Not counting acts like local bands in bars, or city festivals with bands rotating on and off makeshift stages during the day, I’ve seen about 90 live performances by bands and solo artists on tour around the U.S. I say about, because I know there’s likely an unmemorable opening act or two I’ve forgotten along the way. 90 is as close as my memory allows me to get, but it’s close enough to the right number for me to feel like the list I keep on my hard drive is accurate. I count every performance separately, so opening acts get their own spot on the list just like the headliners.
A top ten was tough to come up with. I started with the idea of a top five, but that was hopeless. Even at ten, there were a few that seemed impossible to leave off the list, but I closed my eyes and made the brutal final cuts. The last three to go still deserve a mention. U2 playing at Fountain Street Church in 1981 was as close to the action as I’ve gotten at a show. I stood in front, leaning against the stage (ducking Adam Clayton’s bass when he would step forward and swing it back and forth) and even received one of the handshakes Bono was spreading around during the show. A Bad Company show in L.A. in 1976 featured an fairly unknown band named Kansas as the opening act, who were introduced to the stage, curiously, by Don Knotts. Bad Company’s encore featured a long, bluesy jam with their two surprise guests (and Swan Song label bosses) Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. And maybe hardest to leave off the list, a truly spectacular double bill of My Morning Jacket and Pearl Jam in 2006. Two incredible bands at the peak of their live prowess, playing to a crowd that roared their appreciation for every song. Exactly what a rock concert should be.
I missed some along the way, to be sure. Just off the top of my head, I would have loved to see Lou Reed somewhere along the way, in whatever style he was performing at the time. Pink Floyd, before Roger Waters left, would have really been something memorable. I’ve seen Neil Young but never with Crazy Horse. A classic lineup Anderson/Howe/Squire/Wakeman version of Yes seems like it would have been great fun, too. Several of the artists on my list I simply would have liked to have seen a bunch more times. Ranking the final list in order of preference wasn’t working at all, so I’m going to run through them in chronological order.
• Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: St. Paul Civic Center 1977 - Attending this show meant traveling from the U.P. to the Twin Cities in full-on February winter weather, sliding around in the box of a pickup truck with a cap on it, but no heat. The truck’s driver and co-pilot were in the cab, indulging in a frightful array of illicit substances, so I was expecting a rollover at any time – both ways. But yeah, it was totally worth it.
It’s fair to say that Bruce’s fan base became rabid over the years more for his live performances than his albums. I had seen a small number of concerts before this one, mostly bands setting up in a big open room designed for some other use and playing out their setlist with cool-looking colored lights flashing overhead. Springsteen’s show was the first I saw in a room specifically designed and acoustically treated for music performances. The clarity and power of the sound hit me like a hammer from the opening line of the first song, "Night." Bruce was fighting his manager in court at the time, so he was legally barred from playing any of the new songs that would eventually be on his Darkness on the Edge of Town album. The setlist focused on his first three records and a handful of terrific covers (the Animals’ “It’s My Life” was a particular highlight), and that worked splendidly for me. Springsteen’s shows, then and now, are a spellbinding combination of joyous rock & roll and dynamic tension-and-release theater. The perfect pacing of the setlist, Bruce’s high-energy, 100% committed performance, and the dramatic beauty of the accompanying light show was a level of rock music showmanship I had definitely never seen before and only rarely since.
• Al Stewart: Houston Music Hall 1978 – I thought this show was a mistake. When my pal and I were walking to the Music Hall, tickets in hand, I looked at another small theater across the street and saw Keith Jarrett’s name on the marquee, one of his inimitable improvised solo piano shows was scheduled for the same evening. But we shrugged (my friend wasn’t nearly as interested in Mr. Jarrett as I was) and went to the show we came downtown for. I don’t know how Keith’s performance went over that night, but the one I saw was spectacular.
Al was riding high at the time, Year of the Cat had sold a gazillion copies two years before, and the show I was there to see was in support of his almost equally successful follow-up, Time Passages. I was in the room because I had already discovered his overlooked gem from 1973, Past, Present, and Future, and was hoping he'd play at least a cut or two from that record. And he did, but I’ll get to that in a second.
