Amazing Concerts Growing Up in St. Louis

I consider a big benefit to growing up in St. Louis in 50s-70s, was the opportunity see some amazing concerts.

One of the most amazing concerts I ever saw took place at the old Ambassador Theater on the evening of December 20, 1974. The show was Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders. Jerry Garcia kept incredibly busy with the Grateful Dead, but still found time for some outside projects like his work the amazing Merl Saunders.

The show was going to be a sellout. So the night before tickets went on sale at the Ambassador box office in downtown St. Louis, I loaded up my sleeping bag and joined a few hundred other people to wait on the sidewalk outside the Ambassador all night. One of the few times I got to see the sun come up at that time.

I would never dream of doing something like that these days. The crime rate in downtown St. Louis would prevent most people from sleeping on the sidewalk all night in front of a theater. But that in itself, was quite an experience.

Even more so, was the actual concert. The start time was supposed to be 8 PM, but Garcia's flight had been delayed. The producers asked the audience to be patient, assured us that Garcia was on the way, and there would be a show that night.

For the next 3 hours the audience passed the time by doing lots of visiting with other concert goers. There were people smoking and sharing opium, hashish and of course marijuana. The act of doing it at a concert like that was no surprise, but it was the amount of sharing I saw going on that amazed me.

Around 11 PM, the producers announced that Jerry Garcia was on the way. A short time later the band took to the stage.

Garcia was having trouble with a guitar string, but the guys manning the spotlights persistently kept them shining on him even though he was trying to fix a problem.

A few times he asked them to the turn the lights down. Frustrated, he finally said, "Can somebody dim those f_____ers, man, they're blinding me." And the spotlights got turned off.

I think the band played until around 2 AM that night and the audience loved every minute of it. And it's surely an opportunity I wouldn't have had if I had not grown up in St. Louis.

In our youth we did some dangerous things. Looking back, it's quite amazing to think we actually did some of those things. But we did and we survived in spite of the danger.

Life is good. God is great. Carpe diem!

So it goes.