December 3, 1979
By Dan Reed, Music Director for WXPN
Reposted from XPN’s All About the Music Blog
Last Saturday was the 26th anniversary of The Who concert tragedy at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum. I was a ticket holder and witness. We got our tickets about a month before, and I drove two hours from college (I was a freshman) to meet my friends. It was a cold Monday evening. We arrived about an hour before the doors were to open. The tickets were not reserved but “festival seating”… the sooner you got in, the better location you could get to see the show. Despite the cold, we were psyched… it was our first time seeing the legendary Who. I was personally enamored at the time with Quadrophenia. Who Are You was their most recent release, but I had been listening non-stop to Quadrophenia at that time. I was 18, and that album spoke to me in many ways. I’ll admit that I was disappointed that I would be seeing The Who sans Keith Moon, but I was still very excited.
When we arrived, there were maybe 1,000 people already there. We stood in line in front of four glass doors, but the pushing and shoving got really annoying, so we dropped back and stood on some light pole fixtures to wait for the doors to open. Up there, we had a view of what was going on in the front of the line, and none of it was good. We observed people clearly panicking, falling and crying out. A man emerged from the fray, sweating, wide-eyed, missing shoes and most of his clothing. He found a uniformed Cincinnati police officer, and told him, “Man… you GOTTA get up there and put a stop to this… people are really getting hurt!” The cops’ response was “What in the hell do you want ME to do about it?” It was a pretty scary show of indifference, and - in light of what was about to transpire - not very surprising.
The best we could tell, there were 4 doors open… 4 doors for a crowd of well over - I’d say - 2,000 people by now. We saw fists flying, and a sort of vapor rise up over the crowd in the cold December night. Just about then, we noticed that another bank of doors north of us had opened. We jumped down and went in without much pushing at all. As I looked over to my right - where all the pushing was taking place - I saw people still pressed up against the doors, and a pile of shoes at the entrance. It was a crazy scene.
The show was outstanding. The band lived up to their reputation as one of the world’s most incredible live performers. Kenny Jones - the late Keith Moon’s replacement on drums - was more than servicable. After the show, as we walked out of the coliseum, we observed all of these news trucks - NBC News, CBS, etc - and all kinds of other assorted media ALL OVER the pavillion outside. We knew then that SOMETHING had went down. Did somebody O.D.? We turned the radio to WEBN (Cincy’s long-standing rock station) when we got to the car, and heard the terrible news. We were all sick to our stomachs… we had actually seen some of this going down. Even though we did not understand at the time the enormity of the tragedy we were witnessing, we still all felt a sense of - I don’t know - maybe guilt over not doing something. I still have that feeling to this day every time I think back on this event.
We all got to a bank of pay telephones as soon as we could and called our parents. My dad had heard Howard Cosell interrupt Monday Night Football to report the tragedy.
This was an accident waiting to happen. I had seen Led Zeppelin at the Coliseum two years before (again with the dreaded “festival seating”) and had commented to a buddy that night that “somewbody was gonna get killed here some day.” The shows at the Coliseum were always crazy… it was anything goes at the doors. Whose fault was this? Clearly, the city of Cincinnati (owners of the Coliseum) were at fault. They had neither the personnel available nor the inclination BY those personnel to treat the concert-goers as anything more than long-haired cattle to be rustled in the doors. Things changed enormously after The Who concert in 1979, and for good reason, but not soon enough to save those 11 lives…
I attended the University of Cincinnati at the time of the Who concert. My roommate and I had tickets to the show; however, we had a major project due the next day. Therefore, we gave our tickets to two of our friends, Laura and Diane, living in the same dorm. We even drove the girls to the show and dropped them off at the Riverfront Coliseum.
As we worked on our project that night, the news of the tragic event was spread across the local radio station, WEBN, and the TV news. We were terribly concerned, as we had given up our tickets to two of our friends and did not know if they were OK.
We drove to the Coliseum and waited for the end of the show. The girls got into the car after the concert and began to tell us how great the show was. After a minute, they realized that something was wrong and we told them what had happened.
To all those who experienced that night, I hope that their life has been filled with many Rock & Roll memories that tip the balance to joy.
August 28th, 2007 at 8:11 pmIn December of 1979, I was a senior at the University of Dayton. On December 3, 1979, a friend and I made the hour drive to Cincinnati to attend one of the most highly anticipated concerts to date. “Who Are You” would be the last album on which Keith Moon would perform. He died suddenly just over a year earlier, but The Who were determined to press on, and this would be their triumphant return.
We arrived on the scene just after the first bank of doors opened, and what we witnessed was insanity. Stray shoes, uncontrollable pushing and shoving, and oddly, a number of people struggling to get out of the middle of the pack while others were pushing forward to get to the doors. It was very clear to me that what was being witnessed was not right, but I never thought for a minute that eleven would lose their lives in this mess.
We never saw the second bank of doors open, but decided that if we were to get into the concert any time soon, we would have to find another entrance. We walked about three quarters of the way around the concourse surrounding the arena, and found no other open doors. We were thinking that we would have to make our way back to the mob scene that we saw earlier and wait there until the situation became more manageable, when suddenly, a side service entrance door to the arena sprung open right in front of us. A ticket taker waved us over, and we were in.
From the time the show opened with a “Quadrophenia” film clip to the final note of the oncore (”Won’t Get Fooled Again”?, don’t remember for sure), the crowd never let up, and it was scarey. We made our way, somehow, to near the front of the floor, where there were times when I was lifted completely up off the floor by the force of the crowd and then suddenly thrust back down to the ground, smothered by the mob. There was CONSTANT swaying and pushing by the ENTIRE crowd. And The Who played one of the most amazing sets of music that you will ever hear.
We did not learn of the tragedy of the night until we got back to Dayton. We walked into the local campus bar and were shocked to hear the news.
I was in Cincinnati last summer and was back at the Coliseum. The bank of doors where the tragedy occured no longer exists, replaced by ticket windows. New entrances have been built. Much too late!
August 28th, 2007 at 10:32 pm