The rain was pouring down on the audience at Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver, but the crowd wanted more music. Bruce Springsteen was furiously rocking, and Boulder DJ Kenny Weissberg remembers that August 1981 night as the best concert he has ever seen.
I’ll let Weissberg, a former DJ and lead singer of a Boulder band who later became a San Diego concert promoter, paint the picture.
“It had started raining a few minutes before showtime, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band kicked things off with ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain,’ recalls Weissberg, whose book Off My Rocker chronicles his many years encountering and befriending some of the world’s greatest musicians. “Forty-five minutes later, it was still raining and very windy. Conditions were terrible for the audience, and the stage was getting soaked. Bruce stopped the show and asked the crowd of 9,000 if they wanted him to stop the show, promising to come back the next night and play a full show. The fans overwhelmingly wanted him to continue. So, after a quick break to dry off the equipment and let the drenched band change clothes, the show continued for nearly three hours — 28 songs, including a five-song encore. The connection between the band and the crowd was unlike any I’ve experienced before or since.”
Weissberg’s book pulls no punches and reveals him as a wild, fun-loving, music-loving, drug-loving character which was par for the course for many who lived in Boulder in the 1970s. He was a DJ at three Boulder radio stations 1971-1983, where, besides playing music, he interviewed hundreds of musicians, including Gram Parsons, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Jim Croce and Etta James.
He also was the lead singer and guitarist for his band Kenny & the Kritix for a few years in the early 1980s. Members of his band included bassist Mark Andes (Spirit, JoJo Gunne, Firefall, Heart), guitarist Sam Broussard (Jimmy Buffett, Sonny Landreth, Michael Martin Murphey) and flautist/multi-instrumentalist Dave Muse (Firefall, Marshall Tucker Band).
After Colorado, he moved to San Diego and produced concerts at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay, a scenic 1,400-seat outdoor theater next to San Diego Bay. He also hosted a weekly radio show, Music Without Boundaries, on five different stations 1993-2007.
Excluding his band’s shows in Boulder, Weissberg, who grew up in New Jersey, estimates he has attended 3,000 concerts, including 2,000 he produced at Humphreys. With so many memories, he says he could name about 20 concerts as the best. But I insist that he name his No. 2 and No. 3 best concerts, and he complies.
“I have a soft spot for the first concert I attended: Bob Dylan at the Mosque in Newark, New Jersey, on October 2, 1965,” he says. “I felt a profound feeling of liberation that night. I was 17, drove to the concert, took a cheerleader as my date and was mesmerized by the 24-year-old singer-songwriter and his electric band. He ended the show with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘Positively 4th Street.’ My life was changed that night.”
The No. 3 top concert was Dylan’s bandmate decades later in the Traveling Wilburys.”
“As a promoter, my favorite memory was presenting Roy Orbison at Humphreys on September 12, 1987,” Weissberg says. “He did two identical shows — each 17 songs, 62 minutes. There were 10 standing ovations per show — most during the songs when he hit those impossible notes. I laughed, I cried, I shook his hand, I got the chills. One of the most memorable nights of my life.”
Another quite memorable event he attended was the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in 1969. I ask what impressed him most at the legendary festival.
“Four consecutive acts on Saturday night/Sunday morning blew my mind: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone and the Who!” he exclaims. “If you force me to pick only one best, I’d go with CCR. I expected the others to be great, but I snobbishly considered Creedence to be an AM radio pop band and hoped to sleep through their set. From the opening fuzztones of ‘Born On the Bayou’ until their magnum opus ‘Suzie Q,’ I discovered the meaning of choogling and had a new favorite band. I laughed years later when I heard that John Fogerty thought they played poorly. He was wrong!”
With such a deep love for music, I curiously ask Weissberg to identify his three favorite albums of all time. They are Love’s Forever Changes, the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man and Otis Redding’s Live in Europe.
During his college days at the University of Wisconsin, Redding was Weissberg’s favorite artist. Weissberg’s book begins dramatically with Weissberg and college friends waiting in line to procure the best seats hours before a scheduled Redding concert. He had never seen his idol perform and never would. Redding died in a plane crash en route to the show.
Weissberg’s book is a breezy, fun read with many anecdotes of his encounters with famous musicians. I ask him to explain his aims when he decided to write Off My Rocker.
“When my mother was dying in 2005, she was lucid until the very end,” Weissberg responds. “Her last words to me, literally, were, ‘So when are you going to write your book?’ In a way, I was honoring her. I had told too many people that I was going to write a pull-no-punches memoir about a life devoted to music. I painted myself into a corner and had to deliver the goods.”