10 Best Rock Bands To Have Seen Live In The 1970s

Feature Photo: Bruce Alan Bennett / Shutterstock.com

If you were not born in the 1960s or before, then you probably did not see any of the bands below live in the 1970s. That’s one of the reasons why I’m writing this article. It’s to explain to people who are too young to have experienced what it was like seeing live music in the 1970s. I went to high school from 1976 to 1979. My first rock concert was Queen and Thin Lizzy in 1976. From that point on, I was going to concerts two to four times a month, not exaggerating. Tickets were cheap, and you could get most tickets for under ten bucks. I mean, I paid $6.50 for my Led Zeppelin tickets.

Tickets were easy to get for the most part, and going to concerts was a way of life for teenagers in the 1970s. I saw hundreds of shows. I really tried hard to remember all of them. Some are difficult to recall, and others are not, especially the ones on this list. So if you’re a younger person who was born well past the 1970s, or maybe you were even born in the 70s but too young to see any of these shows, I hope you enjoy this article. And of course, if you’re my age or older and you were there, let me know what it was like for you. Who did you enjoy the most? These were my favorites. These shows were incredible.

There are going to be some pretty big bands missing from this list, like The Rolling Stones, The Who, AC/DC, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Elton John and many others. The reason is that I didn’t see some of those bands during the 1970s, and I can’t write about bands that I did not see in that decade. I saw many of those bands later on in different eras, but I’m trying to write about what it was like to be there, so I can only write about the ones that I actually saw. Although there are hundreds more that I could write about, I’m just going to leave it at these ten for now. Some of these shows I’ve written about in depth in previous articles on the site, and you can just click on the links below to read them.

# 10 – Electric Light Orchestra

In opening up this list, I’m starting with a band that I saw many times in the 1970s. The first time I saw them was on the New World Record tour at Madison Square Garden. What was so spectacular about Electric Light Orchestra, besides the brilliant musicianship and the incredible songs that we were all in love with, was the laser show they put on. I often wonder how many people were blinded by those lasers because they would shoot them right into the audience. But they were spectacular. I will never forget the Out of the Blue tour that I attended when the band actually emerged from a spaceship that lifted off the stage as the show began. These guys knew how to put on a show.

# 9 – Rush / UFO / Cheap Trick Tour

It was a freezing cold night in 1978 when I saw these three bands at New York City’s Palladium. Rush was the headliner, and they had just released the A Farewell to Kings album. The Palladium was not a large theater, so we were pretty close. Cheap Trick blew the audience away, and of course, UFO was spectacular. However, Rush made sure to let the audience know who the headliners were. This was no oldies tour. It was a sensational three-bill concert with all three bands at the peak of their power. Of course, looking back now, as so many years have passed by, they were pretty much still in their early years at that time.

# 8 – Emerson Lake & Palmer

Emerson, Lake & Palmer were one of the most exciting trios to see in the 1970s. No three people could deliver as much music and sound as these three guys did. However, when I saw them, it was 3 + 80, as I attended the Works tour that hit Madison Square Garden during the summer of 1977 when ELP performed with an 80-piece orchestra. We probably had the worst seats in the Garden, sitting in the top deck all the way across the arena, but the sound was so powerful I could still feel my hair blowing back as they performed. This one was heart-stopping.

# 7 – Fleetwood Mac

I will never forget the month of June in 1977 when I saw Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours tour, Led Zeppelin’s Presence tour, and then on July 3rd, Pink Floyd’s Animals tour. All of these shows were at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The month ended with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours tour on the 30th of June in 1977. The band sounded sensational, but it was the aura of Stevie Nicks, who stood center stage in her black cape and hat with a silhouette of a tree behind her and a moonlit glow, that made thousands of young boys in the Garden fall in love with her instantly. At the time, they were probably the hottest band in the world, and Lindsey lit it up with his guitar playing. If my memory serves me right, I believe Kenny Loggins opened up the show, and I remember when he did “Danny’s Song,” the place went absolutely nuts. I had forgotten all about that moment until just now as I’m writing this. Wow, it’s funny how just talking about something can bring you back and open up parts of your memory that you thought were gone.

# 6 – Yes

I don’t think history has served the band Yes well. I don’t understand it, and I don’t know why, because Yes was one of the biggest progressive rock bands, if not the biggest progressive rock band of the 1970s. People loved Yes. Maybe it’s because they split into various different versions of the group over time, or maybe it’s because they didn’t have a lot of hits on the radio, but it just seems that younger fans who got into rock music later on have not discovered this band the way they should have. If you talk to anybody who saw Yes in the 1970s, they would tell you that this band was absolutely mind-blowing. I saw them later in the decade for the Going for the One tour, and even though that was not their biggest album, the tour was still spectacular. This was a band of musicians who were the best at their instruments, and seeing them perform live in concert was unlike anything else in rock music at the time.

