The Day Rock ’n’ Roll Angel Was Born

Day on the Green, my birthday, and the day I found my tribe

Today, music festivals are worlds unto themselves.

Coachella. Lollapalooza. Bonnaroo. Outside Lands. Glastonbury. Download. Aftershock.

They are massive cultural events. People travel across countries to attend them. Outfits are planned. Vacations are built around them. Social media starts buzzing before the gates even open, and within minutes of an artist taking the stage, somebody halfway around the world can be watching clips from the performance.

And they're fabulous.

I love a festival.

But I remember when the world was connected differently.

We weren't technologically primitive. At least we certainly didn't think we were. We had television, radio, magazines, newspapers, record stores and eventually MTV.

But compared with the world we inhabit today?

We lived on islands.

Music could still be deeply regional. What was happening in New York wasn't necessarily what was happening in San Francisco. What was enormous in one city could take time to reach another. Scenes developed locally. Radio stations mattered. Record stores mattered. The clubs mattered.

And the people standing beside you mattered.

If you grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area during my time, there was one name that could make an entire summer suddenly seem more interesting.

Day on the Green.

Before Festivals Followed Us Home

Day on the Green was the creation of legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, and the first was held at the Oakland Coliseum in 1973. Graham had already become a giant in Bay Area music through places like the Fillmore and Winterland, and Day on the Green took things to another scale: huge outdoor, one-day concerts that could put more than 50,000 people into Oakland Stadium.

And when I say the acts were big, I mean BIG.

Over the years, Day on the Green hosted the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Parliament-Funkadelic, U2, Bob Dylan, the Police, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Metallica and Journey, among many others. The original series began in 1973 and continued into the early 1990s, ending shortly after Graham's death in 1991.

Bill Graham was a monster.

I mean that with enormous respect.

The man understood the event.

You weren't simply going somewhere to hear a band play its songs.

You were going somewhere.

That distinction matters.

Because there was no livestream waiting for you.

There weren't going to be 4,000 vertical videos on your phone tomorrow morning.

Nobody was going to upload the entire experience before you'd gotten home.

If you wanted to experience Day on the Green...

you had to be on the green.

And one year, for my birthday, my mother gave me the chance to do exactly that.

My Birthday Present

I'm not going to tell you the year.

Mind your business.

😂

I will tell you the date.

July 30.

It wasn't only my birthday present. It was also a graduation present.

And the lineup was ridiculous.

Night Ranger. Bryan Adams. Eddie Money. Triumph. Journey.

The historical record confirms those five on the bill, with Gary Moore originally advertised before Night Ranger replaced him.

But I wasn't walking into the Coliseum thinking about historical records.

I was thinking:

OH. MY. GOD.

This was my first enormous music event as a young adult.

And, as was often the case for me back then, I went alone.

Nobody wanted to go.

We'd just graduated. Everybody had plans. Everybody was doing their own thing.

Fine.

I had a ticket.

I had some money.

I had rock and roll.

I was going.

Looking back now, it almost feels like some strange debutante ball.

Other young women may have had beautiful dresses and formal introductions into society.

Apparently mine involved blue jeans, boots and tens of thousands of rock fans at the Oakland Coliseum.

Honestly?

That tracks.

Welcome to Graduate School

Until then, my rock-and-roll education had been pieced together in fragments.

The radio.

Records.

Cassette tapes.

Album covers.

The occasional concert.

The rockers at school.

My various little excursions across the border into Rockerland.

I was learning.

Day on the Green was different.

This was graduate school.

There were people everywhere.

Music.

Food.

Merchandise.

Noise.

Shirts.

Denim.

Long hair.

People hanging out.

People wandering.

People doing certain recreational things that Young Angel was far too shy to investigate. 😂

My memories of all the Days on the Green and Bay Area shows I eventually attended have inevitably mingled around the edges. I remember musicians connected with Santana appearing during one of those sprawling days, for example, though they weren't part of the advertised bill for this particular show.

But some memories haven't blurred at all.

And one of them involves a T-shirt.

I Put on the Uniform

I had brought enough money to buy myself a concert shirt.

And I did.

A Day on the Green shirt featuring Journey.

I took that shirt into the restroom.

Changed.

Blue jeans.

Boots.

Day on the Green shirt.

Then I walked back outside.

That sounds like such a tiny thing now.

It wasn't.

Because I had spent years looking at the rockers.

Remember them?

Those mysterious people across the schoolyard?

Long hair. Torn shirts. Band logos. Smoking lot.

