Stadium Concerts

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Stadium Concerts

In the 1970s, stadiums became the main venue for staging concert performances of popular music. From country and rock music stars to more traditional singers like Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, popular performers attracted audience sizes anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 people at a time. Rock music—with its mass participation and the sheer volume that was necessary to reach so many people at once—was particularly suited to playing concerts at football stadiums and in sports arenas. Rock musicians looked to the stadium as a way to play in front of the most people, for the most money, as audiences broadened during the seventies. Rock's dominance on the concert circuit continued into the 1990s. Of the 20 top-grossing North American concert tours between 1985 and 1994, the average tour grossed $55 million and visited 42 cities; nearly all of them were rock artists.

Rock's first stadium concert was in 1965, when the Beatles performed in New York's Shea Stadium to 55,000 screaming fans. Newspaper reports treated the concert as a curious aberration. The New York Times referred to the screaming fans' "immature lungs," which produced a "magnificent and terrifying voice," and quoted a policewoman who called the fans "psychos." The Shea Stadium concert, at which the Beatles earned more than $160,000 for 28 minutes' work, prefigured rock's commercial power. By 1967, outdoor rock festivals began attracting audiences on an even larger scale. The Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 drew more than 50,000 people, while the 1969 Woodstock festival attracted more than 400,000. The festivals accustomed rock fans to attend concerts in large numbers, but they were plagued by major problems. Festival promoters were often corrupt or inept, and violence was a looming threat that was realized at Altamont. In ensuing years, concert promoters—by having to coordinate 40-city tours—had no other choice but to improve; violence, as always, remained a threat.

Rock's development toward big business can be partly tracked by the growing professionalism among rock acts. At the beginning of the seventies, rock acts like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin would routinely arrive at concerts an hour or more late; in addition, the Stones would not do encores. Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner, in Bill Graham Presents, expressed the attitude toward performing in rock's pre-stadium era: "A show was not just a performance.… A show was a whole social something-or-other. Bonfire ceremony or something. After we played, we wanted to go out and hustle girls. Get drunk and party, come back and play another set, go out and party again, and pretty soon dawn was there. To break that up was business." The move toward the stadiums was inevitable, however, as rock artists commanded greater receipts. Madison Square Garden and places like it, "could not have had an artist play there unless the artist said they wanted to," said Graham, who added that, at the time, he thought stadiums "should just be for … Roller Derby and boxing."

In the 1970s, declared Rolling Stone magazine, "there was no unifying presence in rock … and no artist whose latest record had to be heard by every fan and musician. By the time the decade began, rock was entertainment; in fact, it was well on its way to being the entertainment industry." Soon, performers were accompanied by special effects, like pyrotechnics or laser light shows. Professionalism had become the norm, as the stadium concert gave birth to one of rock's biggest cliches: the audience ritual of requesting encores by holding lit cigarette lighters into the darkness of the arena. If the outdoor festivals were characterized by their free-form nature, then the stadium concert was defined by its ritualistic showmanship.

Holding the attention of 20,000 (or more) people at a time was a serious challenge to those performing, and the rock star was well-armed. Any given tour might include several buses, a couple of trailer rigs, and a road crew ("roadies") to set up and dissemble increasingly elaborate stages; stacks of speakers became impossibly high towers that could allow performers to reach 120 decibels. The amplifiers were as much an assault on the poor acoustics as they were upon the audiences.

The dark side to such mass gatherings, when part of the audience was drinking, drugging, or both, was security concerns. The "stage rush," where people in front rows pushed forward toward the stage, sometimes threatened performers. At other times, the concert frenzy could produce tragedy, like the December 1979 Who concert at Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium. A stampede of 7,000 people, through two open banks of doors, resulted in the trampling deaths of 11 people. A later-abandoned practice known as "festival seating," in which concertgoers entered the stadium by dashing to secure the best seat possible, was held to blame.

By the late 1980s, rock and country artists used stadium concerts as a way to voice their social concerns. Stadium-sized benefits of the late 1980s included Farm Aid—relief for America's farmers—and the Conspiracy of Hope Tour for Amnesty International. The biggest benefit concerts were the simultaneous Live Aid shows in Philadelphia and London. On July 13, 1985, between one-and-a-half and two billion people worldwide watched the televised concert. In the process, the event raised more than $100 million for African famine relief. Tours for individual groups grew to comparable proportions. The top two touring acts of 1994, the Stones and Pink Floyd, grossed $121 million and $103 million, respectively. Stadiums with a 20,000-seat capacity, which were considered to be the big prizes in the 1970s, had became second-tier venues when superstar groups were on the road.

—Daryl Umberger