Not a concert review

I saw The Pretenders last night. Great stuff. I can't go to a concert without a whirl of past concert experiences going through my head. Maybe it's because I've been to so many concerts but not so many lately. I saw pretty much every major band of the 60's 70's and 80's except for the Beatles and the Stones. Don't know why I never saw the Stones, but I never did. My first rock concert was the Credence Clearwater Revival, the great late 60's hit machine (if you've heard John Fogarty, he was the lead singer and wrote the songs). It was at Madison Square Garden and I went with my mom. I was 13 I think. My mom liked the concert okay but she preferred the opening band, a terrific group called Booker T and MGs.

I had a number of great concert experiences. They used to have summer concerts in Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park. It was subsidized by the city and tickets were $4 for the front section and $2 for the back section- all general admission. The only way to get tickets was to line up for a couple of hours at one of a half dozen places in the city that sold them- Ticketmaster didn't exist at the time. My place was the A&S department store in downtown Brooklyn. I'd go and buy as many as I could afford.

The best of these was Blondie and Rockpile. Blondie was of course one of the top bands of their day. Rockpile was a kind of new wave/rockabilly supergroup featuring Dave Edmunds, best known for his hit "Trouble Boys" and Nick Lowe, performer of "Pure Pop For Now People," one of the greatest new wave albums of the late 70's. Blondie's current hit was "One Way or Another" and we heard them sound check it a dozen times while we stood on line a dozen times to get in. It's still stuck in my head to this day. Blondie played a fantastic 2 hour show, but Rockpile, limited to the 45 minute allocation opening bands got, blew them off the stage, highlighted by a song called "Crawling From the Wreckage" which still maybe my favorite concert song ever.

A few years later, after I'd finished business school and moved back to New York, I learned about Ron Delsner's ticket club. Ron Delsner produced pretty much every major concert in the New York area in the 80's and if you paid him $100 it gave you the right to buy 2 or 4 tickets to every show he produced. They were usually the best seats in the venue and the only catch was that there weren't very many of them, so you had to go to his office on Wednesday, the day new tickets came in, and haggle with Ron's irritable sister, Harriet, to get tickets to as many shows as you could. We saw lots of great stuff though that club.

My favorite thing was the Concerts at the Pier. They didn't do the Wollman Rink concers anymore, but they had a similar general admission arrangement at one of the west side Manhattan piers. So how did the club give you the best seats in a general admission arrangement? We all got in at the same time, but the regular customers would enter through a gate on the north side of the pier, they would go almost the full length of the pier (about 100 yards), past the concessions stands, and then back toward the stage and seating which was all the way back on the street end of the south side of the pier. Club members would enter through a small gate on the south side next to the stage and walk right into the seating area. So we would walk in, pick our seats, sit down and then watch 1000+ people dash 100 yards out and 100 yards back and scramble for seats. This was really fun.

Enough for now. I'll write about the concert itself later.