In the bicentennial summer of 1976, a record number of major rock acts hit the arena/stadium circuit across North America, including Paul McCartney and Wings, the Who, Elton John, Kiss, the Beach Boys, the Band, the Stills-Young Band, Yes, Peter Frampton,
and Genesis. These were often part of multi-artist bills that ran for well over six hours, starting long before the sun set.
Inevitably, they didn’t all go over very well. “It is obvious that this is not the Big Bicentennial Bonanza that was anticipated,” syndicated newspaper columnist Lisa Robinson wrote in her Rock Talk column. “Talk to any rock star, and you’ll immediately become engaged in The Discussion: Why the huge, outdoor stadium shows don’t necessarily work.”
Elton John broke it down for her. “I think this is the last year for those kind of shows,” he said. “Any promoter will tell you that these shows aren’t doing such good business. The kids don’t get a good view. They have to sit there all day in the sweltering heat. If they want to go to the bathroom or get something to drink it’s a drag. And to see the act they like, they have to sit for hours watching bands they really didn’t come to see.”
One tour that had little trouble selling tickets, however, was a co-headlining bill of Yes and Peter Frampton at stadiums in June and July. This was the red hot peak of Frampton mania when Frampton Comes Alive! was the Number One album on the Billboard 200, by a long shot, and it was impossible to turn on the radio without hearing “Baby, I Love Your Way,” “Show Me the Way,” or “Do You Feel Like We Do.” The music industry hadn’t seen anything quite like it since Beatlemania.
Yes, meanwhile, hadn’t released a new LP since 1974’s Relayer, and they’d been off the road for a year. Singer Jon Anderson, guitarist Steve Howe, bassist Chris Squire, and drummer Alan White all spent the downtime cutting solo albums. But they regrouped in May 1976 for an extensive North American arena tour with opening act the Pousette-Dart Band. And when Frampton joined the bill in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Anaheim, California, San Diego, and Cicero, Illinois, the show moved into stadiums or, in the case of Cicero, a race track.
The tour was informally billed as the Solo Album Tour, which is very misleading since the set was nothing but Yes classics like “Roundabout,” “Heart of the Sunrise,” “I’ve Seen All Good People,” and “Long Distance Runaround.” “At the time we decided to get into this tour,” White told The Anaheim Bulletin on July 23, 1976, “we decided to play all the songs that the people wanted to hear.”
The tour hit San Diego’s Balboa Stadium exactly 50 years ago on July 18, 1976, with Gary “Dream Weaver” Wright and Gentle Giant opening up. Tickets were $9.50 in advance, but you had to cough up $11.00 on the day of the show. “Enjoy an exciting show you can see and hear outdoors in the grass, festival seating,” read an ad in the paper, “with all the comforts of an outdoor concert. Plenty of concessions, parking and restrooms — attendance limited to 35,000 for your comfort.”
Peter Frampton alone could have easily sold 35,000 tickets in 1976. Throw in Yes, Gentle Giant, and Gary Wright on a weekend night in July near a college, and you have a recipe for chaos. Which is exactly what happened.
“Ninety persons were arrested Sunday as police sought to maintain order at a concert which attracted 4,500 more persons than could be admitted to the 35,000 capacity Balboa Stadium,” read a UPI report the morning after the show. “Police said most of those arrested were young adults, and they were charged mostly for drunkenness, drug use, resisting arrest and trespassing… Milling crowds broke down fences, and caused damage on the campuses of San Diego High School and City College, both adjoining the stadium. A first-aid trailer at the stadium treated 100 persons for injuries. An unknown number of people were taken to hospitals.”
An inadvertently hilarious dispatch from CBS 8 San Diego (available on YouTube) shows cops in riot gear battling crazed teenagers outside, desperate to get in. Every single fan looks like an extra from Dazed and Confused or That ’70s Show. If you watch the footage on mute, parts look genuinely like the Attica prison riot.
Sadly, there’s not even a glimpse of Gary Wright, Peter Frampton, or Yes in the news footage. But we do see a few seconds of Gentle Giant performing “Knots” from their 1972 album Octopus.
There is Super 8 footage of Wright’s set that looks like it was filmed by Abraham Zapruder. There’s also 12 minutes of Peter Frampton’s set captured on film, and six minutes of Yes, including bits of “Sound Chaser,” “I’ve Seen All Good People,” and “The Gates of Delirium.” A bootlegger also walked out with a clean tape of the entire set, which has circulated for decades. The highlight is a final encore of “I’m Down” by the Beatles, one of just 15 known times they’ve played it.
The Yes tour wrapped a month later with a gig in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that marked keyboardist Patrick Moraz’s final show in the band. Rick Wakeman rejoined during the Going for the One sessions later that year. Moraz moved on to the Moody Blues in 1978 and stuck around until 1991, when his acrimonious departure led to a legal battle with his former bandmates that played out on Court TV. Today, Moraz and Justin Hayward are the only living members of the Moody Blues. (Relations between them are so frosty that Hayward didn’t even know Moraz was still alive when we spoke to him last year.)
Yes has also gone through quite a few changes over the years. Today, Howe is the only member from the classic-era lineup still in the band. But they continue to tour and record quite regularly. Last year, they took a page from the 1976 San Diego playbook by playing a Beatles song near the end of the night. This time around, it was “The Word.”
Like Yes, Balboa Stadium is almost unrecognizable today when compared to its 1976 self. The original venue was torn down a few years after the Yes/Frampton show, and replaced with a much smaller stadium that seats just 3,000 people. If Yes and Frampton ever wanted to return and share the bill again, they’d probably fill it. This time around, the police would likely be able to leave their riot gear at the precinct.
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