This three night stint with the Grateful Dead in May, 1980 is a blur, as it should be I suppose.

Franklin’s Tower

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GQ

I would go see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young at any venue and in any configuration so this Graham Nash solo concert was interesting and unusual at the time. I sat in the loge section to the right of the stage and my thoughts at the time were that this was Nash doing his “ Neil Young” thing. I can recall Graham Nash sitting solo at the piano with harmonica and I know that I enjoyed the show at the time. Years later I attended Town Hall in Manhattan to see Graham Nash with band perform two albums in their entirety. I do not always agree with Graham’s politics but I am one of those guys that believes everyone is entitled to their opinion (even if it is wrong). At one point fairly early on in the concert during his between song chatter, Nash said “The NYPD murdered Eric Garner” which took me aback and instantly put me in a foul mood. I think everyone would agree Eric Garner’s death was a tragedy but it was not murder; and to say that the “New York City Police Department” murdered Mr. Garner is just wrong and inflammatory. The Town Hall was pretty quiet after he made his remark and my wife and I were just a few rows back from the left side of the stage so if I had shouted something Nash most certainly would have heard me. My wife would have walked out when Graham went out of his way to demonize the great men and women of the NYPD but when you attend a Graham Nash concert you go expecting some political commentary so I grimaced and watched the rest of the show a little pissed off. While I do love the man and his music, I will always regret not having yelled “it was a tragedy but not murder” to Graham Nash that night.

Songs for Beginners

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GQ

I never really listened to any Pat Travers Band music but I had one of his albums which were almost more known for the inventive album covers which were always interesting. I really have no recollection of this Palladium concert but I did see the Pat Travers Band many years later at The Space in Westbury, a fairly odd venue which is a former movie theatre converted for multiple purposes to include live music events. The Westbury show was a Groupon grab and it was not well attended allowing me to enter late and walk right to the front of the stage dead center. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the show and Pat Travers can wail on guitar.
The Good Rats were a pretty successful band working the Long Island club scene in the late 1970’s along with Zebra and, of course, Twisted Sister. The Good Rats were never really my bag but they had a couple of songs that you heard on the radio and they drew large crowds so it was always a good night out.

Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights)

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GQ

Bridge of Sighs

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GQ

The 70’s were a wild ride for Aerosmith and it ended at some point with the band’s break up and guitarist Joe Perry starting a new solo venture apart from the iconic hard rock band from Boston. The first Joe Perry Project album was pretty good; in fact good enough that later on Aerosmith recorded “ Let the Music Do the Talking”. Joe Perry exudes lead guitar swagger and chops and the new project was kicking ass at My Father’s Place in Roslyn. Perry’s new frontman could sing but he was no Steven Tyler. It’s funny how some have the chops but not the persona; like a Myles Kennedy from Slash’s band when away from Gun ‘N’ Roses, the Joe Perry Project front man just made you appreciate Steven Tyler more. Years later I read somewhere that this My Father’s Place gig was the last concert that the Joe Perry Project ever played together. It was a good Saturday night of hard rock and roll to be sure at the intimate setting called My Father’s Place.

Check out YouTube when Steven Tyler joins the band this night to play “Walk This Way”.

Once a Rocker, Always a Rocker

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GQ

Next up on the rock and roll itinerary was the extreme polar opposite to the Pink Floyd arena spectacle known as “ The Wall”. Iggy Pop, famously of the Stooges, played the cozy confines of My Father’s Place in Roslyn with its table seating in stark contrast to having seen Pink Floyd at the Nassau Coliseum. A group of us occupied a long table facing the left of the stage and when the explosive bundle of energy known as Iggy Pop hit the stage we had a great view dangerously close to the action. I say “ dangerously close” because Iggy Pop was the real deal with a violent no frills stage persona who would even roll over broken glass with no shirt on to incite a reaction from the audience. Iggy was singing a song with his band when Mike’s friend Doug decided it would be a good idea o give Mr. Pop the middle finger. Now under ordinary concert circumstances this would not seem to be a big deal, except we were close enough to the stage that Doug caught Iggy Pop’s attention. And it was not a quick flip of the bird; it was table seating and Doug was standing for what seemed like a long time while Iggy stared him down with the middle finger seemingly a mere few inches from Pop’s nose. Some of us tried to tell Doug to knock it off but he insisted that Iggy “liked it”. From the look on Iggy’s face he did not appear to enjoy the exchange as much as Doug thought he would, to the point that I began to think it was not improbable with Pop’s well documented somewhat erratic performance behavior that he could leap off the stage onto our table and begin to beat the crap out of his newfound nemesis. Why it did not end that way is still a bit of a mystery but Pop performed through the audience member’s seeming disrespect, heightened emotions, antagonism and somehow through all this all ended well for us and Mr. Pop.

