I was a crazy Hilton Coliseum camper
A long, strange trip back to a 1980 ticket stakeout for...WHO?
AMES — Let me say at the outset that I am a proud alum of Iowa State University and devoted fan of Iowa State Cyclone athletics.
But I have to say, those young’uns who camped out in the subzero cold in the Hilton Coliseum parking lot for tickets to the ISU men’s basketball game versus Kansas, days before the game, in subzero cold…well, they had my head shaking. Not shivering, shaking.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not beyond braving the elements for my ‘Clones. I was layered up like someone in that movie “The Hurt Locker” as my son and I sat in the upper stratosphere on the windward side of Jack Trice Stadium to watch the Cyclone football team notch their school-record 10th win over the Kansas State Wildcats on Nov. 30.
But that was a few hours. Not a couple of days.
And I’ve been known to layer up and go out on morning runs in the cold, or even shoot baskets. But not for prolonged periods. As one of my dear departed older brothers once told me, “You’ve got a few notches on your belt now too, son.”
But as I initially wondered about the wisdom and sanity of these young Hilton campers, I forgot one thing.
I did that once.
Forty-five years ago, I camped out for a weekend for tickets for the April 29, 1980 concert by the rock legends The Who at Hilton.
My “tent” was my 1973 Chevelle. At the time I’d been out of school almost a year and was working at the Ames Tribune.
This was back in the days before Stub Hub or Ticketmaster and online purchases. Tickets were sold through the promoters. You went to the ticket office and they gave you a numbered ticket, like a raffle ticket, that denoted your place in line once tickets went on sale.
You HAD to be there to keep your place in line. Every few hours or so they would “validate” who was there and who wasn’t. They called out numbers for the tickets they had issued reserving your place in line. If you were there, you received a new ticket for the next validation. If you weren’t there, you lost your place in line.
Some of the campers got a little aggressive about it and would start chanting “VAL-I-DATE! VAL-I-DATE!” so they could get others knocked out of line and move up. The Validation Guy got to be pretty popular with some folks.
...
I actually had a journalism school classmate come and take my ticket and hold my place in line while I went to Saturday night Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church a few blocks down Lincoln Way from Hilton. No, not even The Who was going to put me in a state of mortal sin and in risk of eternal damnation in Hell for missing Mass.
Unlike those souls who camped out at Hilton a few weeks ago, it wasn’t subzero cold, It was springtime cold; this was late March, a month before the show. Cold enough. And fortunately it did not rain. I heard campers for earlier stakeouts weren’t as fortunate.
The campers were taunted. I remember one car slowing down and a passenger rolled down the window and yelled “WHOOOO?” at us.
We ate up parking for other events at the Iowa State Center — like a performance of the Martin Stitt drama, “The Runner Stumbles,” which, in hindsight, may have been a more productive use of time.
And there was the usual shenanigans of college youth. One bunch of fellows were stopping cars passing through the parking lot at night for what they called “safety checks.” They’d yell “Safety check!” and one guy walked out to the cars wearing a construction worker safety helmet and a long flashlight.
I kind of laughed to myself and laid down in the back seat of my car. They I heard what I thought was a big logging chain being dragged across the concrete.
“Oh no,” I thought. I had visions of someone pulling a stunt like The Pharoahs gang did in the movie “American Graffiti” when they pulled the rear axle off a squad car. Fortunately that did not happen.
It was long before some of the current camping rules, included in this YouTube video below from Iowa State Athletics. Open flames and oral “antifreeze,” if frowned upon then, were not policed as tightly as today.
Back then, several fellows were huddled campfire-style in the parking lot, and must have pulled an all nighter. The next morning one of them, shivering and wrapped in a heavy blanket, possibly feeling the after effects from the previous night’s revelry, was loudly and profanely cursing The Who.
I was none too pleased either, when I found out the money-making racket some of the fraternity houses were pulling
While I was camping out there by my lonesome, one “frat boy” told me he and his frat brothers were working in shifts. Not only were they working in shifts, some of them had numbers up at the front of the line for choice seats, while some of them were back in my place in line buying tickets just to scalp them.
Yes, I know: To paraphrase Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” you’re “shocked, shocked, that ticket scalping is going on at this university!”
Well, it worked. Some campers gave up and bought tickets at scalped prices — at least prices that were ridiculously high for 1980, anyway. Two tickets for $75 each would be a bargain today - but a tidy profit then at a face value of $12 a ticket, which could run into a nice haul of several hundred bucks or more if you got enough people to bite.
Concert tickets were like money. Even the used ticket stubs have resale value today. I found this stub from The Who’s 1980 Ames concert for sale on worthpoint.com. This, of course, was before the days of electronic tickets delivered online to smartphones.
Anyway, I stuck it out and got The Who tickets — for my younger brother, some friends from back home in Waterloo and my J-school buddy who saved my immortal soul by standing in to let me go to Mass.
My no-nonsense Scottish landlady, who had served in the British Army medical corps in World War II, thought me quite silly for doing it and referred to the band as “The Who-whos.”
But I more or less did it for my younger brother who was a big Who fan. We’d watched their documentary “The Kids Are Alright” together many times and he had the soundtrack album. When I was home visiting, he would crank up the stereo and wake me up mornings with lead singer Roger Daltrey’s deep throated scream in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
Queuing for tickets was a tradition on the ISU campus at that time, and could be rather festive, akin to tailgating for football. The lines could get quite long. One time when I was in line for tickets for a show by The Moody Blues, one of my hippie-holdover acquaintances said he showed up to “view the oddity.”
The Who’s 1980 appearance was the first and only time, however, I camped out days in advance. It seemed like The Holy Grail of concerts at the time. I recently found an April 24, 1980 article in The Daily Iowan in Iowa City — way over in Hawkeye land — in which promoters hyped it as “the concert of the decade.”
The Who’s performance was great — though my ears were ringing for three days afterward from the opening act, Blackfoot. But it was not “the concert of the decade,” which was still young. Nor was it the only opportunity to see the band. Far from it.
The Who played at the UNI-Dome in Cedar Falls just a couple of years later. It was part of a “farewell tour” sponsored by Schlitz beer that seemed to never end — kind of like one of those going-out-of business sales by a warehouse appliance dealer.
So, yeah, I can plead guilty to ticket-campout silliness. Been there, done that.
But my campout days are long, long over. My ticket-hunting today is limited to a computer screen.
I won’t get fooled again.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription.
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My favorite band of all time. I was at that Ames concert. Saw them twice more, once in St. Paul and once in Des Moines.
Curious...what was that Ames ticket stub selling for? And I would argue Springsteen @ Hilton was the concert of the 80s decade!