Sunday, February 2, 2020

Concerts with Lots of Stars

Tomorrow, February 3rd is the 61st anniversary of “The Day The Music Died,” the day we lost Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a snowy plane crash in Clear Lake Iowa. Much has been said and written about this uniquely American tragedy but not much has been said about the type of tour they were on that fateful day.

Today’s concert goers feast mainly on shows that feature a single group, sometimes with an opening act. But in the late 5os and early 60s the concert experience for most of us was to enjoy a number of our favorite stars in groups ranging from 5 to 20. It may have been the “Winter Dance Party” in snowy Iowa or “The Big Ape Convention” in the Coliseum in Jacksonville Florida. The latter was my first concert experience.

Rock and roll was in its teenage growth spurt back in the day and some enterprising live music promoter came across the idea of having multiple acts with each act performing their tunes that were either currently or recently appearing on the top 40. The Winter Dance Party is a great sampling of this phenomina: Buddy Holly and his band, consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were the headliners. Joining them were Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo to complete the concert card; five acts shared the stage. But really the only ones to be on stage the entire time was in this case Buddy Holly’s band. They were the background musicians for the other acts on the stage. One of the reasons for this is so that the show could progress from one act to the next with little or no interruption. All it took was unhooking one frontman’s guitar, hooking up the next and making some minor adjustments to the amplifier settings. This made for a pretty seamless show with each act performing for about a half hour. The headliners were the last to perform and would usually have more songs in their repertoire and a little more stage time than the others.

This scheme created a concert that usually ran between 2 ½ to 3 hours. On weekdays the concerts would be in the evening with Saturday matinees and Sundays would be off days. Well sort; they still had to travel to the next venue. That was a luxury after the rush overnight on Friday night to get to the Saturday venue with 6 hours less travel time. That had to be hard of the performers.

My first concert was the in the summertime of 1958, the Big Ape Convention promoted by WAPE - the Mighty 690 in Jacksonville. At the time, WAPE was still a “daytime” station that signed on at dawn and off at sunset. Their main competition was WPDQ who was a full time station that had control of the rock and roll listeners in the market after dusk. The geniuses at WAPE used the “Big Ape Conventions” sometimes called “The Big Ape Shower of Stars” as a counter marketing tool to form a bond with the teen aged audience. My memory 62 years later is a bit hazy but I seem to remember hearing songs from Jimmy Rogers, Jimmy Clanton, The Pony Tails, Jacksonville’s own Johnny Tillotson and the headliner, Frankie Avalon. I don’t remember Jacksonville’s other native son Pat Boone as being a part of that show. While I may not remember the details of the show, the feeling of excitement at seeing them live on state stays with me like it was yesterday.

Logistics were the bane of the concert promoters. The Friday night shows and the Saturday matinees were the most profitable so all the concert halls and clubs wanted the shows to be on those weekend days. But in many cases the larger venues were not close to one another so the tour would often cross its own path several times as it criss-crossed the region. Often there was not enough time to spend the night in a hotel so the musicians would sleep on the busses between stages. They would wake up shortly after noon wolf down breakfast set up the stage and do a sound check. There was time for a quick sandwich for lunch as the rest of us were enjoying dinner. Then it was Showtime. After the show, the breakdown was always quicker with the busses being packed sometime between midnight and the time to board them around one AM for the dinner sandwich and the drowsy ride to the next venue. Not exactly the romantic image of the journeyman troubadour traveling the country.

For the most part, these multi artist shows died out after the big mega-concerts in the late 60s and early 70s; The Monterrey Pop Festival (1967), Woodstock (1969), the Isle of Wight (1970) and the Atlanta International Pop Festival held in a soybean field adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia on the Fourth of July weekend in 1970. True, there are revivals and attempted revivals of these festivals in recent years but they are pretty much the exception. Most concerts these days are single act or opening act/headliner combinations.

I’m glad to report that the multi act tours seem to be having a comeback. Probably the most well known of these is the “Happy Together Tour” put on by Paradise Artists. The 2020 tour involves The Turtles, Chuck Negron formerly of Three Dog Night, The Association, Mark Lindsay the former lead singer of Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Vogues and the Cowsills. The Grass Roots, Gary Lewis and the Playboys and Peter Noone’s Herman’s Hermits are on tour even as I write this, each band with a mixture of solo shows and in groups with other artists.

A new twist to these group performances are the “Rock and Roll” cruises where the bands and their audiences spend a musical week at sea with multiple shows and a lot of interaction time with the audiences. There is quite a following for these popular shows.

So tomorrow, I’ll be recounting the story of The Winter Dance Party on WUSC-FM. But I can’t help but to paraphrase the old “I may be old but I got to hear the best bands” mime with this happy thought; “I may be old but I got to hear the big multi band concerts!” The young folks don’t know what they are missing. Oh MY!

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