Texxas Jam ’78 – Documentary (2010)

So the biggest musical event texas has ever seen we’re here for help the texas world music festival july 1st to the 3rd at the cotton bowl the only other thing that had ever happened to the scale that you could even compare the texas jam to

Zz top had done a show in the early 70s and down in austin at the uh at the ut field they had put about 80 000 people into the football stadium and it was it was hugely successful from a attendance standpoint but they tore up the infant

So badly that they never allowed them to ever do it again without the texas jam in 1978 we probably would never ever have had an outdoor stadium show ever again first major rock show that pace produced cotton bull dallas texas and we had a whole lot of people there producing the event

Uh it was uh probably the start of a decade long of stadium rock shows at the cotton ball as well as the texas jam and the lineup was just awesome and if you look at the lineup today you’ll see that they’re still awesome in those days i was um i was into like

This numerology stuff and numerology is this thing and it’s kind of ridiculous now but neurology is this thing where you you know you use the letters in words and they add up to numbers and stuff and there’s good numbers and those bad numbers and david was always sort of enthralled with the

Fact that i was into this numerology stuff because he was into some esoteric stuff too david krabs who was my partner with the texas jam he was in los angeles and uh he was going across the street back then to his agency uh who represented some of

His bands icm and he called me he goes you’re not going to believe this i just saw a license plate and it had texas on it with two x’s he thought oh that’s like a real omen texas so he came to me and he said what

Do you think of texas with two x’s and i i remember working out all the numbers for him and saying david that’s going to be real good the numbers are real good and stuff like that you know i think when we talked earlier i think it was like three months that we

Actually went in and we rented apartments and i want to say 12 14 15 of us were there for about a 10 to 12 week period we had to get through the city council process because it was a departure from what what anybody ever had done in texas

Really whether it was dallas or not you know everything was new so everything we were doing we were doing for the first time so figuring out where to put all the trailers for the dressing rooms and trailers for the production people and motorhomes for the people that were

Spending the night there for two or three nights in a row that’s kind of how we learned back then we were just learning as we went we were all in our 20s i remember one of the biggest issues we had is we had to cover the turf with with plywood

And during the day the plywood would would bow up on the ends and during the during the night it would kind of lay lay flat again and so we were constantly moving plywood around to make sure that there was none of the turf exposed because they were still playing football there

And when we were running forklifts and trucks and go-karts and ice carts you know it was kind of a it’s kind of a difficult deal moving all that plywood around big old rolling stages that were heavy to push around i remember you know huge sets as we learned over

The years we made stuff a lot smaller it was so heavy and it took 40 people to push each stage and 475 miles east of here we had heard big time about the texas jam it it became legendary from the very from the very start it’s the biggest musical event

Texas has ever seen the texas world music festival july 1st to the 3rd at the cotton bowl with three days of music the world’s largest movie theater a battle of the bands flea market fireworks laser show a rock and roll midway the zoo is your official information station for the

Texas world music festival take yourself with booming so we knew we had a crowd coming we had 60 70 000 people the first night had about 35 or 40 the second night so we knew we had crowds and this hadn’t been done before in our part of the world and we were

Yeah we were uptight we had everything out there well actually about 10 or 15 of my friends got the idea to go out there the night before and just kind of camp out and spend the night outside the cotton bowl and our you know goal was to be one of

The first people in line so we could get inside and get up by the stage you know we had a amateur statewide contest where each major market would uh interview bands and would have them send in tapes so we had and they opened had several of

The winners play at the open be the opening act for the concert the night before the texas jam we had a show with frank marino mahogany rush and the idea was that there would be you know five six ten thousand kids hanging around the night before and that we

Wanted a place safe place for them to go so we created this concert at the coliseum which was adjacent to the cotton bowl and only 300 kids showed up and i know when frank moreno walked on the stage and saw basically no one there he just threw his hands up in the air

And walked off and didn’t play and so that was quite an interesting start to the weekend found a big grass field where everybody parked and looked like 20 000 people had the same idea as us to get out there and get a good spot early so you know we

