The Who plans first Cincinnati-area concert since ’79 tragedy

By Danielle Wallace | Fox News


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The British rock band The Who announced Tuesday night that it will stop in the Cincinnati area as part of its upcoming tour, performing there for the first time in 40 years since 11 people were killed in a pre-show stampede outside a concert in the city at the height of their fame.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band will play April 23 at Northern Kentucky University’s BB&T Arena.

On Dec. 3, 1979, 11 people were killed and another two dozen were injured when a crowd of thousands lined up for first-come, first-serve tickets began to stampede outside what was previously named the Riverfront Coliseum. The two sites are on opposite sides of the Ohio River just seven miles away from each other. The deaths paved the way for the crowd safety ordinance.

The band’s announcement came on the 40th anniversary of the tragedy after WCPO-TV in Cincinnati aired a documentary featuring interviews with lead singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend, the remaining original members of the British band that emerged in the 1960s featuring songs of youthful rebellion such as “My Generation” and its “Summertime Blues” cover.

Both have said they’ve been haunted by the tragedy. Townshend recently told The Associated Press he was looking forward to discussing it in Cincinnati.

“Now we can have a conversation about it when we go back,” Townshend said.

“We will meet people and we’ll be there. We’ll be there. That’s what’s important,” he continued. “I’m so glad that we’ve got this opportunity to go back.”

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The band is adding the concert to its “Moving On!” tour 2020 dates.

The Who said it will donate a portion of proceeds from the Cincinnati area concert to a memorial scholarship fund benefiting students in the Cincinnati suburb of Finneytown. Three of the 11 killed, including two 15-year-old girls who were the youngest victims, had attended Finneytown High. Daltrey visited a Finneytown High School memorial site in 2018 and the band has for years supported the scholarship effort there.

The band didn’t know about the tragedy until the concert was ending. Longtime manager Bill Curbishley had made the decision to have the show go on, warning Cincinnati authorities that they wouldn’t be able to control the crowd if the concert was called off.

“Despite everything, I still feel inadequate,” he told WCPO. “I don’t know about the guys, but for me, I left a little bit of my soul in Cincinnati.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

'WKRP in Cincinnati' did an episode on this back in the day.

By DW Dunphy - Ultimate Classic Rock


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The impetus for a still-remarkable moment of television on WKRP in Cincinnati grew from a concert tragedy on Dec. 3, 1979, just before the Who took the stage at Riverfront Coliseum.

The Cincinnati venue had become known for its lax security and safety standards, evidenced by notorious occurrences at previous concerts by Yes and Led Zeppelin, among others. Nonetheless, this concert utilized the ticketing process of unreserved so-called festival seating, meant more for open-air and open-field venues. The tickets all cost the same, and fans' actual seating positions, whether near the stage or otherwise, depended on how fast one could get to the front.

Fans who waited outside mistook the Who's later-than-expected soundcheck for the actual concert and rushed the venue, finding only a few doors actually unlocked. Too many people jamming into too small a space meant certain trouble. Eleven people were trampled to death in the ensuing melee.

Neither the details of this horrible incident – nor the history of sitcoms itself – indicated that it would make good TV comedy fodder.

After all, network situation comedies aren't typically known for tackling controversial current events. There are "very special episodes" that will hit upon a broad topic, but when it comes to focusing on a difficult moment ripped from the headlines, the format understandably often can't handle the balance of comedy and the shock of the real.

But WKRP broke from that pattern a few months after the Riverfront tragedy, when an episode titled "In Concert" – recently reissued as part of a box set featuring the complete series – addressed the deadly stampede head on.

Set in a rock-oriented radio station full of misfit characters, WKRP in Cincinnati regularly featured the hit music of the day as a part of its scripts. That, coupled with the show's (fictional) station being set in the same city as this particular real-life tragedy, gave the sitcom an opening to deal with something more thought provoking than the usual antics of disc jockeys Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) and newscaster Les Nessman (Richard Sanders).

Still, producer Hugh Wilson was initially against the idea, scripted by stalwart writer Steven Kampmann. The vice president of CBS' Cincinnati affiliate WCPO, Robert Gordon, believed the effort to be in poor taste, capitalizing on a horrific event, and he threatened to preempt the airing with alternate programming. Only after a preview of the episode – which focused not on sensationalizing the Who concert but in exposing the fact that few U.S. cities had yet to address the issue of unreserved ticketing – did Gordon change his mind.

"In Concert" aired on Feb. 11, 1980, as the 19th episode in the the second season of WKRP. By then, the Cincinnati municipal council had banned festival seating, heeding calls for such a ban that had been made as early as 1976.

The fallout for the Who had become clear by then, as well. The group was already under tremendous pressure, having just lost longtime drummer Keith Moon to an overdose of Heminevrin, a drug for alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle were attempting to carry on with the less-dynamic Kenney Jones in the drummer's chair – a controversial experiment, then and now.

Musical concerns, however, were put aside after the Cincinnati show – which had gone on, as planned, with the band kept in the dark about the deaths until after the show. The fear was that if the concert was canceled, the audience reaction might have made things even worse. Townshend remained visibly shaken through the Who's subsequent shows. "There's no words to say what I feel," Daltrey told Cincinnati rock station WEBN. "I'm a parent, as well. I've got a boy of 15, and two little girls. All I can say is: I'm sorry for what's happened."

The next night's show in Buffalo was dedicated to those who died. Safety measures that once might have been considered unnecessary were now implemented.

The stampede was further memorialized in the film adaptation of Pink Floyd's The Wall, when concertgoers are crushed trying to enter a Nazi-esque youth rally that features the songs "In the Flesh," "Run Like Hell" and "Waiting for the Worms."

And yet, festival seating – despite an ongoing ban in Cincinnati – remains a legal, if far less common, practice across the country. Capitalism, not lawmakers or even television programming, ultimately made concert-going safer, in a roundabout way. With venues committed to assigned-seating more than ever, the business-culture of high pricing for better floor positions has run rampant. Stage-side seating for anything less than $100 per seat is rare, if not entirely unthinkable now.

While the advent of cable and subscription networks has helped the situation comedy format expand and mature, on network television it still primarily exists in a fantasy land – filled with huge apartments the characters couldn't possibly afford based on the jobs they're supposed to have, or in a mythical New York City somehow filled with freely available street parking. Some would argue that is the way it should be for such escapist fare.

Critics of the medium, and specifically of this episode of WKRP, tend to echo the arguments that nearly shut down this memorable television moment in its infancy. Such dark inspiration, no matter how pertinent, can kill the spirit of comedy. The story risks becoming wooden, preachy and – probably the worst thing that could be said of any light entertainment – not funny.

Still, if the "In Concert" episode stands for nothing else, it at least has the honor of saying this: 35 years ago when things got real, right in the backyard of its fictional setting, WKRP in Cincinnati did not flinch.


The Full episode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSeWECDb3YM