Study Hall with the Doors, the Dead & the MC5: Real-Life Rock ’n’ Roll High School Gigs
by Colin Fleming
There are those who are sufficiently hip as to have caught the bug earlier, but most people who fall in love with rock ’n’ roll do so in high school. We are at that age where a little rebellion feels like it goes a long way.
Rock ’n’ roll is often an ideal soundtrack—and a kind of thematic descant—to our emotions, our hopes, our need to make ourselves stand up again after being knocked down, which is a large part of the high school experience for most.
We’re still at that age of curiosity. Sure, we cop an attitude that we know it all, but we’re not listening to the same old music simply because it was what we listened to in high school and college. We’re not done with the former and haven’t gotten to the latter, just as we’ve yet to make ourselves complicit victims of the blinding tendencies of nostalgia. All of our life feels like it’s ahead of us. We needn’t be too serious. We can have some fun. Bond with people over music. The sharing thereof.
Who hasn’t felt like a loser and gone home and cranked the likes of the Beatles’ “I’m a Loser” or “Help!”? Or had dreams that felt out of sorts from other kids’ dreams and subsequently turned to the wonder and imagination of the Smiths’ The Queen is Dead for comfort, companionship and inspiration? Or had another rough day, as if one’s teenage soul had been curb-stomped, and then put the headphones on and cranked up the Who’s Quadrophenia?
In high school, music feels like a power that we need to carry on and that also helps make us who we are. That kid who listens to Metallica is that kid, and the Swiftie is a different kind of kid.
But what about rock ’n’ roll as performance art at high school itself? Linda McCartney, in her pre-Macca days as an excellent photographer, took some casual shots of the 1966 Yardbirds waiting to go stage for a gig at a Connecticut high school. The notion of them being there strikes us as surreal today. Here were Jeff Beck and the boys lounging in that same place where kids gossiped and wolfed down their food, soon to be rocking the gymnasium in which the boys basketball team had recently beat the school’s big rival.
Jeff Beck and Keith Relf of the Yardbirds in Antonioni’s Blow-Up
Everyone knows about college gigs. The high school affair, though—for those who weren’t in attendance—is the real imagination-inducer. Separate—but still linked—worlds came together, one on top of the other, like some super cool palimpsest. What was that Yardbirds show like? These guys were on the radio, and if you had formed a band, chances are high that you played a bunch of their songs, and now they were blazing through “Over Under Sideways Down” and “The Train Kept A-Rollin’” under the basketball net on the makeshift stage that would be gone come Monday morning and Mr. Gordon the PE teacher was back to cracking that whip again.
Amazingly, some of these shows were taped and we’re able to listen back in on those magical occasions now. Additionally, three of the best such tapes are of bands you can scarcely believe were booked to play at a high school.
Let’s start with the Doors at Danbury High School in the Connecticut city of the same name on October 11, 1967. The Doors’ self-titled debut had come out in January and was one of those epochal LPs—a cultural game-changer. Its follow-up, Strange Days, had recently been issued on September 25. Everyone knew “Light My Fire”—how could you not?—the big galvanizing hit from the spring that proved inescapable throughout the summer. This was the first American group that was both crushing it in the charts and resonated as some dark, but enticing, menace, a unit both Stygian and celestial.
If The Doors were playing your high school auditorium, it was no mere sock hop gathering, and the tape—which is easy to find allowing you can work a search engine—is among their top-tier live recordings from the crucial year, along with the Matrix Club recordings. They played straight rhythm and blues (“Money”), psychedelic rhythm and blues (“Back Door Man”) and took the audience deep into their Los Angeles variant on Jean Cocteau-esque dream spaces (“People Are Strange,” “Moonlight Mile”).
You have to wonder how hard Jim Morrison’s shouted—no, make that screamed—admonition to “Wake up!” hit the high school students who were there, so used to hearing those same words from their teachers on drowsy mornings.
