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The Who At Ponmet: This Is Rock & Roll?

The Who At Ponmet: This Is Rock & Roll? image The Who At Ponmet: This Is Rock & Roll? image
Parent Issue
Day
3
Month
December
Year
1975
OCR Text

The Who at Ponmet

THIS IS ROCK & ROLL?
by Frank Bach

The Who come onstage to cheers and thunderous applause. Quickly they plug in and ready themselves – then they smash into one of their hard rock and roll standards that are helping to create an era of glory for white rock and roll.

The year is 1968 and it's a steaming-hot Friday night in Detroit. The Grande Ballroom – center for a rapidly-developing new social/cultural scene for young people in  the area – is packed to the walls for the evening's performance by The Who. The entire crowd is on its feet, of course, and on the fringes of the dance floor there are many who somehow find the room to boogie, unable to resist the color and pulse of the music pumping from the band's monstrous amplifiers.

Many of the Grande's 1800 customers that night are "regulars" who often come to the ballroom to meet friends, dance, mingle, get high, and take advantage of the best opportunity they have to enjoy their favorite music. As The Who play on, the people move and press closer to the stage, where sweat can already be seen soaking through the musicians' bright clothes. Roger Daltry spins a microphone into the air. . .

Seven years later – on Saturday, December 6, 1975, at about 10:00 pm – four tiny figures will be seen mounting the stage on the tarp-covered astro-turf at the bright, new Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium. It is The Who.

Some 70,000 people are watching from their seats in this $48 million Oakland County "super facility." Many use binoculars to discern the gestures of the band and get a hint of facial expression. In the third tier the music seems slightly out-of-sync to some of the fans who can make out the band's movements.

In an hour or so they will all go home and the Pon-Met maintenance crew will clean up and ready the stadium for Sunday afternoon's National Football League game, the Lions vs. the Dallas Cowboys. The Who's road manager will tidy up the details concerning the $560,000.00 ticket revenue, which is to be split with the promoters.

* * *

The Who have come a long way in the last ten years or so – and so has Detroit's concert scene, which was once dominated by a large number of active ballrooms and clubs which supported quite a few thriving local and national bands and provided a wide range of musical experiences on any given weekend night for young people of this area. As was outlined in Part 1 of this article (The Sun, November 19 issue), all of these smaller rock and roll venues are closed now, having been wholly unable to compete with the large (4,000 +) concerts that have become the order of the day for Detroit and every other major city in America.

A few years ago really big rock and roll events ("pop-festivals" is what they were usually called) seemed doomed. Many of these promotions were slipshod affairs which drew the ire of local police and, in some places, were outlawed altogether. Promoters with a little more determination and foresight, however, began finding that large rock and roll concerts could be controlled well enough to be inoffensive to most conservative powers-that-be, as well as resulting in astronomical profits in the shortest possible period of time. The ultimate tools in all of this were the huge places originally built for sporting events: basketball and hockey arenas (such as Cobo Hall or Olympia Stadium) and baseball and football stadiums (Pon-Met being the latest example).

Rock and roll has become as American as . . . professional football. But what does it all mean?

What are the economic effects of the big concerts? And, where are they taking the music?

The economics of the big concerts are actually quite simple. Professional promoters of live music know that there is a limited amount of money to be spent at musical events at any given time – there is only so much that people can afford for live music, especially during a depression. And, as is also the case with sports promoters and most other businessmen in this society, the music promoters' idea is to get as much of the available money, and as quickly and easily as possible.

In other words, the bigger the concert the better, as far as profit is concerned. But don't the big concerts have an effect on the smaller events? People in the business say they do, and we have seen the actual failure of many small venues just because people apparently chose the bigger, more attractive events to the exclusion of those more intimate clubs and ballrooms.

A comparison of the Who/Pon-Met concert with a hypothetical alternative helps illustrate the dollar-effect of big concerts on the music business. (See box on this page.) On December 6, the attendance at Pon-Met will be limited to 70,000; at eight dollars a ticket this means total ticket receipts will be $560,000.

If, instead of this, there were events at every major concert hall and club now operating in the Detroit area on that night (which would be about fifteen places, representing performances by over thirty different acts) the total gate receipts would be $246,073. In other words, on one night The Who concert easily grosses over twice as much as all the rest of the live music places could possibly take in during one night in the metropolitan Detroit area.

