What’s the best live show you’ve ever seen?

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Marty Appel
Best live concert for me: The Beatles, Shea Stadium, 1966.  Yes I was there.  It was 35 minutes long.

Lew borman

It was an opportunity I wasn’t going to pass up. I had seen them on Ed Sullivan and I heard they were going to play in Indianapolis as part of their tour.
Now granted, this was a long time ago, 1964.
My seats were terrible but I could hear them and see them as I stood on a chair on the ground floor.
It was a great set of songs. And of course now available online. I loved being there and I love the looks I get from my young pals when I tell them I saw the Beatles live.

SDWilliams

Lol! When I saw the title about "Best Live Show" I thought it was about television shows, since we grew up in the era of live TV. So . . .

"Beat the Clock," because my father worked for the advertiser, and they used a Boxer puppy for a live ad, stage left, for Blue Dot flashbulbs (flashbulbs!), and Dad brought the pup home for us. Loved that dog.

And in second place, "The Howdy Doody Show," because my brother got to be in the actual Peanut gallery once. Really! Forget seeing the Stones, the Byrds, Springsteen...he met Howdy Doody!

Brooks Dareff

Best live show I missed: Woodstock—I was invited by my sweet older brother (one of the "few" to buy a ticket [as in about 50,000 of the estimated 500,000 who attended]), but, all of 12 years old, I declined; a year later, I, hahahah, might've thought I was ready.
Most revelatory: John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra (including Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer) at Staples High School in Westport, Ct.—it was the first time I heard them, and it absolutely blew me away.
Because the first has to be included: Eric Burdon and the Animals, also at Staples, 1965 (I was 8 and I went with my older friend, who was 10).
Best, for highest energy: Edgar Winter's White Trash (with guitarist Rick Derringer, who played also with Edgar's brother Johnny)—and yes, Staples again (Sly and the Family Stone played at a dance there—a dance!—that my brother attended).
Best county fair live show: Aretha Franklin, Lane County (Oregon). For an extra $5 admission, the incomparable Aretha Franklin!
Best surprise (tie): Grateful Dead, unannounced, at the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, Ore.; Eric Clapton, unannounced, filling in for the recently departed Duane Allman, Nassau Colisuem.
Best I played in: Saxman (Alaska) Tribal House, 1992, with my late and supremely generous friend Pete Figueroa (he was the musician, a guitar virtuoso; I was a passable singer who played a little guitar).
Best experience: The Grateful Dead, city park in Portland, Ore., 1979—someone handed me some magic mushrooms, and I danced the whirling dervish with Sufis. What a time! The closest I would come to Woodstock...

Silvia Gambardella:
I would have to say I’ve seen many great concerts including the Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East in the ‘70s, the original Chicago also ‘70s, the Rolling Stones in LA in the ‘90s and Billy Joel in 2022 at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte.

Jeanette McVicker:

Most memorable: first semester freshman year 1977 at Purdue University's Hall of Music: I think it was actually my first real concert, to see a band I'd l-o-v-e-d since middle school--and they were literally on my campus! and I was there with my best friend and roommate. Walking into the darkened hall, thunderous emcee voice "ladies and gentlemen, Emerson! Lake! and Palmer!" Sheer spectacle: Keith Emerson literally spinning in mid-air playing electronic keyboard; Carl Palmer behind an enormous wall of drums and gongs; Greg Lake looking boyishly mischievous ripping on the bass. I think I still have the ticket stub. This was the epitome of amazing.
But the actually best live act? had to be 1990, at the Tralfamadore Cafe Buffalo, seeing Robert Fripp & the League of Crafty Guitarists. This was the opposite of the ELP show: an intimate jazz space, with a bunch of (not so young) guitarists seated on straight-backed chairs in an orderly semi-circle on the stage...that exploded into sound that went right through me. Mesmerizing, vibratory. Enthralling. My friend and I were so wiped out we stayed for the late show.

