Auditioning my first all Naim/Rega system after years of sideways upgrades. Maria Callas singing arias from Samson and Delilah by Saint Saens from the 1950’s
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I was 12 when I heard for the first time Chicken Shack playing ‘I would Rather go Blind’. I had up until this point been a regular listener of music having been encouraged by my parents from a very early age. Most genres of music save Blues, Modern Jazz and Pop Music.
Listening to Christine Perfect as she plaintively pleaded with her rival I realized then that songs could have an emotional impact that transcended the words and the rest of the song.
Listening to The Weavers or The Kingston Trio, The Beatles and other emerging groups of the day the words told a story or were catchy and rhymed but they were matter of fact or sounded good on the ear but they never ever sounded as real as that first rendition by Christine Perfect.
Even today after all the covers by various other artists, to my ears at least, no one has come close to conveying the heartfelt sentiments contained in those lyrics as convincingly as Christine Perfect.
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How great this thread has been, with people writing about, and of, music and themselves often quite movingly.
Bruce
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I was 16.
Left school, got a job and bought my first hifi.
Started smoking, Embassy.
Got a bad case of tonsilitis, 
fever.
Spent the day in bed re-reading Lord of the Rings.
Reached the part where Gandalf fights the Balrog on the Bridge at Khazad-dum.
Gandalf breaks the bridge with his staff, and the Balrog falls.
But ‘even as it fell, it swung its whip’.
As Gandalf falls, he calls out, ‘Fly, you fools’, and was gone.
I was listening to 24 Carat Purple.
This experience struck me deeply about the reality of loss.
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. . . . I agree. The first cut is the deepest. Here is one you might like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo__EIXzAco
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About 6 years ago I had just reached the point in my life that the kids were raised, business was not all consuming so my wife and I bought a lake house. Music had taken a back seat to “life” for 30 years. I was like every other college kid in the 70’s, loved music and spent every dime I could borrow on a Kenwood system with Phillips speakers. But for 30 years other things got in the way. Recent music to me was Eagles Hotel California.
One afternoon I was down at the dock and a bunch of teens and early 20’s came by in a surf boat blasting something really loud. I don’t know what it was; sun, bikinis, or the music but something hit me like a ton of bricks. The music was Five Finger Death Punch’s House of the Rising Sun. I stood there with my mouth open absolutely mesmerized. I was hooked again. I purchased a new system and have upgraded to a 500 series. My wife and I have travel to concerts from Vegas to New York, Red Rocks 6 times. I can trace it all back to that surf boat and House of the Rising Sun.
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I can trace it all back to the bikini.
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I have been fortunate to attend many performances going back to the 60’s. I have been a big fan of Charles Lloyd and saw him in concert with Billy Higgins (drums). Billy Higgins was jazz legend having played with many of the greats. He had just had a liver transplant (his second). At the end of the show Lloyd played a wooden flute of some kind and Higgins had a hand drum that he played with small stick. I don’ know how to describe it but they had such a groove going. They came into the audience playing and made their way through the crowd. As they passed me I felt my hair standup on the back of neck. It was so moving, something I hadn’t experienced before. It took my breath away. I asked others if they had experienced the same thing and they had. Billy Higgins. Passed away shortly after.
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This is two stories in one.
My music epiphany & a tale of possibly one of the most successful but short-lived music promotors of all time, me.
Aged 16, I went to Medway and Maidstone College of Technology (Maidstone) in September 1972 & somehow found myself on the student union entertainment committee whose sole job was to organise the monthly Friday night music gigs.
We had a set budget each month for booking bands to appear from lists sent (I believe) from the National Student Union H.O. & were supposed to book two bands within our budget of (as far as I recall) around £500.
For the November date I was thrilled to see the Dutch band Focus on the list of available acts for booking. I had heard a lot of them through the Dutch version of Radio Caroline, Radio Veronica, which could be received in parts of Kent, given favourable atmospherics.
I thought they were fantastic, world class, & persuaded the committee to spend all the months budget on booking them as the sole band that night.
