By Marley Seaman
The library hosted a "History of Rock Concerts" program by Rockville Centre native Clive Young, a senior editor for the trade magazine Pro Sound News. Young is also the author of the book "Crank It Up: Live Secrets of the Top Tour Engineers." Assisted by film clips featuring the sights and sounds from famous concerts and tour documentaries - including some footage never released to the public - Young detailed the history of the rock concert over the last 50-plus years.
"Rock is a relative term," Young said, by way of defining the music. "If you think it rocked, it's a rock concert."
While the music has changed constantly, Young noted that at least one thing about big rock concerts has remained the same: The organization is usually terrible. For instance, the first rock concert, deejay Alan Freed's 1952 "Moondog Coronation Ball" in Cleveland, lasted precisely one song before rioting brought it to an end.
"It was a complete disaster," Young said. "The entire place was just one big fight." Tickets to the show, however, sold much better than promoters had expected. In fact, that was part of the problem: Organizers anticipated 7,000 fans at first, then 9,000 after the initial tickets sold out in two weeks. A total of 25,000 people turned up on the night of the show, overwhelming security. The debacle helped prove that rock music had the potential to become very popular.
The music's popularity grew in the decade that followed, and in late 1964, promoter Sid Bernstein suggested that the Beatles try something new: playing a concert in a baseball stadium. The following August, more than 55,000 people packed into Shea Stadium to see the Beatles perform, even though the group played for only half an hour. The show sold out mostly on the strength of word of mouth advertising, and the most expensive seats cost $5.75. Future shows would dwarf the Shea Stadium concert, but it helped set the tone for the large, multi-day festivals that marked the late '60s and are still popular today.
"The people and scene made the event, not the bands," said Young.
At Woodstock in 1969, roughly half the festival's attendees simply crashed the gate, forcing the concert organizers to accommodate far more people than they had planned. The Woodstock sequels in 1994 and 1999 also spiraled out of control due to planning problems. The 1999 edition of Woodstock became a riot on its final day, with the attendees angry over ticket and food prices and heat and insufficient facilities spilling over into rioting and looting. Worst of all, candles were passed to audience members on the festival's final day, leading to numerous fires.
The most famous disaster of all was the Rolling Stones' 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway in California. After several last-minute venue changes, the show was plagued by problems like insufficient medical facilities. Tragically, four concertgoers died during the event.
There is more to concerts than chaos, however, and Young traced the evolution of the rock concert from the traveling, multi-artist reviews of the mid-1950s to the enormous stadium and arena tours of recent years. As MTV became a greater cultural influence, he said, concerts had to offer more visual stimulation than ever. Rock shows moved away from straightforward presentations of the music and began to include camp and humor, as well as more elaborate staging.
"Concerts started becoming kind of a theatrical presentation," Young said. "There was a lot more mystery to rock and roll" in the pre-MTV days.
Young cited U2's flashy, multimedia "Zoo TV" tour, which lasted from 1992 to 1993, as the pinnacle of concerts as spectacle. Each Zoo TV performance featured dozens of large monitors. Since the early 90s, many bands have offered more stripped-down performances.
He also discussed the thorny topic of concert prices, which increased rapidly throughout the last decade. Between 1996 and 2001, the average ticket price for the 100 largest tours of the summer increased by 62 percent. That rate was far greater than the price growth in other forms of entertainment, like sporting events. Between 2003 and mid-2004 alone, average tickets went up by $9.
Young predicted this year's concert scene will not be very busy, with the concert scene this year will be fairly quiet, with the largest tours being put on by artists like the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, and possibly Eric Clapton in the fall.
"All these acts have been around forever, and that doesn't necessarily bode well for touring," he said. In the future, when older acts eventually stop touring, Young predicted that package tours - like the Warped Tour - will grow in popularity.
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