Got out and you could smell marijuana in the air and beer cans all over the ground and and we started noticing people with different license plates you know from louisiana oklahoma arizona new mexico so we just stayed up all night pretty much and had a good time you know you

Know 12 midnight one two three in the morning everybody started lining up probably twenty thirty thousand were lined up come gates open at six or seven in the morning when the music started and everybody was on the freeway all the kids were on the freeway coming to uh the cotton bowl

When they heard the music they shut it down and started running and so we had cars a mile just nobody in them cars on the freeway stopped [Applause] Here i come [Applause] I just remember there being an awful lot of bands on that show that were kind of all starting out at the same time van halen okay 1978 van halen was was on our tour that year believe it or not was a you know a new band to a lot of people at

That time i was i was very close to the guys of van halen because we were in the studio together van halen had their first single running with the devil these guys are ornery and we took them out on the first tour alex van gaal in his horn ring did they

Break us in or did we break them yet it was it was more the other question yeah eddie’s orange they were on this rampage back in those days i like busting up hotel rooms and throwing tvs out in the swimming pool michael anthony he’s a sweetie he’s

Sweet i was maybe eight years old the doctors said i was hyperactive and they told my parents oh we have to put dave on riddling therapy and all of this because every night at dinner when i get the blood sugars up i’d start ticky tacking with the knives and forks on the

Table and i’d start telling jokes and singing commercials from television and everything and the folks would say to the company now don’t worry about david he’s just doing what we call monkey hour and i have successfully turned monkey hour into a career i’d say 90 percent of that crowd that day

Didn’t know what they looked like if you can believe that they had no clue i remember when van halen come walking down the ramp and it was my first introduction to hair bands you know i mean i was sitting there going it was quite a shock you know seeing these guys

Come in with makeup on in their hair all frizzed out and spandex i hadn’t seen that before we were still all rock and rollers and blue jeans this long blond-haired guy just came out on stage you know like with his arms up and like he owned the place and pretty

Much just all at once the whole crowd stood on his feet Eddie van halen jumped to his knees and started the beginning of the instrumental solo he does called eruption [Applause] and i swear that was the highlight of the entire afternoon listen to all these bands it says aerosmith ted nugent atlanta rhythm section head east heart frank mourinho mahogany norrish uh eddie

Money van halen walter egan i don’t even know who he is our journey um was he really there that day walter where are those i don’t remember them being there either i wasn’t even there for their show i don’t mean to disrespect to walther i’m walter walford

It’s the name of my gun um that i’m sure if he was on the show he must have something to deliver give him my very best if you see him i mean he had a huge hit so uh you know he’s a legitimate part of the music business but

I first met fleetwood mac at santa barbara they were doing a concert up there 1976 and buckingham knicks were still trying to be an entity outside of fleetwood mac at that time so during the recording of my first album stevie was doing a lot of background vocals on that album

And of course i was madly in love with her and i decided to write a song about this feeling that i had for her after she sang the background vocals on tumblr low i saw and by the time i got home from the studio i had written magnet and st-shirts/” target=”_blank”>teel

Remember a signal magnet and st-shirts/” target=”_blank”>teel sure sweet guy i remember his hits i remember hearing those those songs yeah and we played with him a lot afterwards was it uh walter egan you are my magnet you are the magnet I love his uh second album i love his second album it’s like one of my desert island discs i didn’t know he played the jam eddie money was a really great guy too but the texas jam was the craziest show i think i’ve ever done yeah i think i visited hell and

Back yeah i’ve also heard that that day was like officially the hottest day of the entire decade of the 70s it was at the cotton bowl and they are so nuts about their football in texas it’s crazy well as my bud my buddy eddie money says texas means football and college

Football especially all right okay they’re nuts about football football and they didn’t want to destroy the field at the cotton ball it was 104 degrees out and they had a black top on the field i did remember watching eddie money you know exactly what you think you’re going

