My Favorite Summer Concert
It was June 4, 1983. I was 17 years old and had just finished my junior year of high school. The calendar may have said it wasn’t yet officially the summer, but it already felt like summer to me.
My friend Bob and I were at J.F.K. Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to see five of the most popular music acts of that time: The Tubes, Bryan Adams, John Cougar, Sammy Hagar, and Journey. We loved several popular songs by each of the acts and we’d purchased our tickets several months earlier.
Both of us hoped for and expected a fun day filled with a lot of fantastic music. We were not disappointed.
The Tubes were the first ones to take the stage that day. They were touring for their new album “Inside Outside,” which had been released a couple of months earlier. The first single from that album, “She’s A Beauty” was a smash hit on MTV and the radio at the time of the concert.
The Tubes’ performance that day was a lot of fun to watch. Over the many years they had been together by that point, they had developed a reputation for being a very entertaining band to see in concert. In addition to doing great live versions of their music, they were also well-known for onstage antics like making bizarre costume changes, doing odd dances, and generally being a bit silly.
And they were like that on the day I saw them. Even when the band did songs that were unknown by many of us in the audience, The Tubes still gave us an incredibly entertaining show.
The Tubes were followed by Bryan Adams. His third album, “Cuts Like A Knife,” had been released in January of that year. By the time of the J.F.K. concert in June, he already had two major hit songs from it: “Straight From The Heart” and “Cuts Like A Knife.”
