You Gen Xers and Boomers remember that rite of passage, that baptism by fire, that first time you enter a packed and sweaty arena, don’t you? It’s a coming of age standard with few equitable hallmarks, one that tends to define a mindset of the medium, more or less, for a lifetime.
It was almost invariably the first time any of us immersed ourselves in a crowd that large, whether it was a sporting event or a music concert. It was a heady sensation. That many people, cavorting and swarming and congregating shoulder to shoulder, was a discombobulating experience, a contrarian mix of adrenaline and thrill, fear and trepidation. Some of us pro concert goers still get a fair amount of anxiety while attending concerts after all these years. Others like me have grown accustomed to the sis-boom-bah of stadium madness. It’s true humans tend to get more rowdy when more of them are around each other, what with that sense of anonymity and abandon, fueled by the excitement of sharing a communal enjoyment of the artist at hand, one whose music every single attendee digs enough to pay money to see it performed live. Hitting a live gig automatically incurs a commonality among everyone there. ‘Tis a rare phenomenon, when that many humans gather together, likely limited to the triumvirate of sports games, concerts, and political rallies.
Then there’s the bevy of stimuli around at the venue itself. Outside, there’s the limousines for VIPs, the general parking lot imbroglios, the bootleg t-shirt hucksters, the food cart vendors, the tailgate parties. Inside, there’s the long lines for concessions and official band merchandise, the last second thrills of anticipating exactly where your seats lie within the venue, the abject loudness of pre-show crowd murmur just before the lights go out. It’s all a truly bombastic assault on the senses. Especially that first time.
My personal ‘first concert’ story is the stuff of legend within my circles, centered around the 1986 Los Angeles tour stop of Van Halen’s 5150 tour, with brand new lead singer Sammy Hagar, their first run of gigs post David Lee Roth. I’ve told it elsewhere as a fictionalized version within the pages of my debut novel The Kindness of Ravens. Our tale of woe became infamous mostly because of our underage antics, perpetuated by myself and the motley crew of pals who attended that first concert right alongside of me. A few of them had been to shows before, a few were virgins like myself. All of us were diehard Van Halen fans, who’d been apprehensive about Dave leaving the band (or getting fired, depending on who’s doing the telling), but swayed once we’d spun the new record with Sammy. Eddie was still Eddie, shredding away on a consummate mid-1980s rocker replete with synth ballads and howling Eddie riffs. I’ll die on the hill that maintains 5150 is one of several flashpoint records for Gen Xers who graduated high school in the eighties.
We’d planned out the whole shebang. It did turn out to be quite a shebanger.
First, we commandeered the tickets, purchased through a sketchy secondary market of the era called Ticket Time, long before Stubhub came along. That was back when the only way us Southern Californians knew our favorite artist had announced a new album or tour was by reading it in the pages of The Los Angeles Times’ Calendar section, or a advertisement blurb in Circus Magazine. Our seats were actually pretty decent for a bunch of middle class whiteboys from central California with marginal disposable income. They cost about sixty bucks apiece, 17th row floor at The Fabulous Forum. It says $17.50 on the ticket, as seen above, but with broker markup it ended up being three times that. We thought sixty bucks was a lotta dough for a friggin’ concert ticket back then. If only my ‘tween self knew what his adult edition would end up swallowing, eventually.
The Forum. It’s gone through a number of name changes over the years, including its current one sponsored by Kia. When I was patronizing it annually in my rise to live music acclaim, it was known as the Great Western Forum. Yet me and every other native Southern Californian will always know it as The Fabulous Forum, easily Southern California’s most infamous arena, also the one where I’ve attended the most rock shows, by a long shot.
Fair warning (that’s for you Van Halen fans), I’ll be discussing Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagar frequently throughout this column, as they are the pair of artists whom I’ve seen live the most times, at any number of venues across Southern California.
Next, we hired a limousine for the trip, for two reasons. One, we wanted to attend our first Van Halen show in style. Two, we were going to get gonzo stupid wasted beforehand, as was our tradition during that age of excess. That required us to procure the goods for said debauchery, which if memory serves, tallied up to four or five liters of Jack Daniels whiskey and one big fat eight ball of Bolivian marching powder. Remember, we were all barely eighteen years of age. I was still seventeen in fact, the young’un of the group. We were connected in our small redneck of the woods, you might say, and that’s how we hooked ourselves up with our ill-gotten gains.
So, we all met at my parents’ house. My mom thought it was just the cutest thing ever, so much so she managed to snap a quick photo of the six of us, along with our limousine driver, outside the car in my parents’ driveway. What she didn’t know was in that very picture, here rendered below, were those same bottles of whiskey, precariously wrapped in jackets and overshirts in our arms even as we took the photo. Also notable in that image? The venerable fashion styles of the time, including cut-off ‘himbo’ tees (heck, I still wear the shit outta those, though less in public these days), and an honest-to-goodness mesh workout half-shirt replete with visible nipples and belly button. That particular buddy of mine topped off his ensemble with a genuine gold chain around his neck to boot. Pimp before pimp, in other words. Look at all the tight Levi 501s (Millers Outpost…hoo ra!). The polarized Vaurnets and Ray-Bans. The Oingo Boingo tee. The collared Izod preppy shirt. Woof. You gotta love the eighties, amirite, Gen X?
