It's A Long Way To The Top .. Turn The Page

[Lucas]

My high-school Music teacher went with a bunch of friends to see Frank Zappa in the early 70s.

The opening band was Mahavishnu Orchestra, who apparently played with such brilliance and intensity that many of the audience left after their opening set, excited and satisfied.

My teacher and his friends took off, despite being Zappa fans, and went to the nearest record store and bought whatever Mahavishu they could find. Music nerds...

Let me just check this out before I hit “post”...yep, they played 11 shows together around May ‘73, and passed thru Toronto.

 

VT, that is great ... I'll remember this the next time some stick in the ass Zappa fan tells me how much Kiss sucks

 

Can you imagine Kiss fans in the 1970s leaving the building before they played ?!?!

 

[toymaker]

Opening bands I've seen with Rush include Red Rider, FM, Chalk Circle, Voivod, Tragically Hip, I Mother Earth . . . the only bands people around me didn't seem too impressed with were Chalk Circle and Voivod - but I don't recall any audience rudeness. These shows were all in Canada.

[Syrinx]

A thread with quotes, stories, and photos about the hardships of the road, concerts gone wrong, dealing with less-than-enthusiastic fans might be interesting ..

 

 

Johnny Ramone:

“On July 2, 1979, we played on a bill with Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Johnny Winter, AC/DC, and Nazareth to a crowd of forty-six thousand people in Toronto…I saw the other bands we were playing with and I thought, “This isn’t gonna work.” I complained to Premier, our booking agency, about it, and they said, ‘We’ve been in the business a long time, we know what we’re doing’…

 

“About five or six songs into the set, the whole crowd stood up, and I thought it had started to rain. Dee Dee thought the same thing, but they were throwing stuff at us – sandwiches, bottles, everything. Then, all of a sudden, I broke two strings on my guitar in one strum. I thought it was a sign from God to get off the stage, because I’d rarely break a string, maybe once a year. So I just walked to the front of the stage, stopped playing, and gave the audience the finger – with both hands. I stood there like that, flipping them off, with both hands out, and walked off. The rest of the band kept playing for another ten or fifteen seconds until they’d realized I was walking off, and then they did too. I wasn’t gonna stand there and be booed and have stuff thrown at us without retaliating in some way. We had to come off looking good somehow, and there was no good way to get out of that.”

 

http://www.feelnumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ramones-Canadian-World-Music-Festival-Toronto-July-2-1979.jpg

I was at this show and remember this vividly. It was the Canadian World Music Festival. Rush seating. We slept overnight and ran the full length of the football field at CNE Stadium to get close to the stage. The Ramones weren't the only band to have the crowd throwing thngs. Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes had a similar experience if I remember correctly. The crowd was definitely into Ted Nugent / Aerosmith. And I loved and still do, the Ramones. But it was the wrong bill for them.

 

Thanks Syrinx, that must have been quite an experience - both the show itself with all those bands and the reaction to The Ramones and SSJ

 

Man I am somewhere in that crowd up front. A little too blurry to make out faces, but it brings back some great memories!