Lust for Life

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GQ

The album cover for Pink Floyd’s epic masterpiece “The Wall” gave us a clue as to what the concerts might become. The 1980 “World Tour” consisted of dates in Los Angelos and at the Nassau Coliseum; that’s it. We somehow picked up tickets for two nights and while in the Coliseum parking lot for one of them we met a couple of guys who had traveled by train from Canada without tickets to the concert in hopes of somehow seeing the Pink Floyd show. While hanging out with them in the parking lot, someone had made a connection with a ticket taker at the Coliseum entrance who was letting people in for fifty bucks, so we sold our seats dead center in the upper deck to our new Canadian friends for a hundred dollars each, as there were no extra tickets to be had anywhere that night. The happy Canadians agreed to sneak our beers into the Coliseum in their backpack and off we went to slip the usher some cash and attend the show. Amazingly it was a flawless transaction, and since we now had no seats, we set off to track down our new friends to recover our beer. As luck would have it, there were two empty seats right next to them, where we were supposed to sit, and we then drank our beers and watched the show right next to our original spots with our new friends. “The Wall album and concerts are the stuff of legend, state of the art at the time, and one of the best shows of any kind that I have ever attended. Surround sound, air planes traveling above us from the ceiling and flying towards the stage, animation projected onto the white bricks that were constructed throughout the show eventually completely blocking the audience’s view of the band until the wall came down and became stage rubble. It was my first time seeing Pink Floyd and any hope for a “greatest hits” set were annihilated by the sight of the intentional debris onstage. It was brilliant and it was the next great theatrical progression after Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps” tour made the concert industry take notice on what would become possible in presenting rock and roll to mass audiences. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” has been presented in various forms, formats and with various lineups since then, but nothing will ever surpass the original concerts that were presented to a fortunate select few on this extremely limited American tour.

The Thin Ice

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GQ

Now this concert is a bit of an oddball as I was so impressed with the venue, I decided to take a chance and see a band I had never heard of at the Bottom Line, namely the Fabulous Poodles. There would be a number of Bottom Line shows through the years to include Lou Reed, Joan Jett and an Andy Warhol sighting, but more on those another time.

Roll Your Own

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GQ

The 1980’s began for me with a trek into New York City that brought us to West 4th Street in Manhattan and the legendary Bottom Line for the first time. The Bottom Line was an extremely cool and intimate venue with table seating and standing room at the bar. Guitar slinger Rick Derringer followed up a stint playing with Edgar Winter’s White Trash and embarked an a fairly successful solo career. Somewhat amazingly while playing around on YouTube I discovered a good quality audio recording of this very Derringer concert at the Bottom Line which is an interesting archival find and worth a listen.

Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo

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GQ

The 1970’s concert run ended for me appropriately enough at the Nassau Coliseum with the Allman Brothers Band and Pure Prairie League.
The 50th anniversary of the Allman Brothers Band was commemorated in March, 2020 with an outstanding night of music performed at Madison Square Garden with the surviving members of the iconic band calling themselves The Brothers for what turned out to be a one-off. This was the last rock and roll concert in New York City before the pandemic shut down live music as we knew it and the last show that I have attended for what will be a year very soon. New York and New Jersey have begun to allow fans to attend arena and stadium events at a limited capacity so things may be looking up. What this will mean for the summer concert season and touring is anyone’s guess at this point but at least it would seem that we are finally headed in the right direction.

Stay well rock and rollers………..

The Road Goes on Forever

Whipping Post

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GQ