Musical Monday Memories....

WOW....What a great week-end eh? After sitting through about 20 band sets over the past 2 days, my mind did a little wandering! You have to understand something about me, I've been going to concerts since 1967! I've seen most of the Major groups that there is to see, but some concerts were memorable, and some were very sad indeed....
This little post is about lead-in groups. Lead-In groups can sometimes set the tone for the whole
evenings fun, mood, and energy! In 1975, there was a place in Michigan called the Pontiac Silverdome. That place was the home of the Detroit Lions. They also had concerts there. The first really big concert booked there was The Who! This was the original Who, with Keith Moon!
Anyway, tickets went fast, and as a matter of fact that concert held the record for a while for the largest indoor crowd to see a Rock Concert, 75,962. Of course as is with most big shows, the group is always fashionably late, and in those days there was NO security at the doors, so you could just about bring in what you wanted in the form of liquid refreshments! Yeah you guessed it, the crowd was going wild!!! And I do mean WILD!! Finally after about an hour or so, the MC came on stage with his usual PR bullshit, and introduced the opening act...Toots and the Maytalls...Now at the time, the only bigger Reggae group in the world was Bob Marley and the Wailers, but I don't think even them could have prevented the crowd from acting the way they did...They yelled, and screamed, and booed and hissed, and threw lots of shit on stage! Finally for the safety of the group, they ushered them off-stage after only 3 songs.....
When the Who finally did appear, it was one of the greatest concerts of my life! I think that they played for over 2 1/2 hrs with 3 encores...It was awesome!!!
Now lets move back a little farther to about 1970. There is a very prestigious engineering university in Flint called Kettering University. It used to be called GMI, or General Motors Institute. They used to have free concerts in their Gym about once every semester. One time it was really advertised all over town about a fairley well known group comming to GMI for free!
The group was called SPIRIT! Now they had several great releases at the time..."I Got A Line On You"...and "Mr. Skin" was among them. So me and my buddy Ned ( Nick-named Deadly Nedly ) decided to roll up a few and go to the free show. Well this was an engineering school, so the concert started EXACTLY on time! The lead-in group was KICK-ASS!!! Song after song after song was awesome, to the point that they were demanded an encore when it was time for them to leave! They obliged, and when Spirit came onto perform, THEY were the ones booed off-stage!!! The lead-in group actually had to come back out and calm the crowd down with yet another encore....After that, Spirit never did do much. They broke up shortly afterward, and I read that their singer, Randy California, drowned in Hawaii a few years ago...
The lead-in group on the other hand, knocked around for a few years and finally got a break in the mid-70's.....Their name,....STYX..

This looks like a great week in the Mid-West comming up....Enjoy!!!