To get with him you get baby hold on to me whatever will be will be sweet i love you i’m married but i’m not happy you know that i’m a late season i love my wife is he’s exactly who you think he’s gonna be when i when my first

Album came out on columbia records the first gig i did was at the old waldorf up in san francisco and eddie came backstage fellow label mate that he was and he was like like a big brother he was like hey man we’re gonna get through you’re gonna be

Great man it’s gonna be wonderful you know and he’s kind of got the east coast thing that i’ve got being from new york so the only two guys in this typing class back in my high school was me and my guitar player with a bunch of girls which was a lot of

Fun so i wound up learning how to type so they said to me when i joined the policeman they said can anybody type i said i can type so i raised my hand up and i went up typing roll calls for the police department which was a pretty good job i

Was working eight to four but i looked at myself and i said i don’t want to do this my hair was getting really good in the back and i just couldn’t see myself in uniform for 20 years i started the eddie money band and then i wrote two tickets to paradise and

I got signed on amateur night by the legendary bill graham back in 1976. i remember everybody on the floor sticking up two fingers and then the chicks were on top of the guy’s shoulders taking their tops off and were like hey here’s my two tickets to paradise right here you know today

Michelle never forget because the amount of talent on that show i don’t think i’ve had so much really fantastic talent on the same bill in in my entire career as that day i know that down on the cotton boat field itself they had that old 70s astro turf and

It was estimated you know in the days after that it got to be over 130 degrees down on the field then i went underneath the bleachers and it reminded me of gone with the wind that’s how many people were passed out under there i mean it

Was really insane i mean i thought the people were passing out left and right it was like it was insane we’re having a lot of people keeling over and fainting and having to be brought over to our cool down we have cool down areas and it’s mostly from uh

Loss of fluid body fluid they’re sweating and they’re not been able to drink so they end up with us and we have to cool them down and a lot of people some haven’t already gone to hospital we were on walter cronkite i still remember it and wished i had a clip

Because the show was so big it made uncle walter’s cbs evening news and since they had to get a clip there we were on stage when they shot it people tried just about everything they could to keep cool but despite the heat their minds were mostly on the music The tickets for today’s concert sold for 15 each the event was a sellout and will go on through past midnight so to come to dallas i mean probably where we grew up people still from those small towns still dream of you know we might as well told them we

Were going to london or paris so to be able to come to dallas and play in the cotton bowl was just you know that’s what rock and roll dreams used to be made of [Applause] Still one of the best singing bands in the united states very few bands vocally could um compete with us across the board i always thought we could sing with the eagles i remember that people were so hot that they were starting to pass out so they actually pulled out like fire hoses and

Were squirting down people the radar is absorbing just sponging up this insanity not to mention the flesh and the babes and the firmness and the cheerleader factory so there was a tremendous wet t-shirt contest over here so i wouldn’t have changed that that was good [Applause]

Yeah it was it was beautiful the sweat factor was always beautiful man it’s like baptism by greece i love the baptism by greece you know the hotter the better music is one of the most potent weapons that our society is utilizing to cure the wounds that occurred in the last 10

Years between watergate vietnam and the three assassinations and in addition i think that if you look at the last 10 years the people who are 26 are 36 we represent a lot of votes and a lot of power in the community and i think that in essence we’re setting the standard

For our own peer groups well i remember that was the first day i ever met steve perry right in the and the guys in journey never the same since steve left the band we were better known for was what began what began with steve perry so from 78 on i would say was

Was the the bigger picture we had just come off stage and we were lying on the floor in our dressing room cooling off with all the lights off and spraying ourselves with water and everything and i looked up and there was steve perry’s face

Hi how you doing you know and he was he was just starting out too and he so i just remember sort of shaking hands with him and going wow you’re good hey you’re good you know playing in front of mass audiences the more people you play in

Front of the more they become aware that you’re there and what your music is and so once again just playing no matter where we played i think that definitely contributed a lot to the album sales as well as you know our acceptance finally on radio radio airplay was it that was where the

