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Stumpage Reports
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Wednesday, February 12, 2003 :::
It Will Always Be the Pine Knob Music Theater: or, Concert Memories of an Old Fart
I started out writing about a Talking Heads concert I attended at the Pine Knob Music Theater in 1983, but while surfing around looking for info on the venue, I found they had changed the name to the DTE Energy Music Theatre. I started thinking about that place and decided to do a entry on Pine Knob instead.
Pine Knob was "shed" type concert place located north of Detroit. My salad days there were the late 70's to the early 80's back when sheds were uncommon and arenas did not have corporate names. The lawn seats were on a series of small hills and when I started going there they cost $5, seats in the covered area were maybe $8 or $10. Later the prices rose to the astronomical level of $10 and $15.
The first concert I ever went to was at Pine Knob, it was 1976, I was 13 years old and it was an afternoon matinee performance by The Beach Boys. It was during the "Brian is Back" tour, so I'm glad I got to see them with Brian Wilson.
Of course, a few years later, the big appeal of the place was the fact that no matter how old you were, you could take in as much booze as you liked as long as there was no glass. We literally took kegs to concerts. Of course this, combined with "Who's at Pine Knob tonight? I don't know lets spend $6 on a lawn ticket and find out" led to lots of mayhem and some pretty bad concerts. It wasn't all drunken bacchanalias though. I remember being very clear-headed seeing the Talking Heads on their 1983 Stop Making Sense tour, also the second time I saw Santana there, and when I saw The Grateful Dead pre Touch of Grey and all the Jerry-Come-Latelies.
The Dead show was interesting, I didn't know much about them and tagged along with some guys. I had gotten in trouble coming home a few nights earlier from a ZZ Top concert (one of the above "who's at Pine Knob drunken messes") so I kept my act together that night. There were six of us, we took along a quarter barrel of Lowenbrau and three of us took acid and three of us didn't. I was in the "didn't" trio. The three "dids" sat in a row on the hill in front of us and there was no communication between the two groups that night.
I could go on all night about that place, but I promise I won't. It was just so much fun, we were often up to no good and doing things that would've given our parents strokes, but looking back there was an air of innocence and fun. This was when groups like Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Boston, were selling buttloads of albums that everybody was buying. They would play 3 to 5 nights in a row at Pine Knob and everyone who wanted to see them got to go.
But now its the damn GTE Energy Dome or whatever and you probably can't even take a fucking umbrella or blanket in there. I was little more confessional about the drugs and drinking than might be wise for this somewhat public forum, but the hell with it, its true and it happened a long time ago.
Quote of the Day: (In keeping with the Colonial Suffering theme that seems to be developing)
The Starving Time: But that which was most sad and lamentable was, that in two or three months' time half of their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which this long voyage and their incommodate condition had brought upon them. So as there died some times two or three of a day in the foresaid time, that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained.
--- William Bradford, Of Pymouth Plantation c1630
::: posted by tom at 10:50 PM
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