Well tomorrow actually but what’s a day out of the 18,263 since that long ago Saturday September 14 CSNY, Joni, Tom Scott, The Band and Jesse Colin Young hit the boards at Wembley.
Bob Dylan was rumoured to appear but didn’t and Neil Young drove off to Morocco in a Rolls Royce he bought
With his share of the takings.
Anyone else there that day aside from Elvis Costello and myself?
And here’s the entire concert as filmed, recorded and scrapped
I seem to recall quite a few of us from the Afterword were there. I was there as was my brother in law but I didn’t know him then. I recall I hitched down and part of the way got a lift in an ice-cream van.
I watched part of the Band concert on YouTube but had to give up as the sound and filming was hard to listen to and watch. I’d actually gone to see the Band and Joni not too bothered about CSNY.
Given this was, together with Dylan’s comeback tour, one of the biggest global music events of 1974, it was amazing how cheap (Think it was either £2.50 or £3.00) tickets were and
how easy it was to get them.
Gigs and tours weren’t viewed as money-making ventures in themselves, by performers and management back then. They were promotional tools to sell the artists records, which was where the money was in those times. Artists were paid by their labels (often just a pittance) to endlessly tour. Ticket prices only really had to cover the venue costs.
Now gigs and tours HAVE to be profitable top to bottom, or at least pay for themselves, because unless you’re a megastar sales and streaming of recordings don’t make money, except for the record companies and the streaming companies. The promoters and venue owners are now also sucking hard on the tit.
That doesn’t account for how easy it was to get tickets for big showcase gigs back then.
You bought a PO, stuck a stamp on an SAE and sent your application off. Most of the time, back came your tickets a few weeks later. On occasion, you could even get tickets at your local record shop.
In the worst case scenario you might have to go and queue up at the box office – fun on summer nights, not so nice on a cold late-October night when the clocks went back and you had to spend another hour camped on a cold, damp pavement as happened to me and my mates when buying tickets for a Rod S and The Faces gig at Birmingham Odeon
The greedybastards hadn’t yet taken over event ticketing. Promoters themselves, or the venues themselves, were doing all of it themselves in the case of big-name gigs/tours. Tours were shorter, the venues used were smaller and they all had their own box office staff to deal with tickets.
Smaller gigs at local venues weren’t ticketed at all. You just paid cash on entry.
Just you try telling that to the shiftless young ‘uns of today, though @Mike-H