Band changed killer band though obviously some of probably across the board if you took all of the all the components together as talent as town if not more so than anybody on the show well that was another band you know at that period was kind of peaking out in

My mind and i was i liked journey at the time [Applause] It was awesome i mean you know it doesn’t matter how much experience you have in front of how many people every time you go in front of a stadium full of people the rush is something else they all delivered soulful soulful music and still do to this day

And and they have shown through the years how their music means as much to the people today as it did back then really talented ditto it was fun to meet some of those guys some of the other musicians you know because when you’re working that hard

A lot of times you miss and you don’t really get a chance to hang out with other bands well i mean i got to talk to a lot of the guys but in those days i was smoking a lot more pot than i do you know i was

I was a little out of in those days you know i was kind of like pretty hip eddie money i was flying of course at that period you know chi chi chong was definitely a big part of the 70s yeah they came out and did little skits there was probably about 20 minutes

Between shows and they came out and filled probably 15. man hey there’s a joint man come on light it up let’s get chinese eyes man amen i love cheech and i love chong and all they stand for i there was a time when i owned the first

Probably five and chong albums that came out and they don’t remember any of them during that time lone star beer who was the beer of texas at that time they were running this commercial and it it basically it was around the texas state fair and and where they showed all the festival

Activity going on the fair big texas and all that stuff and the cotton bowl and the fairgrounds and all the carnival things and so i called krebs i said i’ve got a brilliant idea i just saw it on television and it’s the cotton bowl louis messina may be the quintessential

Promoter of rock and roll events of all time just from the logistical wrestling match perfection that he accomplished oh he is one of the great great human beings in the business yeah biggest regrets of the la of the loss of the cessation of the texas jam is that i don’t get to

Work with louis messina close in uh on that annual basis he was a pleasure but i give louie much more credit than i do the libra krebs machinery and i i give louis as much credit for as the texas jam for for breaking me in texas in those days because uh

You know louie believed in me and he took chances and sent them out lying areas and he’d put me in a market where most you know people wouldn’t go in there unless they were a top 40 act or something you know where they only had

Top 40 radio he put me in there just because of the reputation of the jams and took a chance as a promoter and he broke me all over texas so louise he’s the greatest always dressed like an ace you know i mean every time i can remember every time he would come

Out to show he he’d have something fabulous on you know that’s right looked really really nice guy really pulled together funny yeah we could trust him i mean heart outside of seattle texas because of the jam they were a major headliner on their second tour they opened for the jefferson starship

The first year as a touring act and they came back and texas was huge for them texas was huge for a lot of these bands after they played the texas jam we had a real big first album in greenville and then the second thing that happened was a big lego dispute so

You know we were in danger of not being able to put out any albums for like five years so we had to go to court you know deal with all that they weren’t representing us uh in a very uh respectful way and they you know there’s

A lot of money missing you know all of all the classic stuff heart is like you know the double whammy between annie and nancy i mean they’re really amazing and ann’s got the voice you know that any rock and roller would love to have and she would just melt you

With the way she was saying and then nancy would be standing there playing the guitar and she’s so good such a good player and she’d be kicking those legs i mean i’m still the image of those girls on stage still burned into my mind well hart you know had the benefit of in

My opinion having the best time slot of the entire show sun was getting down shading the crowd finally some relief from the unbearable heat of the sun and it was like we all had our second wind you know there were fan bases from all the different groups there so the people

That came to see hart were only a percentage of the crowd and the rest of them were like hey who are these chicks you know and uh so the challenge of course was to get everybody interested it was like a battle of the bands everybody was really trying to kick some

Major ass which was uh which was a lot of fun it says here that um that we’re out promoting our new album um magazine so it’s before little queen running up to little queen wow wow fresh out of clubs second album yeah remember they played um those songs that

Were real big at that time barracuda magic man cry was getting all into it and when you looked out at the people from the stage it was like it was a sea of like pink you know everyone was shirtless and various kind of a wash of pink that you couldn’t quite see

