Overall, a great list; impossible to do and make everyone happy. I’m glad to see the old Stones, Zeppelin, and Who shows, as well as J. Geils and Aerosmith represented. I lived in Boston from ’81 to ’85. From that era, I would have added shows where the Jon Butcher Axis and New Man shared the bill. I think that happened at Jonathan Swift’s, the Channel, and Bunratty’s. Neither band made it big, but it’s not because they didn’t deserve to. Also, that was the era when Joe Perry wasn’t in Aerosmith, so he was playing locally all the time. There was a show, I want to say 1983, at Uncle Sam’s that was historic.
Adam Taylor
Media, PA
I’ve been lucky enough to see 10 of the 40 concerts on your list. I’ll give you James Brown at #1, for its historical significance if nothing else. And I agree with ranking the Stones at the Garden in ’72 at #3 because I did see that. But I also saw the Jimi Hendrix Experience perform at the Carousel Theater in Framingham on August 25, 1968. It was easily the greatest and most magical rock show I’ve ever seen. In my opinion, you made a big mistake in not ranking it #2 — not to mention by completely omitting it from your list.
Dan Currie
Boston
I can’t believe the Beatles September 12, 1964, concert didn’t even make this list! It was truly a history-making event. I was 13 years old at the time and was screaming and crying along with everyone else. It was the first concert I ever went to, and after attending a bazillion concerts since then, including everything from Led Zep to Bauhaus and the Cure, the Beatles will always hold a special place in my heart as my numero uno.
Paula Ehler
Everett
Thus spake Mitt
Regarding your editorial, “The Mormonator,” Mitt Romney has been mainlining Nietzsche? Wow! Mormonofascism rears its ugly head on the American political scene! Who woulda thunk it?
Maybe Mitt really is going to get all the Mormons to goose step into the voting booths, the crew-cut men in business-suit uniforms, the pony-tailed women all in matching ankle-length skirts. I’m sure that the Czechs and the Poles are all wetting their pants in nervous terror and that the Sudeten Mormons are all in a frenzy of hope.
Ain’t that just a little bit absurd and fatuous? Beware the bland beast?
Or maybe your hysterical editorial writer has been channeling Nietzsche’s all-too-common moments of adolescent over-the-top hyperbole.
The sad fact is, mainly I’m disappointed in the Phoenix. I thought — had hoped, really — that you’d have known better, would actually have a well-read and thoughtful understanding of Nietzsche rather than a silly cartoon one. Nietzsche’s “will to power” didn’t mean what the well-scrubbed American uneducated masses and Ayn Rand–reading daydreaming teenage boys and masturbatory girls think of it, in all their fears and flights of self-aggrandizing and self-abasing fantasy.
