Gratitude Friday 3 7 25 Surviving Chaos: The Who at JFK Stadium 1982

I grew up in the golden age of rock music. We all know these bands, even as the musicians are either long gone or in their geriatric years. They performed raw, loud and visceral music that defined the era. It is a topic I have wrote about a lot in these  musings, most recently a few weeks ago in “The British Invasion.” Music is inseparable for me from my other experiences over the course of a life. When I hear a song I access memories, the official term for this is music-evoked autobiographical memory. As defined “music's capacity to evoke vivid, emotional, and episodically rich autobiographical memories.” It is one of the thing I love about music.

Music lights up my brain as I have learned in multiple areas including the temporal (superior and middle temporal gyri, insula), frontal (superior and middle frontal gyri, cingulate gyrus, precentral gyrus), parietal (inferior parietal gyrus, precuneus, postcentral gyrus), and cerebellar regions. For most people over 40, music activates a Reminiscence bump and we get a flood of memories. There are people who have what is called Musical anhedonia. Roughly 3% to 5% of the population do not access memory through music. This is one area I am really grateful to be in the majority in. For me personally, I get a really powerful reminiscence bump.

Recently I heard a song on Pandora and the memory of the largest concert I ever attended came flooding back. The event was The Who Farewell Tour at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on September 25th, 1982. It is pictured above, and I am certain I am in this photo, just below the closest light poles on the left of the photo. It was hot and crowded beyond comprehension. The official attendance was 91,451, one of the largest ticketed single-show, non-festival stadium concerts ever held in America. Actual attendance was much higher. There were a lot of counterfeit tickets and I recall at the time that estimates of actual attendance was around 120K. John F. Kennedy Stadium was an open-air stadium in Philadelphia that stood from 1926 to 1992 in what is now the South Philadelphia Sports Complex, its maximum capacity was around 100K, so on that day it was well over capacity with all those counterfeit tickets.  

It was termed the Farewell Tour opening acts were Santana, The Clash, and The Hooters. The Who had recently released their album It's Hard. We were packed in like sardines, most everyone was stoned, and security was not then what it is now. The ticket pictured asserts “no bottles, cans or alcohol” but no one listened and security was in name only. People had coolers filled with glass bottles and anything else one can imagine. At one point in the day in between bands, I recall going to the top of the stadium and looking out into the parking lot and seeing a sea of people walking through ankle deep broken glass, the sound of which was loud and one I will never forget.

I don’t recall the Hooters playing. Santana sounded good but the Clash sounded bad and were pelted by the mob with glass bottles. The band told the audience to F off and left the stage. The Who played 25 songs in total, I found the set list here. I found a few video clips describing the event.  I also found this interview before the show with Roger Daltry. MTV produced this clip on the tour.  As documented on this web page, it was one of the most off the hook shows ever. I found this video clip on the event of how crazy it all was. Getting in to the event, we were jammed into a moving sea of bodies. Almost all were impaired. I recall the fear of that moment and how aware I was that if anything happened, the crowd would turn into a mob and I would have zero control over my own physical safety.

While I do recall experiencing the live performance of some of my favorite songs of my youth, it was the crowd of 120K impaired people that is etched into my memory. It is hands down the most chaotic thing I ever experienced. During the concert someone climbed the light pole a hundred feet or so over our heads and was dangling there. When security came, he descended down into the metal lattice work into a place that security could not extricate him. My brother Doug who we lost in 2018 was our driver. When we made it back to the car after the show, there were so many barely standing people. As he was pulling out a person passed out and hit his head on the driver’s side mirror.

I was 17 years old. It is hard to fathom in our current world what we experienced in those times. In some ways, experiencing one of the largest rock concerts in world history was something that it is kind of cool to have as a memory. But the memory is more about what goes wrong with drug use. I saw the worst of what addiction and excess can lead to. Much of what I saw that day is simply not fit to print. While there were things that were dangerous, I did benefit from the experiences of navigating risk and experiencing the world instead of being fully sheltered from the ugly aspects of life as some kids are today. I am who I am because of these things not despite them.

I am grateful to have attended this concert in 1982 and make it home unscathed, which is probably the wildest event in any of our young lives. I survived it and recall it to this day. These kinds of experiences in some ways helped me figure out how to navigate the world as scary and odd as it can be at times.

What are you grateful for today?