Russ I
Well-Known Member
I was listening to Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die and thinking back to my first concert experience, and thought it might be fun to hear from others about the first time you went to a live show.
I’ve looked this up to verify the date. My first concert was Traffic in 1972 at the Long Island Arena in Commack, New York. I would have been 15, in 10th grade, and as wild as it seems to me now, I went with my “girlfriend” at the time, who was a year or two younger than me. We must have gone with her older sibling or something, because I know we weren’t there with parents. To that point in my life I probably had been raised on British-invasion music (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Herman’s Hermits) along with the likes of The Monkees, Tommy James & the Shondells, and whatever else would have been playing on local radio stations. In that context, Traffic’s music was a world unto itself and unlike anything I’d ever heard before. The horns were a big part of that, but I think it was more the somewhat jazzy/psychedelic nature of the music, because I was familiar with Chicago's sound, but that was much more mainstream. To be honest, I probably wasn’t very impressed at the time, but something definitely stuck because I love Traffic's sound and 2 or 3 of their records are all-time favorites of mine. What I could find online indicates that J.J .Cale would have opened the show; I definitely don’t remember that!
As I think back on this I feel like I can still connect to how new and different the experience was, but it would be only a matter of a couple of years before friends and I were frequenting shows at the Nassau Coliseum, ducking down in our cars in the parking lot to hide from security while we passed around our joints, and hoped the fucking Viet Nam war would end before we were old enough for our numbers to be called!
So what was your first concert and what do you remember about it?
I’ve looked this up to verify the date. My first concert was Traffic in 1972 at the Long Island Arena in Commack, New York. I would have been 15, in 10th grade, and as wild as it seems to me now, I went with my “girlfriend” at the time, who was a year or two younger than me. We must have gone with her older sibling or something, because I know we weren’t there with parents. To that point in my life I probably had been raised on British-invasion music (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Herman’s Hermits) along with the likes of The Monkees, Tommy James & the Shondells, and whatever else would have been playing on local radio stations. In that context, Traffic’s music was a world unto itself and unlike anything I’d ever heard before. The horns were a big part of that, but I think it was more the somewhat jazzy/psychedelic nature of the music, because I was familiar with Chicago's sound, but that was much more mainstream. To be honest, I probably wasn’t very impressed at the time, but something definitely stuck because I love Traffic's sound and 2 or 3 of their records are all-time favorites of mine. What I could find online indicates that J.J .Cale would have opened the show; I definitely don’t remember that!
As I think back on this I feel like I can still connect to how new and different the experience was, but it would be only a matter of a couple of years before friends and I were frequenting shows at the Nassau Coliseum, ducking down in our cars in the parking lot to hide from security while we passed around our joints, and hoped the fucking Viet Nam war would end before we were old enough for our numbers to be called!
So what was your first concert and what do you remember about it?