And, even though expenses for larger events are higher and planning more extensive, the overall profits are still substantially more than for smaller events. So what is essentially a one-night gig at the Pon-Met can outweigh all of the rest of the concert business in town, twice over.

Another useful comparison is between the Who/Pon-Met concert and a series of major musical events held in this area – the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festivals. The Festivals were three-day outdoor affairs which featured literally scores of brilliant seminal black musicians. Yet the overall gross at the two most well attended Blues and Jazz events (1972 and 1973) – 6 days of music featuring some 50 acts – was still not equal to money earned in basically one night at the Pon-Met by The Who and one supporting act.

If the possible economic effect of the huge concert industry seems stark, its effect on the music itself over the last ten years may, in fact, have been even more dramatic. Among people in the music business who have an ear for the music itself, it is widely felt that the big concert-big profit scene has helped lead white rock and roll into a state of near stagnation, with fewer and fewer new and exciting bands coming up in the business because there are fewer and fewer places for unknown talent to play and earn a living. And many of the bands who are already established in the big money scene have significantly cut back on their artistic output.

The Who, newest stars of the Pon-Met, may be an especially good example of this syndrome. Their music developed in what was a very active club and ballroom scene in England during the sixties – it was a music defined by rock and roll dancing, it had social commentary but also was meant to be felt by the whole body and to be moved with. As they've progressed in the music business, however, the band has selected by its own choice to play in the largest places possible. And as the halls got bigger, the audience grew farther and farther away, with communication and feeling lost in the distance and in the prohibition against dancing imposed by the seats (no dance floor)

continued on page 18

Seigel-Schwall
CJO
Count Basie & His Orchestra
Junior Walker & the All Stars
Jimmy Ricks
Howlin' Wolf
Roosevelt Sykes
Leon Thomas
Sun Ra and His Arkestra
Mighty Joe Young
Revolutionary Ensemble
Koko Taylor
Yusef Lateef
Willie Dixon
John Lee Hooker
Lucille Spann
Dr. Ross
Art Ensemble of Chicago
Joe L.
Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers
Little Mack Collins
Little Junior Cannedy
Muddy Waters
Johnnie Mae Matthews
Little Sonny
Dr. John
Eddie Kirkland
Pharoah Sanders
Washboard Willie
Bobby “Blue” Band
One String Sam
Archie Shepp
Arthur Gunther
Freddie King
Baby Boy Warren
Sippie Wallace
Bonnie Raitt
Mr. Bo
Bobo Jenkins
Luther Allison
Robert Junior Lockwood
Mojo Boogie Band
Ray Charles & The Raelettes
Mojo Boogie Band
Jimmy Reed
Miles Davis
Big Walter Horton
Otis Rush
Johnny Otis
Leo Smith
Pee Wee Crayton
Marvin Brown
Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson
Lightnin' Slim
Delmar "Mighty Mouth" Evans
Boogie Woogie Red
Three Tons of Joy
Boogie Brothers
Marie Adams
Joe Willis Wilkins
The Mighty Flea
Houston Stackhouse
Ornette Coleman
Homesick James
Victoria Spivey
Eddie Taylor
Infinite Sound
Carey Bell
Brooklyn Blues Busters

[the above, outweighed on a scale by:]

THE WHO
TOOTS & THE MAYTALLS

METRO DETROIT'S MAJOR LIVE MUSIC FACILITIES
Place Capacity Ave. Price Total Ticket Receipts

Olympia Stadium 16,000 5.50 $88,000
Cobo Hall 12,000 5.50 $66,000
Mason Temple 4,645 5.50 $25,547
Michigan Palace 4,200 5.50 $23,100
Ford Auditorium 2,872 5.50 $15,796
Showcase Theater 2,100 5.00 $11,550
20 Grand 700 4.00 $2,800
Lowman’s 615 4.00 $2,460
Henry’s Lounge 500 (est.) 4.00 $2,000
Ethel’s 400 (est.) 4.00 $1,600
Golden Coach 350 6.00 $2,100
Ben's Hi Chapparal 250 (est.) 400 $1,000
King's Row 250 (est.) 4.00 $1,000
Watt’s Club Mozambique 200 4.00 $800
Jazz West 200 (est.) 3.50 $700
Bobbie's Pub 180 2.50 $450
Raven Gallery 160 3.00 $480
Bakers 110 4.00 $440
Red Carpet 100 (est.) 1.50 $150
Cobb's Corner 100 (est.) 1.00 $100

Total For All Of Above 45,932 $246,073

Pontiac Stadium (Pon-Met)
(limited to 70,000 tickets) 70,000 8.00 $560,000

THIS IS ROCK & ROLL?

continued from page 13

and the ever-present concert security guards.