Frank Van Riper:

Murray, a slight little kid, would always play at our assemblies at PS 90 in the Bronx. We even went briefly to the same music school before Murray went on to Julliard (and I did not.)
“What’s the secret,” I once asked him, as we walked to Music Centre Conservatory off Fordham Road. “You make it look so easy.”
“You really do have to practice,” Murray said to me almost apologetically.
“Shit,” I observed.
Decades passed. We lost touch.
Then, one day I saw that Murray Perahia, hailed by then as the greatest living interpreter of Bach, was going to play a recital at the then-new Strathmore Music Center outside Washington.
I was barely able to get nosebleed seats for Judy and me in literally the last row of the balcony of the huge hall. As Murray emerged to thunderous applause, he looked miniscule, but there was no mistaking my old grammar school friend.
It was not surprising that this musical genius gave a virtuoso performance. What did surprise me was my reaction to it. I was in tears almost from start to finish, a mixture of pride for my former friend and gratitude to be able to hear him play in person.
Afterward, I briefly considered going to his dressing room to congratulate him. But I knew there would be a crowd—and, worse, I feared that Murray would not have a clue who I was.
Judy and I drove home on air that night, buoyed by the memory of what we just had heard.

melinda moulton:

My first date with my husband Rick was in the summer of 1970 - it was a Rod Stewart concert in the Boston Garden. We were tripping on acid. I was 20 and he was 21. It was an amazing night. After the concert we hopped into my 1967 Fiat Sports Spider and drove up to Vermont. I had never been to Vermont and his parents lived there. We arrive in the early dawn with a bright sunrise highlighting the Green Mountains. We drove to the Jefferson Gorge in Jefferson, Vermont and Rick hung a hammock between two white pine trees and we camped, swam, and dove off the cliffs by the gorge for several days - naked. I believe it was in those moments that I truly fell in love with this long haired gorgeous kind-hearted soul and for the next 54 years we still blush at the sound of Maggie May on Spotify....and take to the living room floor for a spin and a trip (just mushrooms now) around memory lane.

Arthur Engoron: “The best concert I ever attended was Creedence Clearwater Revival at Madison Square Garden in or about 1969.  From the first notes, which were the opening to Born on the Bayou, to the last song, which I think was Proud Mary, I experienced musical ecstasy.  The songs were great, and they were played as exactly as they were recorded.  Early on I stood up, turned around, raised my arms like a priest, and everybody behind me also stood up.  Towards the end my girlfriend and I walked forward toward the stage and bathed in the glow of my musical idols.” 

Neil Offen: “It was the summer of ’74, I think. It was before “Born to Run” the album and before the covers of Time and Newsweek. Bruce Springsteen was playing the Bottom Line, an intimate, low-ceilinged-music club on West 4 th Steet in Greenwich Village.

“We went because the Bottom Line was a great place to hear music, not because we knew very much about Springsteen. And to be honest, I don’t remember which songs he did. I think there was Jungleland, the E-Street Shuffle and maybe Rosalita. Could he and the band have done the gestating Born to Run? Maybe.

“What I do remember is how overpowering the music felt in this tiny place, how powerful Springsteen seemed, how close, how intense, how blown away we were. And how we were not at all surprised later on at how big he became.

“We’ve seen Springsteen since at other places, other venues, at other points in his career. But nothing even came close to the impact he made that night.”

Mitchell Stephens: Well, there was the second night at Woodstock – August 16, 1969 – which featured: Country Joe McDonald, Santana, John Sebastian, Canned Heat, Mountain, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, The Who and the Jefferson Airplane. Little known fact: it was also my 20th birthday party.  

But the most intense concert I ever attended had taken place one year and two weeks earlier at among the least hip of venues: the Singer Bowl, a tennis stadium in Queens. It featured a pretty good pair of acts: The Who (who could do some damage themselves) and the Doors. The lead singer of the latter, the closing act, was, I later read, inclined that evening – with a film crew in tow – to ignite a riot (Stephen Davis, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend). And Morrison – at his belligerent-leonine-shaman-drunk best (or worst) – succeeded. By the end of the band’s set – the song, The End – dozens of folding chairs were being hurled at the stage, at Morrison and then, after he slithered away, at the cops and the whole adult order. A few of those chairs were flung by – of all people – me.

Chris Harper: Maybe it wasn't the "best" concert, but it was the most interesting. In 1966, my high school band was opening for The Lovin' Spoonful in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I went to high school.
We were the local band that opened for John Sebastian and his group.
We were all hyped up because we liked the band a lot. But every member of The Spoonful was so out of it either on drink or drugs, they wouldn't even acknowledge us. John sat in the shower of the Sioux Falls Arena, strumming his zither without any chords. It was truly bizarre!