Stones came out and Mick rightly ripped the crowd a new asshole, telling them they’d just missed an amazing performer. Then the Stones did their show. And Rick, who was righteously gay, became deeply befuddled. As far as he could see, Mick Jagger was nothing more than a British queen, so why were these straight white kids getting so excited? He found the whole thing distasteful, and never went back to a rock concert, except Bruce, who he never missed.
I had a great day yesterday and I intend to do it again today.