BOUDER COLORADO 1971
“Six dollars is a lot of money to pay to see anyone,” reads the first line of an article announcing the upcoming show at University of Colorado’s Mackey Auditorium. “Even Neil Young.”
Whether that $6 figure is accurate—and more reliable contemporary sources disagree, putting the figure at an only slightly less extortionate rate of $4, or $4.25, or $4.75, or some other multiplier of the also-upcoming Stephen Stills price: $1.50—was beside the point. Ticket or not, it proved difficult to get in to see Neil that Wednesday night. You had to fight your way through the police line.
“Inside the concert hall listeners heard the music—accompanied by the sound of the (fire) hoses and tinkling of glass—some of it in tune, some of it not.”
Maybe it was the high ticket prices, or the hundreds of counterfeit tickets circulating on the campus, or just a general sense that security would be as lax as it had been the previous night: hundreds gathered outside the at-capacity auditorium bound and determined to get inside for an evening of “soft and gentle music.”
An unreported number of campus police—”almost the entire force”—met them at the doors, bound and determined to keep them out, armed with fire hoses and presumably years of the anti-riot training that had just begun taking center stage in the history of American policing over the previous decade.
I’d like to say hello to all you folks outside tonight—they have speakers outside so anyone out there can hear me. Sort of like talking over the phone.
A public address system had been installed outside the venue specifically to discourage the less-contentious gatecrashing of the previous evening: speakers supplied the incongruous soundtrack, acoustic renditions of songs destined for the following year’s Harvest release spilling out over billy clubs and bricks and broken glass. A college crowd acting out a nostalgic parody of the put-down rebellions of yesteryear, a rehearsal for cinematic retellings of 1968, an eruption that began to feel imaginary even as it happened, murmurs through the audience in their seats, “what was that?”
Two policemen were reported injured; any injuries among the crowd were not.
A lot of people know, you know, they like to know what I’m thinking up here. What’s happening out there? I can hear something happening but I don’t know what it is. I’m just sitting here.