by Tim Van Schmidt

Prelude

In 1966, my family moved from the small town in Illinois where I was born to the strange, big city of Phoenix, Arizona. Until then, my only contact with the entertainment business had either been the big screen in our town’s one and only movie theater, the little TV screen in our living room, or the radio. Just after arriving in Phoenix, however, my brother and I met a woman touring with singer Roger Miller. While my parents searched for our new house, we swam in the motel pool and made friends. The woman gave me a dollar bill from Australia as well as an autographed souvenir booklet from Miller’s tour. I knew of Miller through radio hits such as “Dang Me” and “King of the Road,” and it was a thrill to have his autograph with a personal inscription- “To Tim, 10 goin’ on 11.”

My first live concert experience came when the entire family went to see Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass at the Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix in 1967. I had been a fan of the Tijuana Brass after seeing them on TV and I had even wanted to play the marimba in the school band as a result. What I remember most about the concert was the band’s good-natured stage presence, Alpert trading jokes and slapstick bits with the trombone player in between the songs. I also remember the immensity of the space- a big arena with thousands of people in it. This was big time, clean-cut show business.

Times were changing, however. In the summer of 1967, our family took a road trip to California. In San Francisco, I bought a peace sign button and my folks drove us through the Haight Ashbury district so we could “see what it was really like.” “It” was the new hippie culture. A guy tried to shove an underground newspaper through the car window and my mom rolled it up quick and locked the door. Only a short time later, my brothers, Kirt and Andy, started going to rock concerts- one dressed up in a Nehru shirt his girlfriend had made for a Donovan concert, the other refusing to leave the arena until he heard the Jefferson Airplane play “White Rabbit.” The Airplane obliged.

Andy brought me back garbled, low-battery recordings of Three Dog Night, rousing the crowd with “Celebrate,” and Blues Image playing long, intense jams and their enigmatic hit “Ride, Captain, Ride.” He also took Polaroid Swinger snapshots of a half-sleeveless Alice Cooper (whose drummer, he reported, destroyed his drum kit with a claw hammer) and Iron Butterfly’s bare-chested drummer Ron Bushy doing his famous solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” I was tuned into the rock scene through AM radio (FM was considered “underground” and rarefied,) the Go magazine I picked up at the local record rack, and the 45s I played over and over in my room- “Pinball Wizard” by the Who and “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces. But these new sounds and visions from the concert world were strange and exotic. It wasn’t long before my turn came to experience it for myself.