The band does a go-for-the-throat version of “Light My Fire”—they sound like ex-high schoolers extracting a form of revenge on the concept of the alma mater in oppositional contrast to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys who instead crooned a homage. But then we travel beyond the pale with the closing “The End,” a song from the netherworld of the psyche with patricide and mother-son incest and the plucking out of one’s own eyeballs.
Listen to “Light My FIre” from the Danbury High School show
Were you an English teacher at Danbury High School that week in October 1967, there never would have been a better time to assign Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. And we get to hear the school principal over the PA. Wild.
Grateful Dead, 1968
The backstory for the next high school tape sounds like something out of a coming-of-age rock film from the SAT milieu—Almost Famous crossed with Freaks and Geeks. A bunch of kids at Campolindo high school in Moraga, Calif., wanted the Grateful Dead to play their spring dance on May 16, 1969. Let’s pause to remember that America has had perhaps no better dance band in its history than the Grateful Dead. You could take the LP of the Duke Ellington orchestra playing a dance hall in Fargo in the winter of 1940 and pit it against a Dead tape from, say, 1969 to 1972, and act out some whale of a contest.
But an actual high school dance? That wasn’t really the Dead’s scene.
Then again, the Dead played all sorts of places that didn’t appear to be their scene, which they then sublated as part of the Dead experience: on the back of a truck on Haight Street in 1968, at a prison in 1971 and for free in the middle of the town square of Auvers, France, for the locals, a fire brigade and children.
Initially, the Dead couldn’t commit to the high school gig because of their schedule, then they had an opening. The kids, of course, who’d tried to do the organizing boasted that they landed the band before they technically had, and you don’t want your stock to fall in the pecking order of high school. Ah, the stress of peer pressure. But if you love the Dead, you’re also apt not to care about such matters.
Anyway, $3,000 was forked over (big cash commitment for the high school committee that could), the Dead showed and you can listen to what they played in the normal Dead space, that being the Internet Archive. Whereas the Doors closed with “The End,” the Dead commenced their compact performance with “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.”
Listen to the Grateful Dead’s performance at Campolindo High School in 1969
Everyone who has ever heard that song knows that said schoolgirl isn’t being greeted with the titular pleasantry for the purpose of cramming in a quick study session before the math quiz, but rather the act that proved the thematic basis of singer Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s “Good Lovin’” enticements and instructions (“Jump on my pony and ride”).
Imagine if they had elected to play “Dark Star” and left it at that? “Thanks, kids, we’ll be seeing you.”
But: Time and place. The Dead always knew what was best for both. [Their vast recordings are available here.]
That takes us to our final gig/tape, and another doozy. You’d think a high school rock ’n’ roll show would feature a poppier act, someone with a few chart hits who didn’t get too wild, a band along the lines of the Beau Brummels. In other words, not, for the love of God, the MC5, who were brought in to light up Westfield High School in Westfield, N.J., on October 3, 1969.
Listen to the entire Westfield set
By then, there wasn’t much mystery about the MC5. They were conceivably the loudest band in the country, the most aggressive. Fittingly, they had a song called “High School” on their slightly mellowed out—compared to their debut, Kick Out the Jams—sophomore album, Back in the USA, which featured a Chuck Berry cover of that very song. Chuck Berry certainly knew his way around a high school if his songs and, alas, some of his life choices, were an indication.
1970’s Back in the USA, the first studio album from the MC5
The MC5 were bang-on tight for their high school gig. “Teenage Lust,” in particular, hits home (fancy that). As the Doors played “The End,” the MC5 follow controversial suit and play “Kick Out the Jams,” which they also saved for last, so that they could yell, “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” to what one presumes was a goodly portion of the student body. You’re either the sort of person who thinks this is brilliant or else juvenile and horrible, but it’s very on-brand rock ’n’ roll, and it couldn’t have happened at a more fitting place.
The MC5’s recordings are available here.
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