Summer of love

[Beachboy]

quote:

---

My favorite concert of all time was seeing Janis Joplin in Gregory Gym at the University of Texas in December 1969. Janis was a UT dropout, and started out singing folk music with a guitar on a bar stool at a place called Threadgill's Tavern on Lamar Blvd. in Austin around 1963. Janis did a few blues numbers one night, and somebody told her that she should switch to blues and move to California, so she did.

Anyway, Gregory Gym was built in the 1890's and looked like a Victorian railroad terminal with huge structural steel cantilevers holding up the roof. It had no air conditioning, negligible heating and held about 8,500. The night of the concert about 12,000 people showed up. The police and fire marshalls gave up trying to restrain the crowd when it became apparent that doing so would lead to yet another riot on the already battered campus. (We were very anti-war and regularly made our displeasure known.) They threw the gates open and left.

People were literally sitting and hanging among those enormous cantilever rafters to see Janis. My roommate and I were lucky enough to get seats because we had a late PE class in the gym annex and got in early. (We actually had tickets!)

Now anyone who went to UT-Austin in that era knew of the ritualized torture of Registration that was held in Gregory Gym every September. It was usually around 100 degrees and about 90% humidity outdoors in Austin that time of year and worse in the gym. They literally had paramedics on duty to handle all the people who passed out. Registration was not yet computerized, and some people spent days in that hell-hole trying to get a course they needed to graduate.

So when the show began, the band came out and took their positions, followed by Janis. The crowd went wild, and then instead of singing her first number, Janis said, "I've been in this s*&%-hole before! Do they still make y'all do registration here?" The crowd screamed "HELL, YES!" Then she said, "Yeah, I know what it's like to need to get into old Doc Bowman's American History class and have to wait in line for three days. It made me feel like everybody in the whole round world was . . ."

. . ."Down on Me." She and the band went seamlessly into that great radio hit. We went crazy. She poured her heart and soul out on that stage for the next three hours.

That girl from Port Arthur, Texas who was never pretty enough or refined enough for tea-sipping proper Texas society shone like a supernova that night. She took the ugliness and the pain she felt and turned it into something beautiful. SHE was beautiful. We all knew we had been there for something special, and less than a year later, she was gone.

Time passes. Now we have another crappy president and another war. But I will never forget that night or the girl from Port Arthur. Janis, you're beautiful. We all knew it. Why couldn't you?

Wistfully needing to hear "Ball and Chain,"
Jerry





Edited by - JerryCarr on 07/31/2007 14:06:02

---

Wasn't "Cheap Thrills" one of the all-time best live LP's of it's era? Approved by the Oakland Chapter of the Hell's Angels", I remember seeing that in the right hand corner of the LP.
Hey Jerry, did you ever enjoy Lou Reed at all? Speaking of Live music ,Lou Reed's Rock N' Roll Animal was pretty awesome.
Of course I actually grew up with the Rolling Stones & Bob Dylan. Probably my all-time favorite Stone album 'Exile on Main Street', that buggar was awesome too!