Al’s band was jaw-droppingly great, let’s start there. Five musicians, not counting the star, including a saxophonist and a strikingly beautiful woman with long, blond hair, who stood next to Al at the front of the stage. She was there mainly to provide backup vocals and rattle and shake an array of percussion instruments, and I could barely take my eyes off her. All of the songs, including the huge radio hits, were played with a little added room in the arrangements so the musicians could stretch out and show off a bit, and their interplay was amazing all evening long. “Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages” morphed from catchy soft-rock hits into beautiful, jazzy, exploratory wonders in a live setting. I had almost forgotten why I was there in the first place by the time the band took a brief set break halfway through.
When they came back, a deep dive into Side 2 of Past, Present, and Future took up most of the second set. They started set two with a long version of the trippy folk-rock of “Roads to Moscow,” complete with projected images of World War II combat on the Russian front as a backdrop. A jammed-out “Nostradamus” mid-set approached Grateful Dead-level exploration before slamming back into the song’s wonderful chorus, and they ended the show with a crunching version of “Terminal Eyes,” one of the hardest, and catchiest, rockers in his catalog. By that point, I was out of my seat and bouncing around like everybody else in the smallish hall.
I knew there would be an encore coming, as we stood there stomping and yelling in the dark, but I couldn’t imagine what they could still have left up their sleeves. It turned out Al was done singing for the night after “Terminal Eyes.” They closed the show by bringing the sax player to the front for a long, jazzy version of Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” A perfect last song for a pretty much perfect show. The thought of the Keith Jarrett show across the street didn’t enter my head again for several days after.
• Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: The Castle, Charlevoix 1981 – One of the best shows I’ve ever seen in easily the most uncomfortable venue on my entire list. The scorching sun and 100+-degree heat of the Cotton Bowl in 1978 seems like a walk in the park by comparison. I can’t claim to know what the history of The Castle is, just outside one of Michigan’s prettiest resort towns, all I know is its original use was not likely music concerts. There’s the castle itself, a somewhat rundown-looking brown stone building in the middle of a field, a few non-descript outbuildings scattered around, and a stage sort of attached to one end of the main building, looking like a total afterthought. There were no seats provided for the crowd, just a bunch of what looked like metal handrails winding through the audience area, god knows why. Lots of people tried to sit on them, but narrow metal bars won out over jeans-clad butts pretty quickly, and that idea was abandoned. Remember the line from Young Frankenstein “it could be worse; it could be raining?" It was, and raining hard the whole evening, the ground below our feet was a mud bath, so sitting was out, too.
Thankfully, once the show started there was no need. There was no sitting once Tom and the band took the stage. I had the good luck to see Tom and the Heartbreakers a half dozen times over the years, and they were always fabulous shows. Tom’s charisma from the stage had to be seen to be believed, you just couldn’t take your eyes off of him as he prowled around. But this was a tour where Tom and the band had a bit of a chip on their shoulders. The album they were touring for, Hard Promises, did well sales-wise, but not at the level of their breakthrough Damn the Torpedoes. There was some premature “have they peaked?” discussion happening in the music press at the time, and Tom had just come out of a protracted battle with his record company to keep the list price of Hard Promises away from the price hike MCA had just announced for their top tier artists’ new releases. I’ve always suspected that fight (that Tom eventually won) is one of the reasons MCA was booking him into less-than-desirable venues like The Castle, but I don’t know that for sure.
Of all of the shows I saw from these guys, this was the most intense, rocking, dramatic, and memorable. Tom wore a checked flannel shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, looking like he could have stepped out of the crowd to take the stage. The Heartbreakers ripped through their two-hour setlist of giant crowd-pleasers, deeper album cuts, and well-chosen covers with unstoppable energy and sublime musicianship, guitarist Mike Campbell nearly stealing the show, like he nearly always did. The encore performance of the R&B classic “Shout” made the raucous version captured in Animal House seem like a tea social by comparison. A final huge explosion of great music, great vibes, and great theater before we were all left to slosh and stumble through the mud to our cars.