Where it ended [Applause] And of course the kings of the 70s for everyone was led zeppelin so when they came out and played some led zeppelin you know we just went crazy [Applause] Heart was probably besides van halen you know they had the best set of the day i think ted what a character to this day uh he considers himself a survivalist he’s a and he really is an expert shot and he’s a good bowman and i respect the fact that he eats

Anything that he kills even if it’s a raccoon but ted nugent is definitely one of a kind i mean that guy he’s such a redneck let’s just talk about the baptism shall we that guy is like permanently on i mean he’s just they broke the mold when they made ted

Nugent ted’s boisterous let’s say that he’s outspoken and rambunctious we’re kind of seattle girls you know and we love animals you know and stuff like that so it was kind of oh hi i still had african dirt on my feet i still had african blood in my fingernails politics absolutely stream of conscious Naked dancing around the campfire chuck berry and mo diddly brought to me he really i’m i’m telling you there’s nobody like him there is no body like ted i mean you know ted is an icon you know he sort of came with his entourage of hot young thing you know he’s really iconically

A redneck rocker and he still is i want to play every city in texas with electricity we’re a little happy whatever the size i want to play he is sober he does not do drugs he’s like that naturally he’s colorfully you know wildly exuberant that is not chemically

Induced he’s straight arrow and ted really is anti-drug and he caught his brother who was his road manager at the time john nugent he caught him snorting coke one night and he fired him on the spot fired his own brother sent him home he said go to the airport go home so much

For family love so much for family love he was the first one to play with the you know the sun completely down and have a light show and i remember one thing i really remember was when he took the mic and started beating it on his chest you know

And thumping the entire cotton ball like [Applause] that i cannot control [Laughter] [Applause] can you hear my heart beating out there texas it’s beating for some of that sweet texas [ __ ] and he went right into wang dang sweet queen [Applause] She’s i mean i was defying gravity that day i mean the sweat factor i remember they squeegeeed where i was if i stood at a microphone and then i ran across stage you’d have to come and mop out where i stopped anywhere because of the sweat

Factor at the end of a show he he went so crazy and was going off so hard that he like literally passed out you know i mean passing out on the stage and he was that exhausted from the heat i met aerosmith a few times beforehand

Because david krebs who was one of my managers was also the manager for them and they you know they weren’t always present as it were during those years i’ve never heard a band that had a bigger sound than aerosmith those guys had a wall of sound these guys are rocket roll personified

They didn’t sound as good as the aerosmith that i’d seen before by that period in their careers i know they’ve admitted now that some of their late 70s shows they weren’t at their best and i mean aerosmith is once again the quintessential uh roller coaster ride of humanity i mean they almost

Killed themselves back at that time but they were able to still pull off a really respect respectable and precision performance because it was in their blood i can close my eyes right now and remember ted and aaron smith jam into milk cow blues and joe perry was they were kind of pale thin

Joe perry was pale and thin and kind of quiet but you know we were like oh my god Why You can just tell they were wasted that night you know uh but there were some shortcomings at that time which they will be the first to admit to you making a lot of money yeah have you made a lot of money in your day yeah

Millions do you have oh yeah where is it now went up my nose i must have snorted up all of peru to survive the 60s and the 70s it’s a it’s a [ __ ] miracle you think you could have been dead oh god i was several times

We’ve used drugs for so many years it’s like you know you you burn out the punch card you know i mean you’ve only got so many drinks in your life i think i used all of mine in 35 years you know i was looking forward to

Having a few sips on the porch when i get older but eating the cards you know joe and i are the toxic twins baby they weren’t the most friendly guys i ever met in my life um they they they made it pretty much clear that they wanted to associate only with each other

Ah well they chose not to meet with you well i guess they are standoffish aren’t they um even to this day i guess you have to get on american idol to really get to talk to stephen tyler these days i always never understood how they could

