By Chip Lovitt
My name is Chip and I am a concerta-holic. I’ve been addicted to live music since I was 15, and while many of my 50-something contemporaries have given up on live music, I just can’t seem to stop handing my money over to various music venues and on-line ticket sellers.
A major highlight of my summer concert season was the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Two plus hours of great tunes, great musicianship, lots of guitars, and some fine Petty-Stevie Nicks duets. The crowd loved the show as much as I did, and thousands showed their appreciation at the end by holding up their cell phones, screens alight.
The sight got me thinking about how concert going has changed since I attended my first concerts as a teenager in the late ‘60s. I go back so far, I can still remember the pre-Bic era when people held up lit matches to call for an encore. (I also recall the 1960s Fillmore East policy where lighting a match for any reason, got you a flashlight beam in the face. (It was fire prevention policy more than anything else. The place, after all, was old.)
Speaking of the Fillmore East, I was also reminded how ticket prices have changed. The first rock concert tickets I bought were for the Schaefer Music Festival in New York’s City Wollman Rink.
Perched in a beautiful corner of Central Park, the place attracted top acts for the now unbelievable 
prices of $1.50 for the bleachers and 2.50 for floor seats. Graduating to the Fillmore 1968-71, I paid $3-5 for tickets, although Bill Graham would soon add fifty cents to those prices. That now seemingly tiny sum often bought three top acts a night (Neil Young/Steve Miller/Miles Davis; Chuck Berry/Albert King/ the Who; the Allman Brothers, opening for the Dead and Love, led by the late great Arthur Lee, to name just three shows I caught.) For the same price in 1969, lucky fans like me could spend New Year’s Eve, 1969 with Jimi Hendrix.
One amazing thing about that era was that, quite often, even big-name shows took weeks to sell out. CSNY’s June 2-7, 1970 stand at the Fillmore East was the first show I recall that sold out in just a matter of a few hours. (A high school “friend” scalped me a $5.50 ticket for ten bucks. Needless to say, once I got the ticket, that little piece of extortion ended our friendship. But maybe my former friend was just ahead of his time.)
Anyone remember standing on lines for hours at Ticketron waiting for that 10 AM ticket sale start time? No such thing as on-line ticketing in those days. How about wristbands that gained you the privilege of coming back later to stand in line to actually buy tickets. I have to admit, on-line ticket sales are a big improvement and quite convenient. Of course you pay for that in the form of the cleverly named premium known as the convenience charge.
Back in my distant youth, too, there also was no such thing as annoying corporate sponsorship for a concert tour. I mean what’s next? Pre-show commercials? If those already exist, please don’t tell me, okay?
Ticket prices remained reasonably priced for a long time, but many big shows now can easily strain
your budget to the tune of $150 or more. I’m not immune, either, having shelled out more than that to see recent shows by Cream and CSNY. Luckily, there are still plenty of shows one can catch in the $25 to $50 range.
Why do I do it? Plain and simple, there really is nothing like hearing live music. Seeing a terrific performer deliver a set of great music in front of the faithful can be a wonderfully exhilarating experience one remembers for life. I’ll never forget still the time I saw the original Allmans blow the roof off the Fillmore in 1969, seeing the Who perform Tommy from the Fillmore’s fourth row, or how Bob Marley practically levitated Madison Square Garden at a show during the 1970s.
One thing has not changed and that is the power of live music when it’s presented with talent, taste, style, and flair. I got all four of those things at a recent Chris Isaak concert at NY’s beacon theater. Great tunes, a great band that’d been together for decades, and plenty of showmanship, and great guitars. (Are we seeing a trend here or what?).
I have a musician friend who says it’s great that I support and sustain live music. He’s got it wrong. It really supports and sustains me.
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