Driving to the grocery store, I was listening to Stairway to Heaven on Sirius ’70s. A memory came back to me from high school. If somebody saw me, they’d probably wonder why I was sitting alone in my car laughing and singing along to “And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.”
I went to the Led Zeppelin concert in the Seattle Kingdome on 7/17/1977. I was seventeen. Oh my!
What was I laughing about alone in my car? Not the weird numerology. There was a rumor running throughout our state that the Kingdome’s roof was going to collapse due to Led Zeppelin’s decibels. Looking back decades later, doesn’t that seem ridiculous?
Construction on the the Kingdome, which would become home to the Seahawks, Sounders and Mariners began in 1972. The huge concrete dome opened in 1976. Led Zeppelin was the fourth or fifth concert held there since the opening. It was the loudest at the time.
I remember feeling fear about going to the concert. I might die at the concert. Or see others die.
I didn’t know much about Led Zeppelin until my brother, who is two years older than me, went to the University of Washington. I’d visit him at the dorms. They were blasting Led Zeppelin out the windows. Led Zeppelin was all the rage at that time.
When a friend asked me to go to the concert with him, I couldn’t wait. Then the rumors started that construction on the mega dome was faulty. Contractors had been fired during construction. One crew didn’t know what the other had done before them. There were rumors that construction workers refused to go into the Kingdome because they knew it would collapse.
The Kingdome in Seattle.
Yes, the concert was LOUD. The Kingdome wasn’t a great concert venue because it had a lot of echo. 65,000 people risked their lives to attend the concert. I think we all came out alive.
The Kingdome had issues when ceiling tiles fell onto a seating area:
During the 1990s, the Seahawks’ and Mariners’ respective ownership groups began to question the suitability of the Kingdome as a venue for each team, threatening to relocate unless new, publicly funded stadiums were built. An issue was that neither team saw their shared tenancy as profitable; both teams also questioned the integrity of the stadium’s roof as highlighted by the collapse of ceiling tiles onto the seating area before a scheduled Mariners game in 1994. As a result, public funding packages for new, purpose-built stadiums for the Mariners and Seahawks were respectively approved in 1995 and 1997. — Wikipedia
After remembering the concert and the anticipation of the roof collapsing, I did some research. Here is more that I found on Wikipedia:
The stadium’s construction encountered numerous issues; in January 1973, six support beams for the roof were toppled as one or two of them buckled, bringing down the others in a domino effect. By January 1974, the stadium reached 50 percent completion; only reaching 60 percent completion in July, it was clear that Drake (the first construction company hired — with the lowest bid) would not reach the December deadline at that point. It was also apparent that Drake was ill-prepared to work on a project with such scale, with numerous errors, delays, and short-staffing slowing down construction. Efforts to renegotiate the contract failed, and on November 22, Drake stopped work on the Kingdome. The county fired Drake on December 10, bringing in Kiewit to finish construction on the stadium
Wow. There were construction issues after all. On March 26, 2000, the Kingdome was imploded. (Another weird numerology coinkidink…My son’s birthday is March 26.)
What memories do you have from concerts in your younger days?
What was your favorite concert and venue?
Here’s a Youtube link to my favorite Led Zeppelin song::