Always be such good friends and do tours together and ted sober and aerosmith so wasted so i think ted must have just been high on rock and roll that night and fit right in with them so i’ve worked a lot with uh with nugent and aerosmith being we all have the same language

I later later on probably developed closer friendships with joe perry and even steve tyler and even ted started saying nice things about me after a while everybody but frank marino and mahogany raj loved it because there were two they were on the show and frank mourinho got there early and i’ve never seen

Anybody sweat so much in my life he came out there from canada in leather all day and he didn’t play to like later on in the afternoon and i’ve never seen anybody i mean that leather was like i don’t know how you got off of it let’s

See i’m going to dallas texas oh by the way you’re playing in the cotton bowl in the middle of the afternoon in hot sun i think i’ll wear leather a leather jacket leather pants leather boots neil peart is a machine but but frank is yeah he’s that wasn’t his best judgment he was

Pretty hot in fact i think that he almost passed out while he was playing if i remember correctly frank marino mahogany frank franks was a car guy just like jeff beck right he was really into cars as much as he was into music yeah well kind of felt bad for frank marino

That night i was a fan of his too but you know to come on after hart ted nugent and aerosmith and so late Oh [Applause] the truth is by the time he finished that night it was like 10 it was like 20 or 30 000 people left and everybody else had gone on home and the people that were there were really the die hards that were there for the you know the duration of it all

You know frank mourinho had the uh he was kind of at the jimi hendrix slot jimi hendrix closed the show at woodstock and uh played to basically people cleaning up the trash on early monday morning and i think frank marino suffered the same fate but i don’t know i i

I feel like he kind of got screwed just by having to go on so late and last that no one just it wasn’t because of his performance it was just you know half the people were dead by then two things made it increasingly difficult for the texas jams to continue

Those two things were none of the bands everybody wanted to headline i think that many of the bands in those days just did things to access and everything got more and more and more excessive and i think that the acts got less and less accessible not only more promoters can’t afford

What bands want because of the cost of everything else that cost bands to go out there inflation yeah you know it’s just hit the ceiling continues to move up and so i think it’s it makes it sort of impossible for for bookends to meet you know what i mean think about you’ve

Got a lineup of six bands and to make a to make a strong enough all-day bill to command the ticket price you can’t put on lightweight acts well four out of those six bands are used to headlining arenas on their own you take those four out of those six and you say okay

Three of you have got to go on earlier in the day while the sun’s still up that means you don’t get all the lights and all of the special effects that you’re used to how do you get all those bands and pay all that money i mean

I think one of the reason why they’re not as frequent as they used to be is they’ve gotten way more dangerous yeah people die now you know like what happened to pearl jam and holland and yeah and and uh the last few uh several lollapaloozas were kind of you know hair raising

Ticket prices have rot you know just skyrocketed and to where you know in the days of this you could probably forget what these tickets were but they were probably you know 20 bucks for a roster of bands like that you know to get good front row seats and stuff

Like that it’s 200 250 150. jimmy buffett was just in houston and the tickets were 500 apiece so people used to go out to concerts all the time you know even if a lot of times they didn’t always know who the bands were the other thing was a purely economic thing

And it was insurance now i can guarant-shirts/” target=”_blank”>tee you 80 000 people goes to the cotton bowl to see the texas jam 79 999 of them have never even crossed their mind that there has got to be insurance on this one day event and what are they thinking about

How much would that insurance on an event like this cost well i know for a fact that in the middle 80s the insurance that uh pace concerts the promoter was paying was in excess of a million dollars for one day this was in the middle 80s and it was it was escalating not

Arithmetically but geometrically and it was getting to the point where only these uh special carriers like lloyd’s of london would even touch an event like a texas jam and when you when you get a universe of one place in the world that you can go to to ensure you they can command any

Price that they want they can pick any price no matter how outrageous they’ve got you by the short and curlies Don’t eat the nachos here for help [Applause] We’re here for drinking like a little booze show your chick’s little honey we’re here for helping touches Texas jam 78 wow you

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