Only one problem. I had overlooked the fact that no one else in the Maidstone area had ever heard of them. Two weeks before the gig we had sold less than 50 of 400 or so tickets & I was being held responsible for probably bankrupting the student union! Then lady luck intervened in the biggest way possible.
That week Focus appeared live on Top of the Pops & their, unknown in the UK, single, Hocus Pocus, rocketed to no. 2 in the charts.
Despite being licenced for 400, we sold over 600 tickets & made a small fortune which enabled us to book slightly better acts for the rest of the collage year. I was a hero & basked in the glory for all it was worth on the basis of ‘trust me, I know what I am doing’. I didn’t dare let it be known how relieved I was over the whole experience & just rubber stamped other peoples booking suggestions for the rest of the year!
So, one gig, huge success, quit while you’re winning!
What about the epiphany moment? I had never heard a professional rock band live & when the roadies were setting up on the afternoon of the gig I was surprised how loud the drums were & mentioned it to a friend who said ‘if you think that’s loud, wait until they mike them up’.
Never was a truer word spoken. The focus set opened with the quiet start to Focus 3 & the first 30 seconds sent thrills down my spine that I have never forgotten, reinforced my love of music & forged a love of live music. I had no idea that music could sound like that.
Thirty-eight years later, in 2010, I saw Focus again in Truro, my home since 1986, & I couldn’t believe it when they opened with Focus 3 & the memories just flooded back. My wife was concerned when she saw tears down my face.
I tried to talk to Thijs van Leer after the concert whilst getting his autograph & he was not interested until I mentioned Radio Veronica & we then spoke for a couple of minutes about the Focus tour in 1972, their first in the UK.
This is a great thread & I fully understand the experiences/feelings of many of the contributors to it.
I hope my contribution to it & has been of interest to some of you, rather than simply boring everyone!
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August 1976 - Uni ski club hut on Mt Ruapehu
Saturday night, beautiful and clear (Mt Taranaki visible far off)
First taste of the weed and loud on the stereo…
Patti Smith “Horses”
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2 stand out in my memory. There have been other memorable live events but both of these were firsts.
Having in the school orchestra and wind band since is was 13 I was partially aware ( as much as you can when actually playing) of the power of live music but one of our teachers organised 6th form trips to Sheffield City Hall on alternate Friday nights for their philharmonic concerts.
It was my first ever Classical music live experience (I wish I could remember the orchestra) but it was Mahler 2. 100+ musicians, choir organ, a 5 minute gap between the first and second movements, the programme said “ to think about what had gone before”.
The power of the orchestra, the ephemeral ending, just WOW.
The second one was just after I started working and a colleague said would I like to go see some bloke called Gary Moore. (Slight aside my record collection at that time was almost exclusively classical played on LP12 Ittok K9, Naim 62 90 into Mordaunt Short MS20). Having never heard of him or been to a rock concert I said yes.
After an unremarkable opening act the lights went down and on strolled a bloke with an acoustic guitar to a completely black stage and proceeded to sing about searching for answers and disasters then after a minute all hell let loose, lights, pyrotechnics, guitars drums
Music hasn’t been quite the same since.
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Early 80s, a good mate suggested going into town instead of another pint in the village as there was a blues band on in The Greyhound. We got there and got settled, pint in hand in front of your standard pub band back room set up - a few amps, couple of spare guitars leaning on stands and a routine drum kit, then most of the band shuffled on and got themselves sorted.
Then this bloke - who I instantly recognised as the guy who ran the local hifi shop (when towns had hifi shops) - he strolled up to the mic and at full lung capacity belted out in prefect rendition:
ohhohh, I can’t quit you babe… but I’m gonna have to put you down for a while.
And then the rest joined in, at a remarkable volume. It literally blew me away and it hit me, this is how good it can be, how volume isn’t volume for its own sake but by its nature gives that drive and energy that even now we still seek.
Would have been around 1984/85 maybe. I saw Rainbow at Leicester De Montfort in 1978 but this Blues Band were extraordinary, streets ahead in comparison.
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Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at Birmingham Town Hall, sometime in the early 70s. Didn’t know who I was going to see, got free tickets from the manager of Virgin Records. Amazing gig, so special, it was billed as a summer evening of blues. A privelige and down to the nice folks at the original Virgin, Paul Dolman was the manager, I used to spend all of my Saturday job wages in there.
