I was 14 when Woodstock took place. It was 1969 and I was a freshman in high school back in Brooklyn, NY. I recall the posters on buses in Brooklyn advertising the festival and it’s lineup. Did I go? HELL NO!! As I said, I was 14 and my parents weren’t going to let me leave their sight. But when I was 16,  they did let me and a group of high school friends take the subway into Manhattan for our first concert. And so it began…

My first show was Alvin Lee and Ten Years After at Madison Square Garden in November of 1971. Alvin Lee was huge at that time, having ridden his performance at Woodstock into a successful career. I quickly followed that with the Beach Boys at Carnegie Hall, Brewer and Shipley at Brooklyn College, Melaine in Central Park and the Allman Brothers at Gaelic Park (an old rugby stadium) in the Bronx, with an encore that included Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. Five shows within eight months and I was off and running!  What could be more fun than getting together with your friends and experiencing some live music in unique locations? We were history in the making and were having a good time to boot! Where do I start?

As it turns out, the music never stopped (a nod to the Grateful Dead) and my life has been on a roller coaster called Rock and Roll since then. Less than 50 years have led me to my 500^th performance and a chance to reflect on these experiences. When I look back on it all, I realize how lucky I was to have been born in New York City. There were iconic venues for live music everywhere! If you were going to make it big, you had to play New York. When you did, you know you made it.

I was fortunate to grow up where I did and at that time in music history. I had access to all sorts of artist and dozens of venues to see them in. I saw eight shows during this time at the venerable Madison Square Garden and more than twenty shows in Central Park at the seasonally vacated Wollman Skating Rink. Shows in Central Park took place up to three times per week and I often took in two or three shows in a week.  More than thirty shows were seen on my college campus and several more in upstate New York. Some of my best memories include shows at Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), Barton Hall on the Cornell campus, the Bottom Line in Manhattan and several grand old theatres in Manhattan and the surrounding environs. That is in addition to the venues previously mentioned here. The artists that I have been fortunate enough to see are too numerous to mention here. I would only wind up leaving off a memorable performance or two. Check out the document attached to this blog (The Music Never Stopped) for a complete list of artists, venues and dates to back all this up. Six years after I got the bug, I logged in more than one hundred (100) shows and was able to graduate high school and college.

Then I got a JOB and everything changed. For the next thirty years until 2008 I could only partake in the fun another hundred times. However, during this stretch I witnessed Eric Clapton and Alvin Lee take the stage with Asleep at the Wheel for some good old fashioned Texas swing! My first music festival was most likely the, “Champagne Jam,” of 1979 in Atlanta. Hosted by the Atlantic Rythem Section and headlined by Aerosmith, the show also included The Cars, Mothers Finest and Whiteface. This period ushered in my appreciation for the Fox Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. During two separate stints living in Atlanta during the eighties I was able to enjoy Rock royalty at the Fox. Some of the artists included Santana, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers band, Kenny Loggins, Warren Zevon, the Kinks with John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp opening and Little Feat. I saw shows at the old Philadelphia Spectrum during my stint working in Philly and have fond memories of shows at Chastain Park in midtown Atlanta.

About ten years ago, it appears that things were headed in my favor, allowing me to spend more time experiencing live music. I was now a Charleston area resident for twenty years and had been living in our dream home for about five of those years. I developed a group of friends with similar interests and circumstances and the North of Fifty gang was born.  North of Fifty was the moniker I used to describe my concert going friends. I could always count on going with or meeting up with a friend or five at most of the shows. Truth be told, if I want to see someone bad enough, it matters little if anyone goes with me. I was logging in more than a dozen shows each year.

It was in 2014 when a friend posed the question, knowing my love of live music, why I wasn’t an usher at the Charleston Music Hall? My response was that I didn’t know such an option existed. She put me in contact with the right people and my tenure as a volunteer at the Music Hall began. It was a life changing moment which opened the doors to experience as many shows as my schedule allows. I now average a show a week over the course of the year. By being part of the staff at the Music Hall, artists whom I had anything from a curiosity of to being an ardent fan, were on my calendar!

Show number Three hundred came in Chicago on the Fourth of July weekend in 2015. It was the opening night of the Grateful Dead’s celebration of fifty years together, Fare Thee Well. The performances would be the last time that the four remaining members of the band performed together. Now a day, Phil Lesh leads bands bearing his name and the remaining three members tour as Dead and Company.

It is that band, Dead and Company, that I saw at the Lakewood Ampitheatre in Atlanta, Georiga on June 29th celebrating my Five Hundredth show! Sports fans, that makes two hundred (200) shows experienced in the last four years. While most of these have been viewed at the Charleston Music Hall, we have several eclectic places to experience a band live in Charleston! In the last four years, I’ve traveled out of state to see Dead and Company (Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh), Van Morrison and the Tedeschi Trucks band in Scranton, Pennsylvania (home of the Peach Festival), Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival in Holmdel, New Jersey, and Phil Lesh and Friends at the ancient Asbury Park Convention center in New Jersey.

I want to go on record as saying that while it’s a lot of shows generally speaking, I have fellow ushers at the Music Hall who take in 70-100 shows a year if they want. And then there are some of my DeadHead buddies; these road warriors have seen more Dead shows than I have seen shows. Once I posed the question to several of them if they would like to venture a guess as to the number of concerts seen. To a man, they couldn’t tell. Too many shows, not too many drugs!

Reflecting on the great times I have experienced in the last 48 years, I marvel that 40% of the shows have taken place in less than 10% of those years (Two hundred in four years). If I can keep up with the pace, and there’s no reason I can’t, I could take in one thousand shows before my 75^th birthday. Now that’s a new year’s resolution I can get behind!

Allow me to shed some light on the next blog post/spreadsheet, “The Music Never Stopped.” When I was 17, I had the foresight to write down some data about the shows I was seeing. These musical memories were being recorded for my future review and admiration. I’ve had countless conversations with old and new friends for which I had to refer to this musical diary for confirmation of my memory. Old friends have reminded me of shows that we saw together in times past. I have kept up with the list after all these years, for which I am grateful. This post will likely be posted by the time you read this. If I could go back in time, I would have collected the show tickets for the ones I attended.  Personally, I have a good friend who has a big basket of tickets for shows he was able to say that he was there!

With this blog, I am celebrating the Third anniversary of this blog. My first blog was posted on July 17, 2016 as it introduced the blog and laid out the “Why” that this blog was created. That first post was “How did we get here”? I encourage you to peruse the different blogs and let us know what you think.

We would love to hear about your concert habits, the great performances you saw and the great venues you’ve been to. We want to encourage you to comment on this or any blog I have published. We want to know what you like and what you don’t. Please LIKE our FB page, Do You Believe In Magic! You will receive an email when a new blog is posted and no spam! What’s stopping you?

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