# 5 – Lynyrd Skynyrd / Ted Nugent

As I was wrapping up my tenth-grade year in high school, a few friends asked if I wanted to go see Lynyrd Skynyrd and Ted Nugent at the Nassau Coliseum. It was June of 1977. These guys were heavy stoners, so I knew it was going to be a pretty wild night. Ted Nugent opened the show, riding high on the just-released Cat Scratch Fever album, and he was lighting it up like crazy.

It’s incredible that almost fifty years later, my site interviewed him, and I was able to ask about that show. I could never have imagined that back then. Anyway, as good as Nugent was, Long Island at the time was very much into Southern rock. It was much bigger on Long Island than it was in New York City, so when Lynyrd Skynyrd hit the stage, the place went bonkers. I will never forget when they played “Free Bird” at the end and dropped a Confederate flag down. They turned the lights up, and these guys rocked hard. I looked over at my two friends, and they were sleeping because they were so stoned. They never realized what they missed.

# 4 – Queen / Thin Lizzy

Well, you know what they say, your first time is always the most special. For me, my first time was Queen and Thin Lizzy at Madison Square Garden in February of 1977. I was fifteen years old at the time, and I had never seen a real rock concert before, unless you count Harry Chapin performing at my high school in ’75. But he only stood on stage with a guitar, so it wasn’t really a rock show, though it was great. Getting back to Queen, they actually weren’t the first band I saw that night, because Thin Lizzy opened the show.

When the red lights started flashing and the sounds of “Jailbreak” filled the Garden, it completely blew my mind how powerful a rock band could sound in an arena that big. Of course, as great as Lizzy was, nothing could top the magic of hearing Queen open with “Tie Your Mother Down.” It almost gave me a heart attack. I had about half a pint of Southern Comfort in me at the time, so by the time the show ended, I was pretty much in la-la land, but the memory still burns deep. It was two bands at the height of their powers in the late seventies, in New York City, and I was a fifteen-year-old kid just learning what life was all about.

# 3 – Pink Floyd

If you were part of the stoner crowd, the drug crowd, or even the drinking crowd, though definitely more the stoner and drug crowd, there were two bands that were perfect to see live. The first was the Grateful Dead, and the second, of course, was Pink Floyd. Both were completely different experiences, but equally unforgettable. One of my most vivid memories from seeing Pink Floyd at Madison Square Garden in 1977 was when the lights went up and this huge cloud of thick smoke hung in the air. It was so dense it felt like it had its own atmosphere of marijuana swirling above the crowd.

You didn’t do a lot of dancing at a Pink Floyd concert, that wasn’t what you were there for. You were there to listen, to experience, to just be in it. It was something hard to describe but truly special. Hearing Roger Waters shout out to the crowd as fireworks exploded around the arena, listening to David Gilmour play those breathtaking guitar solos, and then the band returning after a long break to perform “Us and Them” as the encore, those moments made it one of the most memorable nights of my teenage life.

# 2 – Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

Everyone has that moment in life when they experience a revelation that somehow inspires what the rest of their life may be like. It could be a movie, a song, a few words from a teacher or a parent, a tragedy, or a celebration. So many different things can happen in one’s life that affect you forever. For me, it was seeing Springsteen at the Garden in 1978. I knew in that moment that I wanted to be a musician. That is how powerful it was. It was life-changing. Words can’t describe that show. Springsteen was unleashed, determined to present one of the greatest and longest rock concerts anyone had ever experienced. If you were there, you would understand what I am talking about. This was nothing like the Born In The U.S.A. or Tunnel Of Love shows or anything else that came in the 80s and beyond. This was something incredibly special. It was once in a lifetime. That was the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour.

# 1 – Led Zeppelin

As much as the Springsteen concert was life changing to me in 1978, seeing Led Zeppelin in 1977 what’s the first time that I really understood what religion was all about. I’m not talking about religion in the sense that you may be thinking of; I’m talking about an experience of seeing something that seemed not to be of this world. The moment that led Zeppelin to hit the stage almost 2 hours late and that smoky garden in New York City on a hot June night, I knew I was seeing rock and roll gods that no one has ever and will ever compare to. Maybe the Beatles would come close just because they’re The Beatles. I kind of understood in that moment why all those young, crazy girls screamed and passed out when they saw the Beatles, because I just really can’t describe the impact that Led Zeppelin had on me and probably about 18 other thousand people when they hit the stage. Our blood became something else, our bodies fused into another dimension of time.

Yeah, I know it sounds like some sicko science fiction movie, and I’m just trying to write to be clever, but I’m not. There was just something so out of this world, magical, mystical, there are not enough adjectives in the English language to describe what it was like to see Led Zeppelin in the 1970s. Nobody ever had that type of power that band had when they walked on stage. The videos do not do it justice. I almost don’t want to add the videos because you just don’t get it from the videos. You had to be there, you had to be a part of it to understand.

If someone asked me what musical artist I wish I had seen in my life, I’d tell them I already saw them; it was Led Zeppelin.