Detroit Rock City

I had fun commenting about my first rock concert on 17 Seconds, a really neat music blog, by Ed, a teacher in Scotland and also a worldwide music aficionado.

I hope no one minds, I'm going to copy it here and fire up a meme:
"What was your first concert like?"

(Adam and the Ants was my) first concert without parents. First was really when my dad took me and my brother to see the KISS Dynasty tour at the Pontiac Silverdome in '79 for my brother's birthday. I helped him with his Peter Criss makeup and it looked awful. We were not the youngest kids there by a longshot. The stage was so far down it was more like a movie. It was so loud the seats were thumping and we kept tearing bits of paper off our popcorn bags to try to make earplugs but it didn't work very well [unsic]. My dad bought us some for $5 each. KISS' first song didn't sound very good and the audience started chanting "Bring back Cheap Trick! Bring back Cheap Trick!" This went on for a few minutes. I couldn't believe it. Well, Cheap Trick were really great and everybody loved "Live at Budokan" and it's much easier to recreate a live album onstage than a slickly produced one. But KISS won us over, I think Gene Simmons blew flames or something. I think I remember Space Ace came down on ropes or a platform or something and my favorite song was New York Groove. Also, we lost the car and had to walk for miles through closely spaced lines of traffic and wait two hours for everyone else to leave so we could find it. Not a good time for my dad who had to do all this while listening to 2 kids whining "I'm tired!."

Tag, you're it! :)