The opening act was the J. Geils Band, quite good. The balcony crowd quickly moved out of the seats up to the railing and I got myself one of the best spots. It meant I had to stay there as some prick behind a pillar was waiting for me to go grab a beer or something. It was a spectacular.
Later I showed up at the motel to find Marty had gotten something closer at the last moment. It was 2:00AM so I parked up in the hills and slept in my car.
[Author’s note 2024: This would be the last concert I attended, they have become all about big money and prices have soared. It was around this time I learned TicketMaster was a mafia operation with the stadiums in their control. By chance, I found this picture which, flipped horizontally, gave a very good view of what I could see.
Too far away to see any faces, there was a huge overhead LED display not shown here, a major innovation for it’s day. One day I may find the handwritten notes.
The Stones had been around twenty years by the time of this concert but I was too young to understand their weird and largely “unhappy” music. The J. Geils band had just one hit so they played many covers, the last one before the Stones came on was the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love”. I remember it so well because back in Couer d’Alene, Marty said they looked everywhere for me and did not belive I’d made it to the show until I remembered this song.
My position was so far away, there was a time lag between the stage motion and when I heard the music. That took a while to get used to. Mick arrived on stage on an orchard cherry picker bucket. Somebody had smuggled in a flare gun and fired it, smoldering out long before getting near the platform, the Kingdome is that huge.
> It’s a bit of heartbreak for me to learn the Stones will be appearing at the stadium again in a few months from now, reminding me it was 43 years ago and a world where, even if I didn’t have the resources to participate, things in this country were still good.]