Off we went, commencing the drive down from our rural hamlet to the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood, about an eighty mile drive one way, give or take. We indulged the cocaine immediately, followed by copious amounts of Jack Daniels shots. By the time we were barely halfway there, around Thousand Oaks or Camarillo, we were already three sheets to the wind, six dudes babbling incessant to one another, coke-fueled and super high on our collective buzz to see the mighty Van Halen, blasting their albums through the limo speakers.
You might think, what the hell was this limo driver thinking, letting these underage reprobates engage in excessive illicit underage activity risking his job and potential legal repercussions? Well, it was the eighties. Limo drivers were accustomed to teenagers doing dank and dirty things in their cars’ back seats, usually while chaperoning pimply faced teens clad in gowns and tuxedos to high school proms.
Our sixth compatriot had defied his parents’ forbidding to attend the concert, and had sneaked out of their home to do so. I had to pick him up at the bottom of his driveway covertly on the fly, and bring him back to my parents’ house, who of course didn’t know his parents had denied his participation, or my mom would’ve called them accordingly. This guy was prone to recklessness and suffered an obsessive compulsive disorder, which is not terribly conducive to cocaine, as many of you well know. In any case, he was inordinately jittery en route, more so than the coke high, exhilarated but overtly nervous. That same fella came from one of our wealthier families. His father had a company charter plane docked at our local tumbleweed airport.
Now you’re getting the gist.
What five of us didn’t know was that our compadre had left not only the invoice receipt for the limousine hire in his bedroom desk, but also the tickets receipt for the show itself, thus enabling his enraged father, upon realizing his son had fled the coop, to piece together his AWOL kid’s potential whereabouts. To this day, it’s a joking point of contention whether our buddy actually forgot to sufficiently hide the evidence or whether he passively sabotaged himself, and by proxy us, by leaving a paper trail for his oddly determined father to follow us all the way down to central Los Angeles, via his private plane, hiring a car to take him from LAX to the Forum. Yep. I shit you not. That was a man who didn’t want his son to see Van Halen. Never mind all the drugs in the limousine, though given his family’s religious beliefs, where there was smoke there was fire, right? Can’t blame him entirely ‘cause it turns out he was dead to rights.
So. We arrived at the Forum. We told the driver to circle around the lot a few times before we disembarked, get our last lines and shots in before entering the celebrated hall of glory. Just as our driver reached the part of the lot near the building where all the limousines park, there was a checkpoint of sorts, with a couple of police officers and a few yellow-jacketed Forum security staff. The driver rolled down his window and answered a couple questions from one of the yellow-jackets. Our buddy was already wide-eyed. He started to curse, saying I can’t believe it, I knew it, holy Christ what do I do. We had no idea what he meant. Then the yellow jacket walked back to the rear passenger door. One of our buddies, who had just cut and spread a massive, last minute pile of coke across a carnival mirror, asked what he should do. We all piped in like a gabbing murder of crows: dump it, grind it into the floor carpet, stash it, hide it, what the fuckity fuck, all that panicked rant and rave busted teenagers tend to exhibit under the influence of substances.
But before he could dust the mirror off, our soon-to-the-gallows buddy, the one with the impressively determined father, leaned over and snorted the biggest bump of cocaine I’d ever witnessed, still true to date, practically snorting up the entire pile, at least a quarter of the original eight ball. He reared up, his green eyes wide and bulging, a thickly powdered mustache over his upper lip. Then we stashed the mirror and the liquor behind our backs just as the limo door flew open.
The yellow-jacket peered inside the roomy cab. We looked guilty as hell, because we were. He asked if one of us was (redacted), and we all insisted none of us owned that name. Then the yellow-jacket called out to a nearby spectator, who was of course our buddy’s father. He dipped his head inside the car, stared impassively at his son, then turned to the police outside and told them to arrest him. They pulled him out of the car. We frantically motioned to our buddy to wipe his goddamned nose, but he shrugged and smiled, they cuffed him, and off they went. We prepared for our pending arrests, being minors under the influence of illegal drugs and alcohol, but for some reason, they simply shut the door and took him away.
Meanwhile, the remaining five of us hyperventilated.
Panic and cocaine are not a good mix, fyi. No big news flash there.
The driver moved the car on and parked aside a line of limousines, rolled down the partition window and commenced screaming at us, to which one of our more stolid comrades told him to chill out and we’d double the tip and that seemed to quiet the poor guy down, as he mumbled to himself whether he should call his boss or not (he didn’t, surprise). We debated what to do, and as you’ve guessed, we realized the only thing to do, for our fallen soldier’s sake, was to not waste the dough and effort burned already, and head inside and see Van Halen all the same.
Which is what we did.
Was it callous, or was it a seize the day sort of thing?
I dunno if I’ve ever figured that out.
Maybe it was both.
