Valley residents tell the tales behind their favorite concert mementos
The concert T-shirt is more than just an eye-catching article of casual apparel. It’s also a talisman with the power to evoke vivid memories set against a live musical score.
In honor of summer concert season, we asked Southern Nevadans to show us their favorite concert T-shirts and share with us the memories those tees hold.
Here are their stories.
•••
James Steeno grew up in Green Bay, Wis., when “it was a pretty small town,” and “everybody knew everybody and you left the front door unlocked.”
Because Green Bay didn’t have a major concert venue — only an arena that, Steeno says, “was used more for things like the circus when it came to town” — “you didn’t really get all the big-name bands coming to town,” Steeno says. “You just got, I guess, the B-listers.
“So when we saw that Metallica was coming to town, it was just unbelievable. We just never thought that a band that big would ever come to Green Bay.”
It was April 1989. “I was still in high school and I had long hair,” Steeno says. “Me and my friends were all Metallica fans, and when we saw that flier, it was life-changing, for sure.
“It was packed. We were on the floor. I was probably only 5½ feet tall, so I couldn’t see much. But when the music started playing, it was just blaring and so loud and it sounded so good, and it changed my life. I was a metalhead from then on.”
While Steeno has seen “thousands of concerts” and picked up plenty of other T-shirts since then, the Metallica shirt he bought for 16 bucks in Green Bay remains his favorite.
•••
Bob Wagner didn’t make it to Woodstock, but he did make it to what some consider to be the second- or third-biggest rock festival of the time, the Ozark Music Festival, held July 19-21, 1974, at the Missouri State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, Mo.
The Ozark Music Festival is both famous and infamous for its background (city fathers felt the promoter wasn’t completely upfront about what it was to be) and its aftermath (a Missouri state Senate postmortem referenced both Sodom and Gomorrah).
The festival’s lineup was eclectic, even for its time, and included Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, The Eagles, America, Boz Scaggs, Ted Nugent, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger, Joe Walsh, Charlie Daniels, and (huh?) the Earl Scruggs Revue.
Wagner, then 22, had just graduated from the University of Missouri.
“(I was) just kind of taking the summer off before I went looking for a job,” he says.
He drove to the festival with a group of friends. Sedalia is a small town, he says, “probably about the size of Mesquite or Boulder City, and by that weekend they had upwards of 300,000 people in that town.”
Wagner’s memories include barreling across Missouri to Kansas on a prefestival Coors run and baking all weekend in triple-digit temperatures that, in retrospect, may have contributed to the festival’s widespread public nudity.
Wagner also heard some great music and witnessed the end of an era.
“Shortly afterward, Nixon resigned,” he says. “And we all cut our hair and became part of the system.”
Wagner did pick up a T-shirt at the festival, but says that one is “long gone.” However, a few years ago, he bought a few T-shirts commemorating the 35th anniversary of the festival (which celebrated its 40th anniversary just last weekend).
•••
Cathy Orfe’s favorite concert tee is the one her husband bought for her on one of their first dates: a Frank Zappa concert at the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts in 1980.
Orfe knew about Frank Zappa mostly through “his fun little 1970s songs,” she says. “So when he told me, ‘Let’s go see Frank Zappa,’ I was, ‘OK.’ We had just started dating, so it was like, ‘OK. Whatever.’”
But, Orfe says, “I was pleasantly surprised.”
Orfe’s date had given the usher 20 bucks to show them to good seats. “So they’re walking us down and before you know it we’re in folding chairs in front of the stage, in, like, the orchestra pit.”
Orfe’s date purchased the T-shirt for her at the show. And, she says, “we’ve been together ever since.”
•••
Carla Stevenson’s favorite T-shirt, a Rolling Stones tee, is from a concert she didn’t get to attend.
“I really like the Stones,” says Stevenson who, with her son, had gotten tickets to see the band at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1982. But, she says, it later turned out that she was scheduled to have an operation that weekend, on the day before the Sunday concert. So, she gave her ticket to her son, who resold it to one of his friends.
“Then, the doctor called at the last minute and they had to change it — they had to reschedule it — for several weeks later,” Stevenson says.
Stevenson’s son already had sold his ticket to his friend. Although she couldn’t see the show, she did listen to a radio simulcast of it, and her son did bring her a T-shirt.
Stevenson, who now lives in Pahrump, says her collection of concert tees, which dates back to the ’60s, now exceeds 1,000.
A few months ago, she and the tees dodged a fiery bullet after her garage — which contained her collection of shirts — went up in flames.
“I was feeling really bummed,” she says. “I thought I lost all these cool shirts, and there they were, in the last box I went through. I washed them and they were OK. I was so happy.”
•••
In 1983, when Chris Baird was in the Air Force and stationed at Edwards Air Force Base, the US Festival was scheduled for Memorial Day weekend in San Bernardino County.
“I can’t remember how I heard about it, but when I saw all the bands that were playing, I was, ‘I’ve gotta make the time to get there,’ ” he recalls.
“I only had a motorcycle at the time. I was just a poor Air Force guy,” Baird says.
But, for the weekend, he swapped his motorcycle for a friend’s pickup.
“I remember there (were) so many people, it was amazing,” he says. “But the biggest thing I do remember is the big-name bands.”
U2. Van Halen. Berlin.
“It was great,” says Baird, who slept in the bed of the pickup, “as you can do when you’re 20 or 21.
“I just remember drinking a lot of beer and watching great groups, and it was an eye-opening experience for a guy that came from New England.”
•••
Christie Copeland is a Steely Dan fan, and when Walter Becker and Donald Fagen and the band played the Pearl at the Palms last summer, she was looking forward to seeing them.
Copeland bought a ticket and was standing in line for the 8 p.m. show when she heard someone in line say something about the opening act. That Steely Dan had an opening act was news to Copeland, who at the time was singing in a lounge band at the Golden Nugget.
Copeland had to be at work at 10 p.m., and Steely Dan’s opening act surely would make her late. So, she says, “I turned around and sold the ticket to some guy who probably sold it to some other guy.
On the upside, Copeland did make it to work, and “early for once” to boot. And when two friends who did see the concert saw her later that night, they gave her a Steely Dan tee they had picked up to ease her pain.
And when Copeland told her bandmates about her experience, they responded only as bandmates can: They played, for their first number, “Reelin’ in the Years,” Copeland says, “just to rub it in my face.”
•••
The biggest problem with collecting concert T-shirts is that, eventually, you’ll end up with more than you’ll ever get to wear. But Diane Rode solved that one: She had 30 of her favorite concert T-shirts — and a few other rock-relevant tees — turned into the coolest quilt ever, via a company she discovered through Groupon.
“I’ve been going to concerts for a very, very long time,” says Rode, who says it was emotionally wrenching to cut her tees apart to separate the front graphic from the back.
If she had to pick a favorite tee, Rode says it’d be the one in the third row, second from the right, that she got in 1978 at a Queen concert in Cleveland. That it was Rode’s first concert has something to do with that, she says, but “just Freddie Mercury. What a showman.”
Rode is trying to decide how to display her T-shirt quilt. In the meantime, what will she do with all of the T-shirt backs whose front panels are on the quilt?
“I’m thinking about having pillows made,” Rode says.
Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.
