I recently attended a Burton Cummings concert. He was apparently the lead singer of the Guess Who back in the day, but I had never really heard of him until my fiancée expressed interest in seeing him. She loved his version of “When a Man Loves a Woman”—which he did not sing during this concert.
For me, the two high points of the evening were: 1) the very drunk/stoned man behind us basically pole-dancing with a concrete pillar, and 2) Cummings recalling for me a cultural touchstone of my youth. Before “Clap for the Wolfman,” he mentioned the TV show Midnight Special which aired late Friday nights on ABC. I then remembered another show of that era: In Concert (on NBC).
I watched these every chance I got. I wouldn’t attend my first live and in person concert until college (either New Riders of the Purple Sage with Pure Prairie League or Harry Chapin; I forget which came first). But these shows allowed me to experience live performances at a formative moment in my cultural development. Seeing them would ignite a desire for live performances that would become dormant until I once again started attending live music concerts of prog bands, including Porcupine Tree’s The Incident tour and then ROSfest, beginning in 2009/2010.
My memory of watching these shows on TV is pretty vague; no particular or specific memories come to mind. I do have a hazy recollection of Wolfman Jack introducing acts but nothing else. And yet the experience and the memory of the enjoyment of seeing performers in front of me, despite being mediated by the cathode-ray tube, have remained with me.
MUSOFYR 