Those people who seemed to know this entire world that I was only beginning to understand.

I'd spent years walking along their border.

Sometimes stepping over it.

Usually retreating.

But that day there wasn't a border.

I looked around the Coliseum and realized:

I was one of them.

I was a rocker.

And apparently, I had dressed appropriately for the occasion. 🤘

Then Something Even Stranger Happened

I made friends.

That may not sound extraordinary.

For me, it was.

I wasn't somebody who moved easily through groups of people. I didn't have armies of friends growing up. Walking into an enormous event alone was exciting, but it was also very much in keeping with how I experienced a lot of my young life.

Then I ran into five people.

Three women.

Two men.

They were there together.

And somehow...

they adopted me.

That was it.

Come on.

Hang out with us.

And suddenly I had a tribe.

We spent the rest of the day together.

Some of them occasionally disappeared to engage in activities I politely declined to investigate.

Again:

Rock concert.

Use your imagination. 😂

But mostly we did what people at concerts do.

We listened.

We wandered.

We laughed.

We talked.

We discovered music.

And for the first time, I wasn't standing at the edge of Rockerland looking in.

I was walking around inside it with friends.

Discovering Bands in the Wild

One of the great things about those giant concert days was encountering a band you barely knew and suddenly becoming a fan.

That's how Night Ranger landed for me.

They were still relatively new, and I remember being absolutely struck by their energy.

Who ARE these guys?

They could play.

They could sing.

And they knew how to connect with a crowd.

I walked into Day on the Green knowing very little about Night Ranger.

I walked out wanting more.

Later came songs that became part of the soundtrack, including “Sister Christian” and that wonderfully unapologetic declaration:

“(You Can Still) Rock in America.”

Yes.

Yes, apparently we could.

Eddie Money

Then there are performers whose appearances mean something different when you look backward.

Eddie Money was there.

At the time, he was another artist I was excited to see.

Today, that memory has changed.

Eddie Money died in 2019.

And now I get to say:

I saw Eddie Money.

I was there.

That's one of the strange gifts of getting older as a music fan.

You eventually realize you're carrying performances that can never happen again.

There are voices you heard live that now exist only in recordings.

There are musicians you watched walk onto a stage who are no longer here.

And suddenly a fun afternoon from your youth becomes something else.

You were there.

Triumph

Oh, Triumph.

That Canadian powerhouse had been part of my school-years rock landscape, and seeing them live was something else entirely.

I remember watching the guitar playing and being mesmerized.

There's more to say about Triumph.

A LOT more.

So I'm putting them on the shelf for now.

They'll get their turn.

That's becoming something of a warning around here. 😂

Bryan Adams

Bryan Adams is another performer I remember vividly from that day.

He was young.

He was hungry.

And he connected.

That's what I remember most.

It didn't feel like some distant rock star had arrived to perform at a stadium full of people.

It felt like he was talking to us.

There's a difference.

I don't believe I ever saw Bryan Adams live again.

But I remember that performance.

Another little piece of the day I can still reach out and touch.

Some Memories Stay

That's the strange thing about getting older.

Some memories of our youth disappear almost completely.

You know something happened because intellectually you know it happened, but the details are gone.

Then there are others.

You close your eyes...

and you're there.

You can almost reach out and touch them.

Day on the Green is one of those memories for me.

I remember the people.

I remember my shirt.

I remember discovering bands.

I remember the enormous feeling of the place.

And I remember the day gradually moving toward the reason an awful lot of people had come.

Because eventually everything pointed toward one stage.

And one band.

A little San Francisco group.

Perhaps you've heard of them.

Journey.

Journey Was Coming Home

We're going to talk about Journey separately.

Oh yes.

We are going to talk about Journey.

Because they deserve their own Rock ’n’ Roll Angel.

For now, you only need to know what happened as we got closer to their performance.

My five new friends and I moved toward the main stage.

Closer.

And closer.

And closer.

Until we were right there.

I could practically touch it.

And when I close my eyes today, I can still remember looking up.

Steve Perry was right there.

That voice.

That band.

That crowd.

Journey.

Home in the Bay Area.

But there's another part of that memory that means even more to me now.

“I'll Hold Your Jacket.”

I had brought a jacket.

Of course I had.

I'd never been to anything like this before.

Apparently I thought I needed to be prepared for whatever meteorological catastrophe might strike Oakland during a summer rock festival.

So I'd carried the damn thing around all day. 😂

When Journey was about to perform, one of the women I'd met that morning looked at me.

She knew how excited I was.

