When I saw the Beatles, it was ‘65 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. My father had recieved the tickets (2) from a client wanting a favor (He had a lot of those). Dad wasn’t interested in the Beatles, so he gave them to my brother and me. Bro thought we could scalp them for some big bucks, but I talked him out of it, and off we went for a day of personal history. It was a great show. The Beatles didn’t let us down. However, my brother seemed to be more interested in the girls around us screaming and droolind and crying and peeing in their pants. As the show ended and they were exiting the stage, you could faintly hear through the roar of the crowd, George say into the microphone, “Thanks for the money, kiddies.” Cream, I saw several times. I didn’t mention them because no one died. But we all thought Ginger Baker was going to die. He said, years later in an interview, “People used to come to the show just to see if I was going to die”. How anyone could play 2 drum sets and keep up that amoount of hard drumming for so long was beyond belief. We all figured it had to be due to SPEED. I still think so, but I”m not sure if he ever admitted it. Their songs were certainly full of drug references. When they played Toad, the crowd went silent during Baker’s drum solo, which seemed to go on forever, but when it was over, he got the biggest hand of anyone. That was some group, yeah? The first time I saw the Stones, we had recieved backstage passes along with free tickets. The concert was held at Angeles Stadium in LA. It was a good show, but the place is just too big. After the show, passes in hand, we were saying to ourselves, “We’re going to meet the Stones. We’re going to meet the Stones. We’re going to meet the Stones.” But when we got back stage, we heard that they had immediately jumpped a helo to LAX. Bummer! Well, at least we got to eat their food and drink their booze. Here’s a shot of 2 of the Coasters, Leon Hughes (original) and Rayce Gentry, who I managed for a Japan tour.