November 22, 1971

Memorial Coliseum

By David Moore

The Who was my first concert to be in charge of staging for the UPC Entertainment Committee. The band’s (tour staff) sent us electrical schematics for power requirements and a rough layout for the stage, which UA carpenters were to construct on the floor of the coliseum. It was to be either 6 or 8 feet tall and, I want to say, 100x60 feet wide and deep. The show was scheduled for a Monday. I had turned in the requirements and, while the carpenters built the frame for the stage the weekend before the show, I went home to Birmingham. Sunday night, Doug Casmus accompanied me to Memorial Coliseum for a to check on the progress. The stage floor had not yet been laid. As I stood in a portal looking down at the big frame of 2x4s something else looked off kilter. Then it hit me: the stage was oriented to 60x100. I could see for miles and miles, and I saw disaster on the way. How could we turn that big sucker 90 degrees? It was Casmus to the rescue! While I stayed at the Coliseum to ensure the stage frame did not levitate and turn itself, he dashed off to the campus FM station, got on air and put out an SOS (“Save Our Stage”) call for volunteers to help rescue The Who concert set for the next night. Within 20 minutes, it seems, we had maybe 75 people there. We all situated ourselves inside that jungle-gym of 2x4s, then, on the count of three, lifted the entire frame off the floor and, shuffling our feet, rotated it 90 degrees. The next night, I took wild pleasure – as did thousands of others – when Roger Daltrey, from the edge of the stage, let out his iconic scream on "Won't Get Fooled Again" and sent his microphone swinging on its cord in a huge arc out over the heads of the crowd. It was a "windmill" even Pete Townsend, the master of monster chords, could admire. The incident solidified a happy suspicion I'd previously harbored that being involved with the UPC would somehow be magical.