She knew I wanted to jump.

Scream.

Throw my arms into the air.

Reach toward Steve Perry along with everybody else.

And I had this stupid jacket.

So she took it.

She held my jacket for me.

I don't remember exactly what she said.

Maybe it was nothing more than:

“I've got it.”

But I remember the gesture.

All these years later...

I remember that.

Because she wanted me to be free.

The People Were Part of the Music

That's what I think gets lost when we try to explain these experiences strictly through lineups and set lists.

The bands mattered.

Of course they mattered.

But the people became part of the music.

Those five people weren't strangers anymore by the end of that day.

We became friends afterward.

Life eventually did what life does.

We lost touch.

Some of them aren't here anymore.

They embraced the rock-and-roll life pretty hard, and not everyone made it through.

Others simply disappeared into their own lives, as people sometimes do.

I don't use their names because these are my memories, but their names and lives belong to them.

Still, I remember them.

And sometimes I wonder whether somewhere out there, one of them remembers the girl they picked up wandering around Day on the Green by herself.

I hope so.

Because I remember them.

Especially the girl who held my jacket.

You Can't Recreate a Moment in Time

Day on the Green continued for years.

Bill Graham Presents staged the series from 1973 into the early 1990s, bringing an astonishing parade of rock history through Oakland. Graham died in 1991, and the original series continued only briefly afterward.

Years later, people tried to bring the idea back.

I remember hearing about it.

There was a planned revival in 2015 that was postponed, followed by a 2016 Day on the Green event in Hayward built around tribute acts honoring Journey, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner and Santana.

I understood why people wanted it back.

Of course we wanted it back.

But I've come to believe you can resurrect a name much more easily than you can resurrect a moment.

The world had changed.

We had changed.

And that's okay.

I Still Love a Festival

This isn't one of those stories where the Gen Xer tells everybody that everything was better before the Internet.

Please.

I love what music festivals have become.

I've gone to modern festivals.

I've had a blast.

I've been to something like six Ozzfests.

I got to see Ozzy Osbourne.

And...

I got to see Black Sabbath. 🤘

We're not talking about that today because Ozzy deserves his own article, and I have THOUGHTS.

Trust me.

We'll get there.

But I have tremendous memories from those festivals.

Today's festivals can be spectacular.

They're bigger in different ways. They're connected globally. They're technologically extraordinary. And they create their own communities and their own memories for the generations experiencing them now.

I don't need Day on the Green to have been better.

It was simply...

mine.

And more importantly:

It was my first.

The Day Rock ’n’ Roll Angel Was Born

I've been to a lot of concerts since.

I've seen legends.

I've discovered bands.

I've watched musicians become stars.

I've watched some grow old.

I've watched some leave us.

And I've collected more musical memories than the young woman walking into the Oakland Coliseum that morning could possibly have imagined.

But there can only be one first.

One day when the girl who had spent years listening to records and radios, studying album covers, asking questions and wandering nervously along the borders of Rockerland finally walked through the gates.

It was July 30.

My birthday.

My graduation present.

Day on the Green.

I walked in alone.

I bought the shirt.

I went into the bathroom and put it on.

Five strangers became my tribe.

Night Ranger became a discovery.

Eddie Money became a memory I would one day treasure differently.

Triumph blew me away.

Bryan Adams made an enormous stadium somehow feel personal.

And eventually I stood at the foot of a stage looking up at Steve Perry while somebody I'd met only hours earlier held my jacket so I could throw both hands into the air.

I didn't know what that day would become when I walked through those gates.

I certainly wasn't standing there thinking about the woman I'd become decades later or the stories she'd eventually write.

I just knew I'd found something.

Music.

People.

Belonging.

My tribe.

Somewhere between putting on that T-shirt and throwing my hands into the air for Journey, the girl who had spent years peeking across the border finally stopped wondering whether she belonged in Rockerland.

She did.

And looking back now, I know exactly what happened that day.

Rock ’n’ Roll Angel was born.

🤘❤️

Thank you for taking another trip with me through Rock ’n’ Roll Angel, where we're remembering the music, the people, the strange little moments and the soundtrack of growing up Gen X.

And if you were ever lucky enough to experience Day on the Green, I want to hear your story.

What show did you see?

Who was on that stage?

And what memory can you still close your eyes and almost reach out and touch?

🌐 DrAYHeath.com 📸 Instagram: @ayheath ▶️ YouTube: @TheMysticScribe 📱 TikTok & X: @drayheath

Until next time...

Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel) 🤘