A Song Late & Lotsa Dollars Short

On "Breakfast With The Beatles" this weekend, host Chris Carter shared his experience about his first Paul McCartney concert, on the Wings 1976 tour. His experience was similar to mine, in that I also saw that same tour, it was also my first time (to date) and we both missed the first song.

My pal Keith & I had tickets for May 8 1976. I think I paid $5. My only other "Beatle" show was John & Yoko at the John Sinclair rally in Ann Arbor December 1971. He was in "busker" mode, with Abbey Hoffman, Jerry Rubin & street singer David Peel. It wasn't "rock", but it mixed music & politics just cool enough for me at that point in my life (that was $3).

So by 1976 my friends & I were becoming increasingly entrenched in the punk rock ethos: OK, we got music here, and that was almost incidental to whether or not we could get a drink, & of course we were done inconveniencing ourselves in a damn stadium like cattle. We acted like we didn't care. We were just "out" on a Saturday night.

So I never looked at the tickets, and assumed starting time was 7:30. We went out to do some preliminary "boozin'" and when we got to Olympia Stadium we found a great parking place right across the street. So we're walkin' across and I hear music coming from the building & it sure sounds like "Venus & Mars". Keith tells me to check the tickets & of course they say 7pm. I can still hear him say "nice one dummy" or something more akin to a boozed-up 22-year-old suburban punk (that's OK, he more than made up for this throughout the following years - like missing Jimmy Cliff due to pre-show boozin' again).

As nonplussed as we think we are about all this crap, we're both thinking "shit, we missed part of a Beatle performance". I can't remember if we knew how good our seats were before we walked inside - 15th row, main floor! AISLE! And no more than 10 feet from a coke machine (no booze served at concerts yet, but still it's liquid refreshments. I shoulda brought slippers). Anyway, we asked someone what we missed, and it turns out just the opening song, which runs into the one we came in on.

They were great - I guess. I can't remember any of it, really. Recently I saw a photo of Macca onstage with a Red Wings sticker on an old Epiphone guitar. Turns out a fan gave him that sticker on that date in 1976. And also, he wrote "Yesterday" on that guitar, & used it to sing the same on Sullivan.

Yeah, I was there, whatever. Can I get a Red Stripe & a double bourbon?