• Rolling Stones: Silverdome, Pontiac 1981 – I’ve seen the Stones twice in my life and, in a way, the performances were like watching two different bands. The Pontiac show was my first time, I wouldn’t see them again until Desert Trip weekend, 35 years later. The 2016 version of the Stones on stage was exciting and satisfying fun. Over the years they’ve added more musicians on stage to flesh out the sound, and a musical director, Chuck Leavell, who has brilliantly sculpted the live arrangements of their classic songs and gotten the band to rehearse a lot more, so everybody hits their lighting and camera cues. The Stones still rock the house every time with their untouchable back catalog, and they do it in a larger-than-life kinda way. I’ve come to think of them as rock’s greatest traveling circus.
In 1981, they still showed signs of an earlier, more ragged version of themselves. Bill Wyman was still on bass and the only musicians onstage besides the main five were a keyboardist and somebody to play the sax on a couple of songs. They leaned heavily on Charlie Watts to give them a beat to follow to start the next song, while rest of the guys kind of haphazardly fell in line to get the song rolling (no pun intended.) It wasn’t unusual for a song to show signs of falling apart a bit while they were playing it, but they had an impressive ability to grab it back by the reins and drive it home. Every damn time. Being less dependent on specific cues than they are today, their songs could expand or contract, be played slower or faster, depending on the mood of a particular show. Some of the songs they played that were new at the time – “Hang Fire,” Keith’s “Little T&A” - sounded a little under-rehearsed, maybe, but it gave them a fire and edginess that’s been lost a bit with the tighter modern version of the band. Unlike today, the Stones’ setlist in ‘81 included a couple of open-ended songs, with space available to spontaneously jam them out in whatever direction that particular show seemed to inspire. The long versions of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” and Some Girls' “Miss You” in particular, were the show’s transcendent moments for me. They still had the opportunity to go off-script in those days, to just jam as the ridiculously talented group of musicians they are. I would still highly recommend that you see a current show if you can (as of this writing, they’re planning another tour), they remain an outsized spectacle unlike anybody else and, y’know, history, but it’s the walking-a-high-wire-without-a-net thrill of the 1981 version of the band that gives it a slight edge for me.
• Rickie Lee Jones: Royal Oak Music Theater 1984 – I remember the theater being a real pain in the ass to find, driving around the Detroit suburbs looking for the right marquee, trying to find parking once it was spotted, and finally getting inside slightly after the show had started. A rider in Rickie Lee’s contract didn’t allow for people coming or going while she was playing, apparently, so we had to wait in the lobby until she finished her first song. I wasn’t in the best of moods when we finally took our seats, but Ms. Jones and her incredible band blew the bad vibes away in a hurry.
There were ten people in that band - backup vocalists, horns, a second keyboardist when Rickie Lee played guitar at center stage – and their big sound was impressively nuanced and agile. Instruments dropped in and out of the arrangements, from whispered accompaniment on delicate ballads like “Skeletons” and Tom Waits’ wonderful “Rainbow Sleeves,” to full-throated horns and voices on “Danny’s All-Star Joint” and “Jukebox Fury.”
What made the show so memorable for me was the setlist. I could have chosen it myself if I'd been asked what I was dying to see her play. My absolute favorites from her first three albums made an appearance, including everything from side one of Pirates, my favorite of her records to this day. “Chuck E’s in Love,” “Danny’s,” “Young Blood,” and “Company” from the debut. I had my fingers crossed for some of my favorite Rickie Lee cover versions and she played them all. Besides “Rainbow Sleeves” she ticked off “My Funny Valentine,” “Walk Away Renee,” and “Lush Life” from my bucket list. It was a fully immersive, completely satisfying concert, and I can still recall it vividly all these years later. (From what I looked up online when that became a thing, it seems likely that the song I missed by being late was “It Must Be Love” from The Magazine, the album she was supporting on that tour. Damn.)
Part two of this list will be five shows between 1986 and 2017. I’m not including the small handful of shows I attended that were solo performances – just the artist and an instrument or two. They were all pretty damn great and I intend to give them their own list down the road.
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