For the love of music

I suppose that one of my greatest passions in life is music. I like playing it myself, though I'm not very good at it, and I like listening to many kinds of great music. My early life was filled with music as my parents would both sit down and play the piano frequently, and they liked to listen to music in the house. My dad would listen mostly to country music--Grand Old Opry kind of stuff--and my mom was quite often found watching television programs that featured musical performers.

As a teenager, I went to several concerts. I think my first actual concert was before I could drive and it was to Gordon Lightfoot, up at the Special Events Center (now called the Huntsman Center) at the University of Utah. Lightfoot was in his heyday back then. During the seventies, I went to Styx (twice), Kansas (twice), Billy Joel, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. I wasn't a heavy concert goer, and I think these may have been the only concerts I attended. Nevertheless, they were all amazing.

My first real rock concert was Kansas and it was at the Terrace Ballroom in Salt Lake.

Kansas was just becoming famous and they were on their Leftoverture tour. The Terrace, and the photo shows was a small venue, with a low ceiling and a lack of ventilation. A lot of folks there were smoking pot, including those of us (me) who never took a drag on a joint. The air was just so thick with the stuff that no one who was there could have helped inhaling it. The concert was amazing. It wasn't until years later that I thought that I may have thought it was even more amazing than it actually was because of the smoke I'd been inhaling in that arena. Still, I've always loved Kansas since then.

I only went to one concert at the Terrace, but I loved that small, intimate venue. Concerts later at the old Salt Palace just didn't have the same feel, nor did they have the same cloud of marijuana smoke--oh, there was smoke, but it rose a bit higher in the vast heights of that arena.

Any concert memories you have?