Five Best Rock Concerts I Would Have Liked To Have Seen

I am an avid fan of going to concerts.  The bands can be local, rock, country, folk, oldies, or classical, but I love the sensation of being in the crowd with the wall of sound between me and the stage.  There are certain rock shows that go down in history as some of the greatest of a generation and I wish I would have been a witness to them.  Here is a list to the concerts I wish I would have seen:

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Woodstock Music and Art Fair (1969)
This list has to start with the greatest rock concert ever performed.   Three days of peace and music took place in Bethel, New York from August 15-18, 1969.  During that time,  thirty-two acts performed for a group of over 400,000 cheering fans.  This is widely regarded as one of the greatest moments of rock and roll history.  Jimi Hendrix, The Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were amongst some of the performers that graced the crowd.  The entire show was captured into a 1970 movie entitled Woodstock which brought the event to the rest of the world.

The Beatles at The Cavern Club (November 9, 1961)
One of the greatest groups in the history of Rock-n-roll got their start at a little pub in Liverpool, England called the Cavern Club.  This concert is when Brian Epstein first saw the Beatles and knew he had to sign them and turn them into the sensations they were destined to become.  The Beatles were a standard fare at the club between 1961 and 1963 where they performed 292 shows.  They promised to come back one day, but the club could no longer hold the fans after Beatlemania hit England and the U.S., so the promise went unfulfilled.    The Cavern Club also helped start other great groups like: The Hollies (who replaced the Beatles there), the Rolling Stones, Elton John, The Who, The Kinks, and the Yardbirds.

The Doors at the Whisky-A-Go-Go (August 21, 1966)
A continent away, in a nightclub in West Hollywood, the Doors were the house band at the Whisky-A-Go-Go (that is the proper spelling). They started there as the opening act for Van Morrison, but eventually graduated to being the headline act.  The band had just been signed to Elektra Records on the eighteenth of August by Paul Rothchild and their performance on this night caused an uproar that would follow them for the rest of their career. It was on this night that Jim Morrison, high on LSD and alcohol, gave a profanity-filled performance of their song, “The End”.  The song is controversial to begin with due to its retelling of Oedipus Rex; a Greek tragedy that depicts the loss of childhood where a boy kills his father and has sex with his mother.  Morrison’s additional lyrics this night infuriated the club owners so much that the Doors were kicked out of the club for good.

Newport Folk Festival (July 25, 1965)
The Newport Folk Festival was an annual hootenanny that drew folk music enthusiasts from around the country to Newport, Rhode Island each year from 1959 to 1971 (it was later re-established in 1985 and continues to this day).  The festival is known for having performers go on to become big stars.  For example, Joan Baez appeared unannounced as the guest of Bob Gibson in 1959 and Bob Dylan’s 1963 performance there is usually noted as his first major appearance.  What makes 1965 so important is that Bob Dylan was the headliner that year and performed with a group known as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.  The controversy arose because Dylan played his music on an electric guitar which was a violation of the folk movement.  Some say that he was booed off of the stage, but recently, old tapes of the show seem to prove this as an urban myth.  Nonetheless, it was this performance – the first “plugged in” concert of Dylan’s career – that helped to pave the way for him to create more mainstream rock-n-roll.

Winter Dance Party in the Surf Ballroom (Clearlake, Iowa) -1959
The Winter Dance Party was a rock-n-roll tour that hit 24 Midwestern cities in three weeks in 1959.  The venue included: Buddy Holly, JP “The Big Bopper” Richardson, Ritchie Valens, and Dion and the Belmonts. Problems immediately rose on the tour.  The bus was not prepared for the cold weather, the musicians suffered from the flu and frostbite, and several of them were out of clean clothes by the time they arrived in Clearlake, Iowa – a city that wasn’t even part of the original tour.  Sick of the travel arrangements for his band, Buddy Holly decided to rent an airplane to fly the Crickets to the next show in Moorehead, Minnesota.  However, two other headliners were able to get on the plane in their stead.  J.P. Richardson was suffering from the flu and convinced Cricket Waylon Jennings to give up his seat.  Ritchie Valens, who had never flown in a small plane before, won a coin toss with Holly’s other band mate, Tommy Allsup, and took his seat.  Upon hearing that Jennings wasn’t going to fly with him, Buddy Holly told him “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up!”, to which Jennings responded, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”  The plane did crash and Jennings was haunted by the exchange for the rest of his life.  The result was that the Clearlake, Iowa concert was the last performance for the three musicians and came to be known as “The Day The Music Died”.  It was commemorated in the song, “American Pie” by Don McLean.

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