The bigger concerts simply mean bigger earnings for the bands that are there – and for much less work. While the Who used to play constantly in their earlier days, their big earnings have made much more leisure time possible – they have to work together less than three months out of every year.

The big concert profits seem to dull the creativity of the super-groups on their records, as well. Critics now seem to find it difficult to applaud new recordings by The Who (see, for example, Paul Grant's review of The Who By Numbers in our Vortex section this issue) – a band which was once considered a major trend-setter, even "avante-garde." The latest Who records are often described as rehashing of old themes, pressed into plastic principally to fill recording contract quotas.

One thing is certain: as the big concert business has grown, concentrating most of the money and power in the hands of fewer and fewer acts and promoters, the entire rock and roll scene has suffered on many levels, with new, developing musical talent often finding it as hard to survive as the smaller clubs and ballrooms did. Indeed, the small teen-clubs and dance places made the music possible in the first place, back in the middle sixties, providing bread and butter work for a whole generation of growing young musicians.

The bigger concerts not only cancelled work for young bands at the smaller venues, but they also seem to have altered the essential character of the performance business in general, with results few would have predicted even five or six years ago. The Who's earnings for their 90-minute set at Ponmet, for example, are expected to be approximately 90% of profits after expenses, or some $200,000 by conservative estimates. They demand most of the proceeds because they now have the power to set their price as they see fit, and they take the money out of the community which generates it without regard for replenishing the local music scene. Not even the local promoters, who once hired streams of indigenous talent along with the touring acts, and who spent their own money in the community which produced it, still enjoy their previous status as the exclusive exploiters of the local bands and fans.

Many in the business feel, in other words, that it's the supergroups who are finally responsible for the negative effects of the huge concert industry, since their interests seem to lie in making astronomically large sums of money for themselves at the expense of both their music and their audience. The promoters no longer have the upper hand; they essentially service the desires of the super-groups in return for a small piece of the action, on terms dictated by the super-stars.

It's not as if there's no alternative to the monstrous stadium shows or even the big arena concerts which are the standard of the modern-day pop music industry. But the superstars – those acts who work only when they want to – would have to lower their financial expectations in order to make any significant change. That is, they'd have to live more like the rest of us live, while concentrating on their musical output, and the traditional reward for achievement in a capitalist society is too attractive to most big acts for them to be persuaded to take another, less spectacular approach.

One hopeful straw in the wind is Bob Dylan's current "Rolling Thunder" tour, an almost impromptu sweep of small New England concert halls by a troupe including Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Mick Ronson, Ronee Blakely, Roger McGuinn, and Allen Ginsberg. Dylan, who made his performing "comeback" last year with a Bill Graham-produced tour of large arenas, has chosen to limit the size of the concerts for the Rolling Thunder Revue to achieve the intimacy of music and communication which the artist's work demands. All but two of the shows are scheduled for halls of 3,000 or less, despite the fact that Dylan & Co. could have refused anything but stadium dates if they so desired. They're paying their expenses with two large arena dates and the anticipated revenues from recording and filming the historic series, apparently looking to profit from the musical rewards for themselves and their audiences rather than outrageous gate receipts.

Musical dedication at that level of the business has been just about non-existent to date, particularly among the super-rich white super-groups. If Dylan, a central figure in both the business and the mythology of pop music, can convince his peers in the industry to follow his present course of action, something interesting is very likely to happen over the next few months. The prospect, however, is for bigger and bigger spectacles and the concomitant grosses they bring to a smaller and smaller pool of performers, who get richer and richer as the rest of us get poorer and poorer. And the incongruity of rock and roll music, once considered a form through which to communicate intimate, deeply-felt emotions and ideas for people to dance to, being played at a place like Ponmet, designed for high-priced football orgies of 80,000 sports fans, remains hauntingly stark.