Coming Soon: Your Concert Memories
October 27, 2011 at 10:13 am Mary Murphy 1 comment
Back in August, we asked readers to send us their memories from concerts they attended at Penn State. It’s been my job to sift through and edit the submissions for a feature that will run in our Jan./Feb. issue—which, in the magazine world, is just around the corner.
Given my own embarrassing history of concert-going (we’re talking boy bands, people), I expected the job to require plenty of Google searches for artists I’d never heard of and various one-hit-wonders of the past few decades.
Boy, was I wrong. Not only has Penn State drawn some of the biggest names in music, but readers had keen ears, sensing the genius in Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Simon and Garfunkel before the rest of the world caught on.
Pearl Jam: Live from State College. The 2003 show at the BJC was the band's longest concert ever.
One of the coolest stories mentions a 2003 Pearl Jam concert at the Bryce Jordan Center. The show was the band’s longest ever, and the three-disc recording was one of only six bootlegs from the tour sold in stores. Another reader remembers that jazz legend Thelonious Monk performed two sold-out shows in the Schwab Auditorium in 1964, the same year he made the cover of Time magazine.
Unfortunately for me, no musical history was made on Nsync’s 2001 Celebrity tour—though my teenage self would have argued otherwise.
Mary Murphy, associate editor
Entry filed under: Bryce Jordan Center, Concerts, The Penn Stater magazine, Uncategorized. Tags: Pearl Jam, Penn State concerts, Thelonious Monk.
Subscribe
1. Steve | October 28, 2011 at 12:51 pm
It’s funny how your memory works when you get old, I know that I went to a lot of concerts during my years at Happy Valley (fall ’65 – summer ’69) most of them good (Bill Cosby, Four Season, etc) but like life the things that stick in your memory are the bad things, ha! Actually I can’t remember the details that much but I do remember it was a Saturday in ’66 after a tough lose to Syracuse and whoever the entertainer was (in this case thankfully my memory fails me) came out on stage in an ORANGE suit! Poor guy got booed before he did anything, ha! I’ve heard that an important attribute of a good entertainer is to know his/her audience that was never truer than in this case. I can’t be sure but I’d like to think that after our initial shock we calmed down and gave whoever it was a more respectful response for the rest of the evening … if anyone remembers more about this concert I’d sure like to hear from them.
Steve ’69 in VA