"The war is over"

Fifty-three years tonight I attended my first “real” rock concert, Neil Young at Madison Square Garden. I’d been to two Rock and Roll Revival shows but I don’t count them as authentic rock experiences – seeing legendary elders Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley was exciting, but at that point they were essentially oldies acts.

The logistics around Young’s 1973 tour are amazing in retrospect. Today, major tours tend to occur in the summer or fall when travel is easy. For this tour, Young played 61 shows between the first week of January and the first week of April, with nearly all the January concerts played in cold weather cities. And some strange bookings. Two shows in Alabama – Tuscaloosa and Mobile – maybe because the song Alabama was on his last album, Harvest? Shows in Roanoke, Virginia, and Des Moines, Iowa. Overall, a promoter’s dream and a performer’s nightmare.

Not my ticket

The unannounced opening act that night at the Garden was Linda Ronstadt, her first time opening the tour and, after years of playing clubs like the Bitter End in New York City and the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the largest audience she’d ever faced. “She didn’t really want to do it,” said her manager. “She was scared.”

Throughout the Young shows she often played to indifferent crowds, but the shows served as a crucible of sorts and by September Ronstadt had her first gold album as her career took off (and overtook Neil Young possibly in popularity and certainly record sales).

There was no announcement when Ronstadt came on stage and I don’t recall her introducing herself or her band. Nerves, I guess. What I remember mostly was a lot of people milling around during her set looking for their seats, their friends or someone selling joints. And there were lots of joints. As soon as the lights came down for Young, the smell of marijuana was overwhelming; naïve me, it was my first experience being around it and reminiscent of the smell of chicken grilling outdoors, it only made me hungry.

Young played most of the stuff you'd want to hear, like Cinnamon Girl and Southern Man, but in the 1970s it was a badge of coolness and authenticity and honoring one's muse if artists insisted on spending a good part of their onstage time playing some newer stuff, so part of Young's setlist was dedicated to songs that wouldn't appear on record until Time Fades Away. But he also sang the obligatory Heart of Gold, a #1 hit a year ago, and Old Man so folks left the show happy.

This was also the night when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reached the Paris Peace Accord, officially ending U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. Someone came onstage and handed Young a note as he announced, “The war was over.” It was rumored that both sides were close to an expected agreement, but to hear the official word from Neil Young is a little cooler – and much more memorable – than getting it from Walter Cronkite.

Unbuttoned

Unlike the majority of the more than 1000 people who’ve posted their reviews on IMDB, I wasn’t a fan of Cameron Crowe’s 2009 film Almost Famous. If there are two descriptions that have me headed for the neatest exit, it’s romcom and dramedy. Almost Famous is both.

But Crowe’s 2025 memoir, The Uncool, is the richer and more rewarding backstory of how a dorky 15-year-old kid somehow talked his way into interviewing Greg Allman, David Bowie, Kris Kristofferson and getting published in Rolling Stone.

It’s fair to state that those three performers were given to mercurial ways and heavy drug use or drinking, all of which may have gone into their acceptance of young Crowe, but to his credit he possessed the right combination of balls, conviction and a charming naivete.

I understand because I wanted to be a sportswriter but lacked the boldness to pull it off.  

John Austin

I got off to a fast start in 8^th grade, interviewing a substitute teacher named John Austin who also played for the New Jersey Americans (the Americans eventually morphed into today’s Brooklyn Nets) for our school newspaper.

Austin, at six feet, was the first black basketball player to attend Boston College, where he averaged 27 points a game for three years, before playing briefly with the Baltimore Bullets and the minor league Scranton Miners.

I don’t remember what I asked him or how the final story shaped up; the life of a basketball gypsy in the late sixties would have made for a fascinating subject, but how would a 13-year-old know that?

What I recall from that day is that I wore a green sweater, double-breasted and trendy, but left unbuttoned. Middle school could be a factory of cruelty, full of guys who could barely read but paid close attention to everyone’s clothes. Pity the poor sucker who wore white socks with shoes or whose pants cuffs were too high. To my mind, leaving the sweater unbuttoned minimized the chances of drawing their attention, a personal cloak of invisibility.

But John Austin noticed and advised me to button the sweater, because it looked “cooler.” His words. I did, but by later that day it was unbuttoned again. 

More than a decade later, working for a regional entertainment newspaper looking to expand its coverage to sports, I found talking to high school football and basketball coaches a breeze, but entering the New York Giants’ locker room or batting practice at Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia was like walking into a lion’s den. On my own, I froze up, afraid of being rejected, ridiculed or called out as a fraud.

It was as if I was wearing the green sweater, left unbuttoned, all over again.

I did speak with a few players but mostly built my stories around observation and overheard dialogue. It worked pretty well but sometimes felt a bit dishonest. I chalked my approach up to New Journalism and assembled a decent portfolio of published work that helped move me to the next level, corporate communications, a safe haven where I didn’t feel like an outsider peering through a clubhouse window.

With that, the green sweater finally went into a closet for good.