The Power And The Glory -- The Rock Concert Turns 40

Patrick MacDonald has been covering rock concerts for 30 years, starting as a teenager with The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1962 and, after a three-year stint as a disc jockey, continuing with The Seattle Times, from 1972 to the present.

The lights go down. The crowd roars. And once again you get that tingly feeling deep inside, a feeling of anticipation, of excitement.

It might not be as intense as it was when you were 15 or 20, but it's still there. Four decades into its existence, the rock-concert experience still has the power to move you - to excite, charm, titilate, disgust, even transform you.

But rock concerts have changed over the years, becoming more sophisticated and technical. And the concert business is going through what could be called a midlife crisis. For the first time in its history, the business is retrenching rather than growing.

It is generally acknowledged that the first rock concert was 40 years ago - Alan Freed's Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland on March 21, 1952.

That show, featuring mostly black bands playing for a mostly white audience, presaged what was to become episodic in rock-concert history: The show had to be stopped when a riot started outside, because 25,000 fans showed up at an arena that had a legal capacity of 10,000.

Freed, the disc jockey who popularized the term "rock 'n' roll" (an old R&B euphemism for sex), was charged with deliberately overselling the event, but charges later were dropped.

Right off the bat, rock concerts were different. Of course, there had been rabid fans and wild concerts before rock appeared - bobbysoxers turned many a Sinatra concert into a melee, for instance. But rock concerts, from the beginning, have always been more than just what happens on stage.

A rock concert is a shared reality, a communion between performer and audience. The best of them are almost religious experiences. The level of communication becomes so intense that barriers are broken down. You feel one with the performers and the crowd. In that moment, nothing else matters. It's as if you're suspended in time.

And sometimes it's nothin' but a party. The shows where everybody in the hall is shaking to the music (the archetype is a Grateful Dead concert) can also be communal and bonding - a rhythm nation, in that time and place.

You have to go back to the beginning to understand how rock concerts are fundamentally different from other performance events. Rock 'n' roll emerged in the post-war period of the early 1950s, when society was changing rapidly. Rock expressed the technological advancements - through the relatively new instrument called the electric guitar - and the intensity and agitation of the Cold War, expressed in the tension of its rhythm. The music was forward-looking, a complete departure from what had come before. It was not the music of your parents. It was new, different, daring, revolutionary.

It became a bond among young people. It was our music, something we could share and celebrate. That communal feeling held on through the 1960s and '70s, until pop splintered into various genres in the '80s, as reflected in the varied radio formats we have today: hard rock, soft rock, dance music, alternative, country, rap, R&B and metal.

The first rock shows I remember go back to the mid-1950s. I'll never forget watching a rockabilly band at the West Seattle Hi-Yu summer celebration, performing on a flatbed truck in a parking lot near the Junction, our neighborhood shopping area. I had come upon the scene by accident, and stood there, straddling my bicycle, transfixed by the goings-on. To me, it was strange and exotic. I'd thought such music was only on the radio, or on records. The fact that it was live, right in my neighborhood, was a revelation.

Around that time, my friends and I used to hang around the back door of the gym at Hiawatha Playfield on evenings when they had teen dances there. Sometimes we'd hear rock bands practicing, or even playing the first song or two, before we had to get home. I can still hear a sax solo that came through that back door, honking and squealing, from a sock-hop.

The first rock show in Seattle is hard to pin down. Local rock historian Peter Blecha points out that bluesmen like T-Bone Walker, who influenced early rock, played here in the 1940s, as did R&B artists like Ray Charles (who lived here.) He says that a Centralia group called Clayton Watson & the Silhouettes were billed as "Washington's first rock group" in the early 1950s, but the claim is disputable.

Bill Haley & His Comets did a swing through the Northwest in 1955, playing military bases (including the Yakima Firing Range) and the Evergreen Ballroom in Olympia, but, strangely, not in Seattle. Northwest bands played legendary teen dance spots like the Spanish Castle and Parker's in the 1950s, in the early days of a rock scene that eventually spawned such great bands as the Sonics, the Wailers and the Kingsmen.

The first major rock show here may have been an appearance by Fats Domino at Eagles Auditorium in 1956, a concert I attended. It started as a segregated affair, with a scattering of whites on the main floor and a crowd of blacks in the balcony. But as the music intensified, those upstairs came down to the main floor to dance. By the end of the show, the whole crowd was rocking together. It was an exhilarating, liberating, unforgettable event for an 11-year-old Catholic schoolboy like me.

Fats returned the next year as one of the headliners in "The Big Show of Stars for 1957" at the old Orpheum Theater downtown (where the Westin Hotel now stands). The road show, which played two nights here (I attended both), also included Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Eddie Cochran, the Everly Brothers, LaVern Baker, Paul Anka and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers.

But the big rock event of that year was Elvis Presley's first show here, at the old Sick's Seattle Stadium, on the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 1, 1957, a day I will always remember. The King, in gold lame jacket, played for the then-largest concert crowd in Seattle history - 16,200, mostly screaming teenage girls. His set was short but powerful, concluding with a "Hound Dog" that ended with Elvis flat on his back.

