Been a long time since I Rock and Rolled…
I caught a story on BBC News this morning about Led Zeppelin doing their first and only reunion concert after 20 years. Ah memories… I better write this while I'm still half asleep and before I forget about it (the memory goes first?). I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life as most people have. I decided I could get away with going to a 2 year “tech school” rather than getting a Bachelors degree from a 4 year college. I found that my Associates Degree meant a lot more to me than anyone else. But I got some breaks, worked hard at times, and have made a decent living over the span of my career.
Our class started with about 45 students but after a year it was down to 7 that would graduate on schedule. We were stuck into another class and took our quarters out of order. As in all schools there is always a class clown and ours was Crazy Bob. One Monday morning he came in and gathered our group together with one of the most serious tones I had ever seen so I and the others assumed whatever he was going to try and pull off would be good. He demanded that we all empty our pockets and put every penny we had on the bench. As we were laughing and making fun of him, he told us to shut up, Led Zeppelin tickets went on sale at 9:00 at Sears and it was almost 8:00 already. We all dug deep for all the money we had. We added up the money and he told us how many tickets each person could buy and how many people he needed to go with him. And by the way, he needed someone who knew how to get to Sears; he lived about 45 minutes south of the school and didn’t know the area that well.
I was one of the people that went and since we were going to get tickets for a Zeppelin concert, we partied a lot on the way. We made it to Sears just about the time the doors opened. We weren’t the first in line to get tickets and we got paranoid that they would sell out before we got to the ticket window. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how many tickets each person needed and how much money each person needed to have to get the amount of tickets we were allowed to buy. Yes, we had partied as much as if we were actually on our way to the concert. But they didn’t run out of tickets before we got ours and we headed back to school broke but also rich because we had tickets for a concert that sold out in less than an hour. I think there were 5 of us that walked into class in the middle of a lecture. The teacher asked us what we thought we were doing and where we had been. We held up the Zeppelin tickets and he asked where his were. We told him if he had been in class early he could have given us money to get his tickets, but since he hadn’t been, too bad!
There was no doubt who I would go with. Rick was a huge Led Zeppelin fan so I got tickets for him, his wife and myself. A condition was that he drive from Dayton to Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati. There was a parking garage for the Coliseum and Riverfront Stadium where the Reds played. They have both been torn down now. When you parked in the huge garage, there was a 20 foot wide walkway about 4 stories up that went from the parking garage to the Coliseum. There were 3 or 4 Cincinnati cops in Riot gear checking to see if you had tickets just to cross the walkway. When we got close to the doors, the crowd got large and packed. We saw a 30 foot tall pile of contraband that the Riot Police had confiscated. It was mostly bottles and cans, but I saw large bags of Marijuana and pills as well as coats, shoes, and trash in general. As we got closer to the door, the crowd got packed tighter and we got concerned. I saw a guy I went to High School with that was with a few friends. All of us got together and formed a circle. We locked arms and our circle was pushed around, but we all stayed on our feet and actually had a good time and stayed warm in our circle. We made it into the Coliseum without any real problems and got reasonable seats. We still had a bottle of Jack Daniels and smoke even though that wasn’t really needed. The whole place was in a fog so everyone got at least a contact buzz. In those days, Plant could still scream and Paige amazed us with his guitar licks – especially playing when he used a bow. It was a great concert, but getting there had been more than half the fun! We made it home safe and had a great time.
I later ended up buying the trailer next to Rick and his wife. Yep, for several years I was trailer trash. Rick’s ambition was to get all of the Led Zeppelin albums (yes, I do mean vinyl!). I don’t think he ever did, but I did, and I still have them. I don’t have all of them on CD though. That concert was kind of the end of an era for me. The last concert I went to at Riverfront was The Who. It was the last festival seating concert anywhere in America at a large venue for decades to come. If you ever hear that nobody at that concert knew people died, it’s a lie. At least half of the people knew it. The band didn’t and you could tell that they were puzzled by the crowd being so quiet, but that’s another story. I have the Robert Plant and Alison Kraus CD and it's not bad. All of the Zeppelin band looks older and grayer (as do I). I’d still love to go to the Led Zeppelin reunion, but it wouldn’t be the same as the concert I saw at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio ummm, well, (clears throat) - at least 20 years ago.
