The music of your life

Today, I looked at my statistics program to see where visitors to my blog come from. A few came from Kim Stagliano’s blog, http://kimstagliano.blogspot.com/ so I went over to check it out. Her post on music made me think of the part it’s played in my own life. My first career was in music. I built sound and lighting equipment, and special effects, that traveled all over the world. Sometimes, I even got to watch and hear my gear perform. And occasionally, I just went to a concert. Here are a few of the shows I remember . . .

Perhaps you readers can add some memorable shows of your own.

I remembered Kim's songs . . . all those discos I installed sound and light in, all over New England. Every one of them played Sylvester's Mighty Real. And the other standbys of disco life . . . I Will Survive. MacArthur Park. . . even Always and Forever.

The mirror balls. The neon on the ceiling. The colored lights under the raised dance floors. Mark Anthony's with the velvet walls. The VIP, with the mechanical bull. Do you remember that?

Disco's all gone now, at least from clubs. The only Discos today are Land Rovers - Discoveries. I have a white one.

Long before disco, I remember Leslie West and Mountain playing Long Red and Nantucket Sleighride at the Student Union Ballroom, Amherst, Massachusetts. I helped set up the equipment, stacks and stacks of Sunn amplifiers. 2000s, 1200s, and Coliseums. Some were still stenciled with the name of the former owners, the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

I remember The Guess Who and Blue Oyster Cult at the Springfield Civic Center. As the band lit into the first song, the MC howled, “On your feet or on your knees! For Blue Oyster Cult!!”

There were all the bands that played my sound equipment at the Rusty Nail . . . local legends Fat and Clean Living. James Montgomery. James Cotton. Lydia Pense and Cold Blood. The New Riders.

I remember B.B. King and the Royal Philharmonic playing Royal Albert Hall in London. When you listened to the tapes of the show, in the soft passages, the hall was so quiet you could hear footsteps on stage. And when B.B. played his guitar alone, you could hear the low A notes set the hardware on the drums buzzing.

I remember Canadian artist Dan Hill singing his hit, Sometimes When We Touch, through my sound system at the Orpheum in Boston. That night, he played with Phoebe Snow, and at the end of the show we had a tussle as a limo driver arrived to pick up Billy Joel, and he blocked the ramp and got into an argument with the police.

I remember every song KISS played back then, and how it looked and felt, the pyrotechnics and the bass kicking you in the chest. Sometimes Cher would stand next to me, on the right side of the stage, and I marveled at how big she looked on TV and how tiny she seemed in real life.

I’ll never forget the roar of the crowd when Ace Frehley of KISS stepped out with my guitar in Madison Square Garden, 1979. As he started into New York Groove, the flashing lights on my guitar reached all the way to the back wall, where tiny faces flickered in the rippling light.

Meatloaf, with Karla Devito, singing Paradise By The Dashboard Lights to a sellout crowd at the New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts. I’ll never forget that show, because on the way home, I saw an unforgettable fight between a pimp and a female gas station attendant who proved to be 200 pounds of solid muscle. The pimp, no small guy himself, ended up under his 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood. His knife lay in a pool of greasy water twenty feet away.

That was the first show for my first five-way sound system. And we were back there again a few weeks later, for Barry Manilow. I’ll always remember the medley he sang, Commercials of Your Life. It seemed like he’d written every big jingle from every TV ad of the 70’s that night.

And how could I forget Diana Ross, in a sequined gown, playing the big hall at Caesar’s Palace? And Wayne Newton, the Fifth Dimension, and all the other wonderful acts who played there?

And Peter Frampton, who I first heard on Humble Pie, Rockin’ the Fillmore, playing Toad’s in New Haven. We were all wild back in the early days, but that night, I watched the show with the musician’s wives and families and marveled at how far we’d come in 20 years.

And those were a few of the ones who played my sound equipment. There were so many more. There were also the ones I photographed . . .

There was Rick Springfield, dripping sweat after a hot performance, still carrying his guitar, picking up the roses and gently brushing them against his face.

There were the hot girl bands . . .Destiny’s Child. Dream. Mandy Moore. Standing by the edge of the stage, I met Mandy’s mother. I had no idea she was only seventeen.

And all the rockers. . . Def Leppard. Styx. Roxy Music and the Kinks. Talking Heads. So many bands. And I mustn’t forget all those country musicians . . . Clint Black. George Jones. Travis Tritt. Willie Nelson.

Sometimes, in my photography, I see faces from the past. In 2005, in northern Vermont, I shot KC and the Sunshine Band on an outdoor stage. As I watched them, I remembered KC and Terry, thirty years before, playing a sellout crowd though my PA at the old Rusty Nail.

I’ve shot so many of the great old bands as they tour the big state fairs. Hundreds of them, for sure. The Irish tenors . . .Frankie Valli . . . Brooks and Dunn . . .The Village People . . . there’s something for everyone at those fairs. Even Larry the Cable Guy, and the Great Pig Races.

I didn’t even hear those shows. I just saw them, through the viewfinders of my cameras. Nikons, mostly. A progression of models marked the advances in technology. f4 . . f5 . . d1 . . d1x . . d2h . . d2x . . d2xs. And now, even the old Leica's back, as the m8

Some of those people, I haven’t seen in years. With other’s, it’s almost like yesterday. Do you remember the Fillmore East? One of the owners still comes around – retired now – and tells us of jamming with Dylan and sitting around backstage with Janis Joplin.

Taj Mahal’s brother walked in the door the other day, and the Rolling Stone’s stage chief’s car is parked out back. . . walking along the waterfront at Newport, and there's Peter Frampton now, with John Regan! I have to ask whether John's still got that Mercedes we bought together, down at Manheim. Somehow, I never seem to leave music behind.

Perhaps you’ll meet a few more of these folks in my next book.