You might think that downer would’ve ruined the whole show. Not exactly. It was a paradoxical experience. On the one hand, we were all strung out, hyped up on 80s caliber coke (the cheap kind often cut with diluted rat poison or baby powder), and stoked to see Eddie Van Halen live at long last. On the other hand, our buddy was being actively incarcerated for all we knew, and the whole concert was kind of his baby. He was the one who hired the limo service and got the tickets. That’s why he had the receipts. Little did we know, in our addled states, that our own parental comeuppance would be waiting for us late night at home after the show, because his parents ended up calling all our parents, doing their due diligence of community mindedness. None of us, however, had to endure a hours-long car ride home with our father berating us while coming down off an enormous excess of cocaine. That is indeed what happened to our buddy.
At least he didn’t go to jail.
We left the limo, told our driver we’d see him in a few hours for the return trip, and we entered the Fabulous Forum. Holy Toledo, Batman! It was everything I’d thought it might be, and so much more. I’d been around crowds of 10k before, for huge beachfront gatherings during 4th of July celebrations. The Forum hosted near twice that.
It’s different inside an indoor arena, isn’t it? There’s that background crowd echo that bounces off the walls, and there’s that barrel of monkeys type of odor that only drunken concert masses can emit. I remember that aroma clear as day, and to wit, I still take it in near every single time we hit another show. Yes, I still attend plenty of shows in my older age. Live music feeds the soul more than any other ethereal nourishment. I’m here to tell you that. I will see concerts until I am forced to leave this stardust and water shell behind unto other worlds, and I daresay even then, I’ll be seeking out the higher spheres’ forms of the same.
Originally, the Forum was painted in red and white. In our 80s heyday, it had been changed to a stark, laundry detergent blue. In 2013, the Forum renovated itself, bought out by the folks who ran Madison Square Garden back east, and they tweaked the acoustics and returned the Forum to its original red and white facade. When I first walked in there circa 1986, it was not unlike an airline terminal in terms of fashion motif, but I didn’t care. It was the biggest building I’d ever been inside. Nope, I hadn’t yet entered any high rises nor skyscrapers in my life, and I’d never been to New York either. To say it was overwhelming, particularly under the influence of amphetamines, would be an understatement.
A few of us bought concert tees, myself included. I wish I still had that original black 5150 tee, but I outgrew it long ago and it was lost to the sands of time. We made it to our floor seats. When Van Halen came on, we stood on our folding chairs and cheered. The band blazed as we knew they would. It was loud and crazy and hot and overstimulating, all of those intense sensations arena tier concerts offer. Yet during the show, between continued bumps, each one of us took turns looking at the haunted, empty seat in our row, lamenting our friend’s absence, wondering if he was sitting in a cell, miserable and decidedly Van Halen-less.
My first concert was powerful, on flip sides of the yin and yang coin. Van Halen themselves delivered a top shelf performance, clad in standard 80s fashion, parachute pants and poofy hair and neon pastels. The new record translated well live. Sammy clearly wasn’t too interested in singing too many of Dave’s tunes. He did manage Panama and Jump on that first tour, but I think he had a fan come up onstage to sing most of Jump. A few times, he shouted out some slag concerning the former lead singer, and a few fans had brought inked sheets or cardboard signs proclaiming “Dave Who?”
I’m sure at some point in this column I’ll be forced to convey my philosophy into the petty politics of Van Halen lead singers…but not yet.
Most impressive of all was Eddie. The man was a force of nature. He remains the single hero I’ve ever had, outside of my parents. I’m not big on celeb worship. I do wish I’d met him just once. He was a flawed and all-too-human antihero. Just my type. I’ve met the rest of the band in some way at some gathering, actually, but I didn’t get a chance to meet Ed before his passing. I’d liked to have shook his hand (gently, always gently with guitarists) and thanked him for the soundtrack to my life.
When I got home late that night, my parents were up and waiting. They let me have it for the coke use, which I vehemently denied. Everybody else was doing it not me, I just had a few drinks, blah blah blah.
After that, Van Halen became a steady live presence in my life, throughout all their in-house band antics over the decades to come. For obvious reasons, I don’t have any photos from that show, or any of my shows before the turn of the millennium. We didn’t have cell phones back then, and that was before I started smuggling in a Canon point-and-shoot before iPhones became advanced enough to forego the mini cams. The only folks outside of venue-approved press who had cameras were skulking videotape bootleggers.
I’d like to say attending future Van Halen shows became marginally easier on the soul, but I can’t.
As you’ll come to know soon enough.
Still. Nobody rocked the house like Eddie Van Halen.
And that was my first concert.
Hopefully yours had the same sort of thrills with a little less delinquency. :)

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Sparks opened for Nektar, somewhere around 1975 in SF. I think it’s why i’m so deaf today.
Omg loved this article! Memories. My first concert was 1979, REO Speedwagon. Have my ticket stubs from all of my concerts. I did see Van Halen in Nashville in 2012. Omg it was like reliving my teen years and had a blast! Thanks for this trip down concert memory lane!