While the country burns and Trump and Republicans are ripping up the Constitution to use as fragile, single-ply toilet paper, I’m distracting myself with musical moments from my long history.
This memory was inspired by a friend describing his experience in the audience at the Sheldon Theater with the Duane Betts and Palmetto Motel band in Red Wing, MN this past Thursday. Back in the mid-70s, I was struggling to keep my little family afloat, living in Central City, Nebraska, working 90-100 hours/week at something under $5/hour, installing and servicing electronic scale systems, and playing in a couple of cover bands in my “spare time.” A recent high school dropout, Mike Gallusha, worked for me, mostly doing unskilled shop jobs and occasionally travelling with me on field service trips, and playing drums in a couple of the cover bands I fronted. He was largely responsible for one of the first moments in my adult life where a young person drug me (kicking and whining) into another generation of pop music.
Mike, on the other hand, was a true fan. Early in his life, Mike took some drum lessons from Peter Erskine and, as I remember, Mike was in occasional communication with Peter that gave him an early heads-up when someone special was coming to Nebraska. However it happened, Mike knew Allman Brothers tickets would be on sale at the Omaha Civic Auditorium before the concert was announced. And I would be passing through Omaha that day on my way to a service call in western Iowa. He asked me to grab a couple of tickets to the concert, for himself and his wife, on my way through the city. As I remember, again, the tickets were around $8/each, in the middle of the 1st balcony, about 70 degrees from stage right, and I bought 4 tickets; so my wife and I could go, too. That sounds cheap, but it took me almost a full work day to earn $32 back then.
The concert was on January 16, 1976, at the Omaha Civic Auditorium, which was a pretty decent venue, when the stage was properly oriented, which would cost the performers about ¼ of the room’s capacity by putting the stage at one side of the basketball/hockey court instead of at one end. I, once again, had work in Iowa that day and ended up back in Omaha about an hour before the concert began. The tickets had been advertised for less than a day on the local FM rock station, KOMA, and the concert was sold out before the ticket booth closed that day (long before the days of online concert tickets or even the cursed and dreaded Ticketmaster). So, I was lucky to be there at the right time.
The day of the concert, scalpers were roaming the area in front of the auditorium waving tickets at the unfortunate fans who hadn’t been lucky enough to know about the show before it was sold out. Scalped prices started at nearly $100 early that afternoon and started climbing rapidly shortly before Mike, his wife, and Ms Day showed up a few minutes before the doors opened.
I mentioned to Mike that, if we sold our tickets, we could buy every record the band ever recorded, go out to dinner that night anywhere in town, and still have a week’s salary in hand when we got home. Mike took his pair of tickets and started walking to the door, saying, “You can sell yours, if you want.” A bit confused, because Mike made a LOT less money than me, I followed him through the turnstile and handed over what felt like a lost fortune to the gate keeper.
The opening act was a godawful southern rock disaster aptly named “Grinderswitch.” There were lots of cowboy hats waving in the air, hog calls and more “yeehaws” than I ever hoped to experience again, and, outside of a Trump rally, the lowest IQ crowd I have ever seen, let alone experienced. Their set seemed interminable and it was awful. I felt like I had made the dumbest financial decision of my life to that point (I would prove that to be wrong, several times, in the future.) Finally, the yokel noise stopped and Grinderswitch staggered off of the stage. I was ready to leave.
We didn’t have any place to go and the Allman’s crew repurposed the stage quickly and the lights went down as the band found their places via Marshall amp pilot lights and roadie assistance. The opening chords of “High Falls” filtered through the background noise of the crowd. The band was touring to support their new album, “Win, Lose, or Draw” and “High Falls” was the only instrumental on that great, under-rated album (still my favorite of all Allman Brothers records). The cowboy hats disappeared, the audience quickly quieted down, the “yeehaws” and hog callers seemed to dissolve when the 3-piece rhythm section and Lamar Williams’ started playing. I swear, in less than a minute, the crowd IQ jumped at least 30 points, from sub-human to college graduates and Miles Davis fans. From that moment on, the night was absolutely magical.
I have searched the internet for a picture of the mid-70s Allman’s touring sound system with no luck. It was a variation of the Dead’s Wall of Sound with a wall of front-loaded speakers behind the band and two large arcs of speakers at both corners of the front of the stage. There was a Front of House mixer toward the back of the floor level of the audience, dead center, and another pair of FOH boards on the 1st balcony level, about 45o off of center, probably controlling the two smaller stacks of speakers at the stage corners. I had never experienced a sound like that night at the Civic Center and I wandered around the auditorium to see if there were any dead or lo-fi spots. That show was the inspiration for the equipment and live music sound systems my partner and I would build for our company, Wirebender Audio Systems, and how I would run sound for over the next 40 years. I read somewhere that the band paid $18,000 per show for the sound system and their performance fee was $36,000 per night.
The Allman Brothers Band didn’t keep up that high standard for long. Less than 5 years later, my company would provide some of the backline and the stage monitor system for an Allman Brothers Band show in Lincoln, NE. By then, Greg was solidly into his dope addict routine and it was Dickey Bett’s band. That was a totally uninspiring show and a disappointment in every respect, other than having the pleasure of standing a few feet from Butch Trucks throughout the show, one of the best drummers who ever walked the planet. Still, that 1976 show changed my life for the better and I am lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.
