AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums The Cayes Ambergris Caye 80s Night at the Tacklebox

SimonB,
I once saw a new group called "Van Halen" play at a rich kid's graduation party up in the Whittier Hills. Great White had a hell of a time breaking out of the LA club scene. While I was up in Portland, a local group with a female sax player called themselves "Seafood Mama". They eventually went MTV as Quarterflash. I can't remember the names of many of the other bands I saw in the 80s that made it. Some made it big and some were one hit wonders.

Back in the 70s I saw an unknown group called Areosmith open for ZZ Top. That was one of the craziest nights of my life, and that's saying something. The legendary Golden Bear in Huntington Beach was my local club for a while in the 80s. Stevie Ray Vaughn and BB King were house acts. The groups that went through there were impressive, but more often it was a solo act or a few members of a big group-just out playing clubs for fun. Ingve Malmstein, Joe Perry, all kinds of folks.

I saw all kinds of acts and oddball performers at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Lots of up & coming bands, plus traditional Bluegrass and Chicago Blues at The White Eagle Saloon in Portland.

Back in the 80s I misspent part of my youth mining gold in the Mother Lode counrty. The pub crawls with my fellow miners were legendary. Bars like the Crazy Horse in Nevada City managed to throw us out regularly. The main street of town had bars every other door, sometimes next door. The live music spilled out onto the same streets that the 49ers walked in the first Gold Rush. Somehow, we made it back to camp at sunrise.

I miss the club scene! Can you tell?

Dan

Dan, Chief Crazy Horse Inn is still alive and kicking, with plenty of live music by an assortment of local bands. While only about 25 miles from Auburn, where I live, Nevada City couldn't be more different! It's a great escape and one of our favorite places to hang out and to take guests visiting from out of town.

I cannot imagine a better time or place to have been a teenager than England in the 60s.

The first band I saw live was the Beatles, in Bournmouth when I was just 11 years old http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6j5bve7O5E
I saw them again in Leicester in October of 1964, and that was the start of a lifetime spent catching every live show I could get to.

In the mid/late 60s and into the early 70s our local club, the Il Rondo Dancehall, and The DeMontfort Hall featured: Cream, Hendrix, 10 Years After, Taste, Jethro Tull, Jon Mayall, Savoy Brown, King Crimson, ELP, Chicken Shack, Fleetwood Mac, Wishbone Ash, Average White Band, Vinegar Joe, Free and many many more great acts, plus of course all the great soul music that was around back then

From helping to unload the trucks in exchange for a ticket, I started to learn something about how things worked, and moved to London to work for my first "Real" band, Arthur Browns (The God of Hellfire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOErZuzZpS8) Kingdom Come. Along with Hawkwind we played every Hippie gathering Europe had to offer for most of 1969 and 70, but I stayed away from the Brown Acid and was lucid enough to recognize true genius when I met Peter Gabriel in late 1970 and started several of the best years of my life with Genesis.

By 1974 with another of the old crew guys, I'd started a Sound and Lighting company and so we'd have a few weeks with one band, then straight out with another, then another one! In on very strange period, I went from The Clash to Dolly Parton to The Sex Pistols to Niel Sedaka to Gilbert O'Sulivan then Shena Easton with almost no breaks, and the hardest thing was not wearing the wrong T Shirt at a show!

Possibly the best 3 weeks musically was Tom Petty's first European Tour, with the Boomtown Rats as opening act: On that tour and 40-50 subsequent shows I have never heard Mike Campbell play a bum note...one of the great guitarists.

There was such an amazing mix of talent in London in the 70s/early 80s and so much live music to see in clubs every night: It seems that almost without fail, the early material of bands when they are struggling to make it out of clubs and to "the big time" is the edgiest and bands like The Pretenders, Squeeze, 999, The Buzzcocks, Split Enz , The Cure, Simple Minds, Elvis Costello and the unbelievably good Joe Jackson made life so much fun, as did Human League, Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran

I moved to Texas in 1981, as we had expanded and trying to handle US tours from England was getting hard. The size of the venues changed as the shows became more sophisticated.

The list of bands and artists seems to go on forever, and across all genres.

3 Tenors at Dodger Stadium, Bob Marley in the early 70's, The Who, The Stones, Wings, The Eagles, Van Halen, and my favorite live act ever Bob Seger. The last tour I did was Lollapolooza in 1992 with Chili Peppers, Ministry, Soungarden, Pearl Jam and Ice Cube, plus Porno for Pyros and Rage Against the Machine on the side stage and throughout all the years of great music, it was the clubs that were always the best...standing 10 feet away from Hendrix or seeing Claptons fingers move as Cream played Crossroads in a club with 500 people was always better than 20,000 cheering fans even when I was on stage to hear the cheers!

May live music live on forever.....

When I was about 12 or 13, my friend Janet and I used to sneak out of our house and run off to the "Sherwood Country Club" to see an up and coming local band called Aerosmith. We were too young to actually get inside the club, so we watched from backstage through the open "stage" door. Years later we would cruise around local parks late at night, smoking weed and listening to their 8 tracks...reminiscing about having seen them way back when.

I just saw Hot Tuna the other night at a tiny new club in Syracuse. They can still rock - played for 3 or 4 hours till past midnight. Not bad for old guys! ;-)
Love their T shirt that says "If you don't know Jorma, you don't know Jack"