After his final bow, he jumped off stage and ran to a waiting white Cadillac parked near second base, and it roared off through the outfield and out a back gate. The crowd broke through police barriers and rushed the stage. A girl grabbed the knocked-over but still-working microphone and screamed through sobs, "ELVIS TOUCHED IT! ELVIS TOUCHED IT!" As her words blasted through the sound system, other girls scooped up dirt he had trod on his way to the Cadillac.

The next big rock-concert events in Seattle were the visits by the Beatles to the Seattle Center Coliseum on Aug. 21, 1964, and for two shows on Aug. 25, 1966. They played for only a half-hour at each performance, and reportedly you couldn't hear them because of all the screaming.

In March of 1967, one of Seattle's most important rock venues, the Eagles Auditorium, was initiated with a daylong "Trips Festival." Bands, including the Seeds and the Daily Flash, played acid rock while washed in the pulsating, swirling colors of a light show, with occasional bursts of strobe light. It was one of the first drug-drenched events, with LSD and pot part of the experience. A "psychedelicatessen" sold green Jell-O, cold pickles and bananas with chocolate sauce. Tom Robbins presented a play called "Family Entertainment" in which four actors alternately intoned "mommy," "daddy," "bow-wow" and "I love you."

Through the rest of the '60s and most of the '70s, the Eagles - now part of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center - was our version of San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium. Many of the greats of the era played there. Among the memorable concerts: a mesmerizing show by the Doors in which Jim Morrison was in classic form, screaming and moaning and crawling on the stage; a marathon performance by the Grateful Dead that was photographed by the visiting Linda Eastman (later McCartney); an MC5 concert that was so loud, most of the audience was driven away; and the stunning American debut of a young Joe Cocker, which he has said was his greatest show ever.

The price for most Eagles shows was $4. When it was raised to $6, protesters picketed.

In retrospect, those were probably the glory days of Seattle rock shows. The Eagles was small and intimate, there were no seats so there was plenty of room to dance, the feeling was loose and partylike, and the peer security was low-key and friendly. This was before rock shows became Big Business. It was before the era of the mega-show. It was a time of innocence such as we will never see again.

The early rock festivals had that same innocent, unfettered feeling. The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair, held on a farm in Sultan from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2, 1968, didn't have many big-name acts - mostly Northwest rock and folk bands - but it was a delightful gathering of the tribes, a three-day picnic and dance in the country. The Seattle Pop Festival, in July 1969 - a month before Woodstock - was one of the finest such events ever held. The Woodinville site had plenty of room for camping, the event was smoothly run, and the lineup, featuring the Doors and Led Zeppelin back-to-back, was first-rate.

Jimi Hendrix's homecoming concert in 1968 at the Arena was a memorable but curious affair. Apparently because his parents and family were sitting in the front row, he toned down his act - although he did play guitar with his teeth, and behind his back. (Subsequent Hendrix shows were more wild, as he played to packed houses at the Coliseum in 1969 and Sick's Stadium in 1970.)

Before the show, I talked to him in his dressing room, after having met him earlier when he arrived at the airport. Hendrix was shy, quiet and almost formally polite offstage. In his dressing room, as he stood before his open wardrobe trunk, he put on his trademark bolero hat. I noticed a beautifully embroidered jacket in the trunk.

"Paul gave that to me," he said. Paul?

"Paul McCartney." On the inside of the jacket was an elaborately stitched monogram of the letters "PM."

The Paramount Theatre has been a major concert venue since the early 1970s. A beautifully preserved show palace of the vaudeville era, it's a great place to see a concert because of its comfortable seating and fine acoustics. The theater has been, and continues to be, the site of many great shows.

I'll always remember one by David Bowie in his "Ziggy Stardust" period, at which only a few hundred people showed up. After making us all gather around the stage, he presented a long, brilliant show, starting solo with just an acoustic guitar and ending with a full-blast Ziggy extravaganza.

Bruce Springsteen played two nights the same week he made the covers of both Time and Newsweek in 1975. His career was at a peak.

Bob Marley created magic with a reggae show that was positively messianic.

The Coliseum was once considered too big for music events, but now it seems just right compared with massive places like the Kingdome or the Tacoma Dome. The large open feeling of the Coliseum helps mitigate its steely coldness.

The Kingdome is terrible for music because it is too big and sound echoes all over. Only a few acts have played there, including Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney and New Kids on the Block.

The Tacoma Dome is fine, because it was acoustically planned for live music. But it's not exactly intimate. The big shows that play there are often are the kind that are overproduced and mechanical, like Janet Jackson's tape-augmented, puppetlike performance - the kind of fake show that would have been booed off the stage in the 1960s and '70s. That type of cynical, MTV-influenced show is one of the reasons the concert business is not growing, financially or artistically.

A scare has gone through the rock-concert business in the past two years. Revenues have dropped dramatically - last year was the worst ever for the once recessionproof industry. But the downturn has been a mixed blessing for fans. It means fewer acts are touring, but those who are tend to play smaller halls or nightclubs. That means top acts in better surroundings.

The business seems to be bouncing back, if slowly. The concert calendar is already filling up with shows here this spring and summer. Concerts at the Pier series, new last summer, will be back at the waterfront, and the newly expanded Champs de Brionnne Summer Music Theater in George should have its best lineup ever. U2 is already set to play the Tacoma Dome, and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson each may visit here this year.

At 40, the rock concert has retreated some, but is still alive and well.

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