Rolling Stone Magazine's "Live! Twenty Concerts That Changed Rock & Roll"

You make some very notable points and you were there as a witness to testify how good it was. I had forgotten most of the others there then but remembered a few of them. Do you think the number of acts and acts at their beginning was the main reason it changed rock n roll? I realized this was the first real concert where a Beatle performed solo though they were still together. You may remember though I can’t exactly when Harrison played with Delaney and Bonnie so don’t know if Toronto was first before George with Delaney and Bonnie. Aside from other artists being from Toronto, how do you think it changed rock n roll? Maybe as it was like Woodstock or later bangla desh, with a series of artists all at one show, as there were a few but not too many of those types of events along then. To me, Woodstock would have been a bigger changing event.

 

So almost nothing worthwhile ever happened outside the US, and nothing significant happened after 1982, period? Even for RS, this is embarrassing.

 

RS mag was always very US centered and time frame restricted.

 

I would think that Stax UK tour might rank up there.

Beatles or Dylan in Japan?

 

The Almond Brothers? With special guests the Cashew Sisters?

 

Well I think in some way it may have started connecting rock back to its roots with the acknowledgement of the early figures of rock'n'roll.
George Harrison was a few months after, and besides, he was a sideman, not performing his material.
Woodstock was indisputably bigger. Is it not on the list!
I guess "concerts that changed rock'nroll" can be a bit of a misnomer. All of the concerts on the RS list were significant. For example, Elton John at the Troubador was certainly instrumental for his career but I don't know that it changed rock'n'roll.
I am partial to Bruce Springsteen concerts (I know one was included in the list) and I can understand how his epic shows could be rock'n'roll changing and even life-changing (I think they were for me).
I guess, since as you say I witnessed the Toronto Rock'n'Roll Revival, the show in '69 remains a highlight of my concert-going life.
I guess also, it bugged me a bit that my hometown was being slagged. Don't diss the six!

 

A beautiful, everything is so clean city hometown it is you have......I visited it only once. It was the inclusion of the concert on the list I questioned but you explained why it should be considered and certainly not your hometown I was slagging...sorry if you took it that way. Springsteen certainly puts on killing shows, always changing his set list, I’ve read none the same but unfortunately I never saw him live but always wanted to.

 

Most of these didn't change anything so much as epitomize, er, something.

 

Toronto epitomized doing lots of coke and throwing up before you go on stage; snubbing the other acts at the festival, and stealing their catering. Rock n roll, man!

 

I would have thought that The Beatles Shea Stadium in 1965 would have been one of the 20 because it had the first big audience of 55,600 people and ushered in "Stadium" rock concerts. Before the pandemic rock concerts in stadiums was a thriving business.

 

I never had a problem with the Elton movie, it never portrayed itself as anything but a fantasy and was great fun and sincere.

The Queen movie on the other hand.......sheesh, dont get me started.

 

That was the first issue of Rolling Stone I ever bought, and I bought it because of this list. For some reason a local DJ mentioned it on air when introducing a song from one of the artists on the list. Being young and impressionable, I thought it was a big deal - wow, a list of the 20 greatest concerts?! Little did I know that Rolling Stone was in love with lists, and they had little credibility.

The good thing about it is that I did come to appreciate a number of these artists, several of whom I first learned about, or at least learned more of, from this list. The Band and the Allman (Almond!) Brothers are examples.

In many ways this stupid list helped kick off my journey into rock and roll. I can still remember some quotes from several of the articles (beyond just the list, there was a one or two page blurb about each entry, along with some pictures). Cool to see it mentioned here.

 

One angle for including this might be, that I seem to remember Lennon saying that doing the gig gave him added momentum to leave The Beatles. So looking at it like that, it definitely was something that changed Popular music. Although with the growing trend to claim everything Lennon said was a lie - to 'construct' an alternative narrative to his own truth - perhaps this line of thought does not carry any substance. And of course we now know that post Abbey Road the band were still conducting meetings to iron out a future path.

 

Nothing before 1968, really?
Admittedly you couldn't point to a single concert in his case, but Bill Haley changed rock and roll (which most certainly already existed before he started playing it) by his choice of venues to play. He was the first to make a point of marketing his music directly to teenagers. Since many locales didn't have any venues where teens could go to hear live music (because they all served liquor), he made a point of playing high school assemblies and taking note of what the kids liked and didn't like. It's more than fair to say that move changed rock and roll.

 

No mention of Woodstock or Live Aid?
Wait...why did I allow my seemingly never-ending Rolling Stone subscription to expire? Oh yeah...stuff like this.

 

I agree about Woodstock. I'd add Bangla Desh in there as well. Maybe Live Aid was too recent when the article was written for the writer to feel it warranted inclusion? Remember - this article is from 1987 - just two years removed from Live Aid. At the time, it was basically seen as the Bangla Desh concert on a larger scale.

 

I’m not a Beatles fan but Shea Stadium is a bizarre omission.
It was the start of stadium rock and I suspect opened “adult” eyes to the massive potential of popular music as more than a flash in the pan.

 

Time lends perspective, for sure, but even at the time of Live Aid, it was considered an enormous event that showcased the power of music at its best. I was there, and I'm guessing David Fricke was present as well. It's difficult to take a list like this seriously when it contains so many puzzling inclusions and glaring omissions.

 

The RS 1987 lists were meant to highlight pop music history since the magazine started publishing, which ruled out Bill Haley, James Brown at the Apollo, Beatles at Shea, Dylan at Newport, and other concerts before 1967. Maybe Monterey Pop fell just before the magazine debut, too.

Still kind of a weird, narrowly focused list.

 

I think you could also argue that Live Aid didn't really "change rock and roll" in any way. It did mark a watershed in terms of humanitarian activism in rock, but I can't think of any way in which it changed the music itself.

 

So very true...lol...

 

The Jacksons in '81? I don't think so.

 

True...but most of the listed concerts didn’t necessarily change music in any way either ...only a few probably really did....Don’t know if it’s listed or not, but Kampuchea did by containing both rock pop acts and subsequently....by introducing New Wave acts that became the predominant musical style on the eighties.....Many of the listed concerts introduced no real innovation....

 

Good post in a way except that......From 69 forward it was ...Lennon himself who constructed an alternative narrative as he had no consistent narrative of truth.....ask him a day later, and Lennon changed his core narrative of truth..ask him a few years later and his...original...construct of truth was opposite of his earlier interviews....I know this as I have all of those old Lennon mag and book quotations and saw and heard those old now many available online interviews. Lennon himself led the initial trend to....’construct’ an agenda driven narrative and much of what he did say, by his very own contradictions were lies changed to his convenience along the way.

Folks then were very scared of his bitter attack dog tendencies and didn’t call him out along the way and so wanted to elevate him as a guru hero and rationalized his contradictions from his own mouth. I didn’t have to wait till after Lennon died and subsequent books started coming out about him to realize this...because, as a serious solo Beatles collector, I realized it in the seventies ...Sadly so much of what Lennon said then and all along was indeed a lie changed and updated along the way, that folks dismiss now what he said that were truths, like the boy who cried Wolf story...

 

One can only imagine what an updated 2021 list would look like: Billie Eilish, Kendrick
Lamar....