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Nice one Bob,
Lucky you ! !
It’s such a small world, full of coincidences. I bought a Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee album in 1973 from my local virginrecords in Hull. It was that blues combo that encouraged me to get my first blues harp and learn to play the 12 bar.
I still have it, so going to give it a spin right now. Thanks
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For me it was as a kid attending a British Holiday camp and hearing a live Pop band for the first time, it was the middle of the afternoon so they must have been rehearsals. I’m quite sure that it was nothing special in musical terms, but the volume and power re-calibrated in my mind what music was for me, especially when compared to listening to my family record collection at home on an Alba record player.
I had a similar experience on a school trip a little later when we when to see and hear a full orchestra play popular classical pieces, the power and majesty, was ‘Awesomes’, even though that expression hadn’t been invented yet!
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@Roog. Similar although I’d had piano lessons and loved music at age 12 went to the local church hall disco and there was a 3 piece covering Cream/CCR etc. Wow the energy. Saw Creedence Clearwater Revival for real at the RAH a few months later.
Regards,
Lindsay
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You said in your post "the power and majesty, was ‘Awesomes’ ".
This is exactly what I felt when I heard the first few bars of Focus in my earlier Focus post on this thread, & several others have alluded to, including LindsayM in his reply to you.
Whilst not quite totally unexpected, having seen many live acts in the intervening years, I experienced similar feelings, being both stunned & surprised by the power of the sound within the first 30 seconds, at live gigs by:-
Eric Clapton - Birmingham NEC 1998 (my all time music hero, first time saw live, did not disappoint)
Genesis - Madison Square Garden 2007 (lucky to have booked New York holiday then found Genesis were in town at the same time - unforgettable night)
Eagles - Birmingham National Indoor Arena, approx. 2004 (amazing sound, whole band were staying at our hotel & got to say hello to Timothy B Schmidt)
Despite these three stand out experiences, as they say ‘there is no time like the first time’ & nothing has yet beaten the sheer astonishment of hearing Focus live on a winters evening 48 years ago!
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I can mention 2.
I was in Junior High (Secondary 1 in Quebec) and we had a Music course. The teacher was Roland Alarie, who was a choir master and the brother of Pierrette Alarie, a world famous soprano in the days. He introduced us to tone poems - Dukas’ Apprentice Sorcerer, Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Smetanas’ Moldau, Tchaikowsky’s Ouverture 1812, etc. I was 13. I fell in love with classical musical and it’s been my favourite genre ever since.
Like @BobF the second involved Brian Wilson. It happened about 15 years ago. I was then head of HR in a helicopter company, and we went to Rolls Royce’s party at the Helicopter Association International conference in Orlando. They had invited Brian Wilson and his group to play Beach Boys music at night, on the beach with barbecue, a huge camp fire and girls in bikinis. I’ve always loved Beach Boys music, but that night I felt that I fully understood it - it was meant to be played that way. I’ll never forget that evening.
Claude
In my younger days I attended quite a few classical music concerts at mostly the Royal Festival Hall and occasionally the Albert Hall.
30 odd years ago at the Proms I heard the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein play the Clarinet Concerto by Mozart and the 5th Symphony by Gustav Mahler. From the VPO tuning up, we had good seats as we had booked early, you could tell the quality of that orchestra from just that. It struck me at the time that my Naim system, 32 or 52, I can’t remember, would have a hard job in creating the subtlely I heard.
The concert was a revelation particularly in the agagietto from the 5th Symphony. I looked around the Hall at the time and Bernstein just had all that audience in the palm of his hands. What a conductor. He had gained a lot of weight and had lost that bouncy style from his younger days but not the power to convey the music and some. A guy who did not have enough time in the day to do what he wanted to do. Read his biography by Humphey Burton.
He died only a few years later (2/3?). His coffin went from the Dacota Building where he lived opposite Central Park, Strawberry Fields, to the cemerty in Brooklyn. In his coffin was a copy of the score of Mahler’s 5th Symphony.
I have had other uplifting musical experiances some of them recorded. Never quite like that evening.
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