It was about 1970, maybe 1971. I was in the eighth grade and the Big Bam Show was my first live concert and my first official date with a female human. The show was great. The date was not – but more on that later.
In the Top 40 heydays of AM radio, WBAM (The Big Bam) in Montgomery was the hottest station in the sweltering midsection of Alabama, at least during the day (it went off the air at night). I remember a Big Bam DJ saying, “Don’t touch that dial or I’ll bite your finger!” No one touched that dial.
Every year, WBAM sponsored the Big Bam Show at the Garrett Coliseum – a steep-seated, bent-roofed, concrete structure that was some type of architectural marvel at the time and may still be. The arena looked like a giant flapjack from space had landed on a dead crab with spindly legs. It was impressive.
Inside its 31,000-square-foot interior, about 13,000 screaming kids would congregate for a rock and roll worship service that surely made local preachers nervous. The good seats were on the floor in front of the stage. We sat in the back in the nosebleed section as each of the several groups got its two or three songs and was gone. It was not an Allman Brothers kind of marathon session. It was a live version of Top 40 radio. Wham Big Bam, thank you ma’am.
On stage Climax crooned “Precious and Few” and some other song I can’t remember. Then an eye-patched singer – another Alabama boy named Ray Sawyer – came onstage stomping out front of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show and uncorked the funky “Marie Lavaux”, followed by “Sylvia’s Mother”. I think they played another song as well, but it has faded like Ray’s old jeans from my memory.
When B.J. Thomas, the headliner final act, came on, girls started screaming so loud you could hardly hear “I Just Can’t Help Believing,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” and “Hey, Won’t You Play.” His last song, “Rock and Roll Lullaby,” crushed the screamers into a sweaty mob. The whole concert was probably an hour and a half max, including set-up time between acts.
I can’t remember much about my date as she never said more than five words to me and at least three of those five were “no.” She stayed away from me as I recall, and giggled and talked with another girl (several of us puberty-stricken knuckleheads went as a group in what is now called “chilling”). Maybe I thought it was a date and she saw it as something else. Chilling certainly would have been a good word to describe it. It was cold.
At the time, I remember being a little torked that my date acted so standoffish. She looked at me like I was a redneck wearing a quilted shirt, bulbously bell-bottomed jeans and gummy-soled earth shoes (which is a fairly accurate appraisal), but still, she acted nothing like the dates I’d seen on TV or at the movies. Those dates seemed a lot more fun than the one I was in the middle of at the time.
Now that I am old, however, and the years have made a genius of me, I know that she was just acting like an eighth-grade girl. Nothing more. I’d been watching dates as portrayed by people in New York and California and I was about as far away from either as you could get.
For a while after that evening, every time I heard one of the songs from those bands at the Big Bam Show, it reminded me of my failed first date.
“Raindrops keep falling on my head…”
