Ahhh, the seventies, when we were nostalgic for the 50s. Now THAT was some nostalgia. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
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Tied for my loudest are Floyd/The Wall at Nassau Coliseum '78 or '79, and Philip Glass Ensemble with Michael Riesman playing live to Koyaanisqatsi somewhere at Lincoln Center (Alice Tully?), not too long after the film came out. Both shows, body-quaking crystal-clear perfect beautiful bath-like waves of sound. Will never forget the 5 seconds of stunned silence at the end of Koyaanisqatsi. Both shows, covering your ears/burying your head in your lap made absolutely no difference. Waaay before I took hearing loss seriously…
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Another “Great Moment in Television History”. And yes @LurkingGrue New Wave. Punk Rock is a sub-genre of the New Wave Movement.
Man, I dig that.
I’ve seen shit tons of shows since 1980, so there are only a handful of bands that fit the category “could have seen, but didn’t - mad I didn’t”. The Ramones are at the top of the list. Next to The Clash. : (
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Saw Bob Mould’s Sugar at the Aragon in Chicago.
It was Mould’s birthday, and a couple of roadies brought him out a birthday cake with a single lit candle on top.
Mould was NOT amused. He dragged a chair out from backstage, positioned it about five feet in front of one of his speakers, placed the cake on the chair, did something with his amps and his guitar and then ripped out the loudest, ugliest chord I’ve ever heard -
Which blew out the candle.
Luckily, I kinda twigged what was going to happen, and covered my ears first. They still rang for a couple of days afterwards.
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Saw them twice. Once in the mid 80s at a small, packed Detroit club, sometime in July. A friend was dancing at the front and passed out from the heat. Four guys carried him outside, splashed water on him and made him drink some of it. He came round, LHFAO, ran back in - straight to the front, and began dancing again. After abour 15 mins, he passed out again! Rinse, repeat! Also saw 'em for Adios Amigos.
The Swans were indeed loud AF. So are Einstürzende Neubauten. The Butthole Surfers are pretty damn loud, too. Same with Killing Joke, and PiL. Flipper was loud AF, too, esp in a small club!
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New wave was the watered down term Sire Records wanted to use… punk was in usage prior to that, at first by rock critics (first used to describe music in Creem magazine, then others). People were using punk to refer to their scenes next, but prior to new wave…
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Hahaha, that’s a great story.
For me, it’s usually those small clubs where the sound gets above ear-splitting.
I’ve been to somewhere between 800 and 1000 shows since I was a kid (my wife and I still hit one or 2 dozen a year - we don’t have kids) and I probably have hearing loss to a certain extent, but last time it was tested it was OK.
For some reason, one of the loudest that sticks in my memory was Red Hot Chili Peppers at Shoreline. I was maybe ten rows back on Flea’s side, so was also pummeled by his bass stack.
Saw The Whigs at the Casbah a couple hears ago here in San Diego and the guitar player had a full Marshall Stack in there… Was pretty fucking loud.
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Saw them at the ICA in Concerto for Voice and Machinery in 1984 where they used pneumatic drills to dig through the stage (apparently a recreation was attempted recently). A 20 minute assault in a smallish confined space – really painful. There was nothing to deaden the sound and no distance.
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I want to thank you both for sending me down a fun little rabbit hole!
Because of course I read your comments and thought, “Oh but what about Einsturzende Neubauten?” (It could just as well have been any of another half-dozen ear-damaging performers; I just like saying “Einsturzende Neubauten.”) And then took to the interwebs, where the debate has apparently raged since The Who’s 1974 ear-damaging concert.
And it doesn’t appear that Sha Na Na was ever in the running.
(Bringin’ it back home to the topic. Sort of.)
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I never got to see them… did get to see FM Einheit open for Pigface, once, tho. The singer did the toothbrush thing that was mentioned on BB being done by another artist a while ago…
Probably not! But they have their own charm, for sure!
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Your reply and sdmikev’s stirred a memory. I saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in '85, in a big room - St Andrew’s Hall in downtown Detroit. My friend and I made it up to the very front, and after a few minutes I climbed right up the massive speaker stack. Dunno how I managed to do it, but I could easily mount 6ft tall horses w/o lengthening the stirrup leather when I was young and flexible. I climbed up on top of the first one, and stayed there, dancing my ass off for the rest of the show, getting a full body blast from the center speaker. It was fantastic! Such an interesting angle to watch from, and I wished I’d had a camera. My friend didn’t even have to hand me down after the show, I just jumped. No one at any show after that had access to the speakers.
Later that year I saw Einstürzende Neubauten. That was in a pretty big room too, the old Greystone in SW Detroit. There was a wide shelf running the length of one wall, and I climbed up there to watch them. It made me very happy to see - and hear!!! - Blixa Bargeld twice in a year. (The 3 exclamation points are b/c LOUD.)
God, how I loved Creem. Their being Detroit-based was a point of great civic pride. I still miss it very much.
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That’s impressive AF.
Killing Joke left my ears ringing for two days.
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I hate when I’m wrong.
You shouldn’t feel bad… I think punk has been very mythologized by the music industry and so there is a ton of misinformation out there that people believe… 
Hopefully, historians like me can help cut through the BS and tell a more accurate history that doesn’t distort the past…
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Lord help me, I can’t remember the author, but there was a paper included in one of my sociology textbooks that was written by an academic who went undercover and infiltrated the scene. It was pretty interesting how she layered it like an onion, with the “posers” being the outermost layer, to the “hardcore” subjects in the center who actually led a life by the principles. I’ll try to see if I can figure out the name.
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Yeah, let me know if you do… sounds familiar, so I might have read it, if not something similar to it… And of course sociology is a bit different, in that it’s often a snapshot of a scene at a particular point in time, although they’ll often delve into the historical developments of the scene, too. But even that tends to be very localized and specific.
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