Guest Post by starfcker
I’ve been thinking about this subject for a long time. I got a shirt for Christmas that says, “I may be old, but I got to see all the great bands.” That’s a true statement. Kids nowadays have no idea how good we had it in the seventies and eighties. Before digital, bands had to go out there and make music. Much tougher thing to do consistently and with excellence than you might imagine. My first musical influences were country. I had a radio, and basically that was what the channels were in my area. A lot of songs that every country fan knows came out of that late sixties early seventies era that are still around today. Music can be timeless. But when I was 12 years old at summer camp, there was another kid with a radio and he had it on the rock station in Palm Beach county.
First rock song I remember was “Reelin In The Years”, by Steely Dan. I loved that song. By the time I went home a week later I forgotten all about country music, and started listening almost exclusively to rock. I was completely drawn in by it. I had never heard anything like it. That early 70s was a great time for that kind of music. Lots of bands hit their peak then. Bands were mysterious, there wasn’t much press about them, most of what you knew about them came from studying album covers. I started going to concerts when I was about 15. Being at the south end of Florida, most big tours skipped us. It was just too far to drive for one show. When bands played Florida, they played Jacksonville or Orlando or Tampa.
Our venue down here was terrible also. The Hollywood Sportatorium. What a dump. The walls and roof from about halfway up were made of corrugated sheet metal , which most of you can figure out is a fine acoustic surface. Now throw in maximum volume, and you have an echo that never stopped. But it was all we had. And most bands that you’ve ever heard of made it through the sportatorium in their early years. The roster of shows there is very impressive, but the place was hot, loud, crowded and insane. South Florida was pretty redneck back in those days. Fights were very common, but even when it was very peaceful we lacked any veneer of sophistication.
Continue reading “Zeppelin and Me”
