Loverboy with Joan Jett and The Blackhearts

Bands: Loverboy with Joan Jett and The Blackhearts

Venue: The Cow Palace, San Francisco, CA

Date: September 1983

This Loverboy/Joan Jett show back in 1983 was personally historically significant to me for a number of different reasons. I believe the title of Loverboy’s hit song, “Turn Me Loose”, adequately describes the sense of freedom I was feeling that night at the Cow Palace for this concert marked the first show I attended sans chaperones. Up until this point in my concert-attending history, I was deemed too young to see a band perform live without the maternal and/or paternal parental unit in tow. But this time was different, I was in high school now. Granted, my friend Matt Berry and I were dropped off to and picked up from the Cow Palace that night by the mom and dad taxi service but at least the time spent in between the arriving and departing was ours alone.

A second reason why this show carries the weight of personal and historical significance for me is because this show marked the first time that I was more excited to see the opening act as opposed to the headliner. Sure, Loverboy was a bigger band at the time (they had just released their third record and had a string of relatively big hits) but I had already seen them open for Journey a year ago. I was way more interested in checking out Joan Jett and The Blackhearts instead. At the time, she only had two records out but her song “I Love Rock n Roll” was blowing up the airwaves and there is always just that something special about being into a band before they get too big and sell out, man. Plus, Joan Jett was a former member of the female rock band called The Runaways so she had that tidbit of notoriety going for her as well.

The third and final reason as to why this show is memorable to me is because of what happened after the show. Since we were too young to drive ourselves, my mom had dropped us off at the concert and Matt’s mom was going to pick us up and drive us back home. Earlier that afternoon we had arranged with Matt’s mom to meet us a few blocks away from the Cow Palace on Geneva Avenue in order to avoid any potential traffic nightmares of her having to enter an all cars are exiting parking lot. Being the geniuses that we were (and still are), Matt and I decided to avoid the traditional parking lot exit, coincidentally marked exit I might add, and forge another pathway out of there: we tried to hop the six foot tall cyclone fence.

Long story short, Matt made it over the fence and I didn’t. Unfortunately for me, the back of my newly purchased grey and black Joan Jett jersey style t-shirt got snagged on the top of the fence and I was left with my feet dangling a good foot above the ground. After a few minutes of panicking at my affixed to the fence state, we figured out a way to reunite my shoes with the earth and we were on our merry way home. I proudly wore my battle-scarred and ripped concert t-shirt to school the next day and whenever I run into my friend Matt, we always share a laugh about the time I got stuck on the fence after Joan Jett and Loverboy.