Because it's 5/15, duh...

or, more old shit.....

The Who 1975
This was a good show. The band was still intact with Moon on drums, Townshend's guitar playing was better (that had good & bad aspects) & Entwistle & Daltrey were solid. They were touring The Who by Numbers which was full of songs about weakness, self doubt & aging. criminy, they were only about 30. oh, wait, that was old back then.
Townshend had abandoned his trademark SGs & had a seemingly endless supply of gold Les Pauls with big numbers on them. Guitar smashing had become a special event.

photo by Mike Pinson
The opening act was a band called Law who were, essentially, a bar band (& not in a good way). Then Toots & the Maytals took the stage. ok, this was 1975. The American Who audience was and still is a pretty conservative lot. Why in hell a reggae act was put on the bill is a complete mystery. A few years later it would have made a lot more sense. I remember them doing a version of John Denver's Country Roads. They were not received well.

Cliff Radel's review

The Who, Richfield Coliseum 1979
This was the closest I ever came to Phish, Grateful Dead type fanaticism. The Who twice in one week. I drove the Grey Ghost up to Richfield in the rain. Prior to the trip, I did not realize there was a hole in the floor over by the brake pedal. ugh - wet gym shoe in northern Ohio in December.... We got a motel room. I forget who all went. Dan was there. After what had happened at the Cincinnati Who concert a couple days before, I told my mates not to tell the motel folks that we were going to the concert. As we checked in, the old lady at the desk sized us up & told us to have fun at the concert & to stay safe.
Daltrey later stated that the night after the Cincinnati stop, they played a good show in Indy(?). He said the tragedy of the event really sunk in the next day & their show in Richfield was kinda lame. He was right. It was good & professional but just not very inspired.

The Who, Riverfront Coliseum 1979
This is hard to write because thinking about it always makes me mad.
Quadrophenia had hit the theaters. the Who had managed to maintain the loyalty of the old rockers and credibility with the new wave punk crowd. This was a really rally good concert.
Festival seating basically meant no seating. It cut costs & let the promoter make a little extra cash. It was ok. People would go to the concert venue early to get through the doors as soon as they opened & get the bestest seat in the house. Of course the bestest seats were already taken by friends of the management, promoters & radio station folks. Invariably, however there was always a crush just before the doors opened. I heard stories of people gliding through doors as they were swept off their feet and carried in by the force of people in front & behind them. This never happened to me because I was too tall at 6'2" but it happened to people as short as 6'.
Anyway, my friends & I went in several cars. Some folks had no tickets. I went with Al in his van with no heat. On the way down we listened to a tape of Who songs. When we parked we did a few shots & listened to The Who's cover of the Rolling Stones, "The Last Time". ooooohh, dramatic foreshadowing...
Police were stationed at the entries to the plaza & checked folks for their tickets. It was cold & windy up on the plaza. Folks were sitting around shivering & doing shots & getting high. We walked around & finally took our place in the line/cluster.
As the sun set, more and more people showed up. People started getting excited & the crowd started to compact near the doors. This is where it got weird. After awhile a real crush was going on. A crush like what one would normally get right before the doors opened - only we were still pretty far off from when the doors were supposed to open. As we looked at the time and thought about the crush getting worse, Al & I bailed. It wasn't easy going the opposite direction of everybody else but we eventually got out of the crush. We walked round a bit and marveled at all the doors available & how only a few were actually used. It was like the architect got it but the people in charge were operating as cheap as possible. Kinda kept with the strategy of not offering chairs.....
The doors opened, we got up towards the back of the cluster of people going in & were immediately met with a ton more people behind us and we found ourselves in another mad crush. People call it a stampede but we were shuffling in little baby steps going very slowly.
Once in the lobby we had to get thru a few turnstile that further bottlenecked the whole operation. Again, I marveled at all the turnstiles & how only a few were open. At one point a cop on the other side of the turnstiles volunteered to open another turnstile & take tickets. The manager type usher dude told him everything was fine and his help was not needed. I saw a kid lying on a table.
There was this short very pregnant girl in front of us. She had made a fake ticket with colored pencils. She asked us if we would hand the ticket taker her ticket with ours so he might not notice her lame-ass forgery. We declined. She handed the guy her ticket at the turnstile. A huge solid block of humanity was bearing down behind us. The usher examined her ticket for a minute and informed her it was not real. He told her to turn around and leave. Al shoved her through the turnstile and told her to run. He tore his ticket in half & shoved a half into the guy's chest. I followed in suit.
We entered the arena & as we headed down to the floor I heard someone say, "Man, there's, like, people dying to get in here, man"
Entering the floor, we encountered a couple guys talking to an usher. One of the guys was blue. They were asking the usher for help. No help was afforded. Al told the guy to take his friend to the bathroom and induce vomiting. Seemed reasonable to me.
The show was great. Apparently the band wasn't notified that 11 people had died trying to get in. I don't recall seeing anything out of the ordinary outside. Al & I got in the van & since our ears were shot we played no music nor listened to the radio. When I got home, there was a LARGE message by the phone saying to call SistahT IMMEDIATELY. The phone rang & scared the shit out of me. SistahT told me what had happened. I remembered the guy lying on the table. I told her the crush getting in had been worse than normal. My parents and sisters told me they were not worried about me. They assumed I had the common sense to recognize and get out of a bad scene. If I had been with someone besides Al, I dunno.
The next day I started hearing the news. On TV they played clips of the concert. Figures people have to die to get some concert footage on the tube.
CityKin has scans of the Fishwrap's coverage, here and here.
I used to feel sorry for the parents of the kids who died that night. I knew they missed their kids. When I got older I realised they were missing much more - the families & grandchildren they might have had.
Why did this happen? The building was designed right. Some motherfucker just wanted to save a little money. I don't know who was responsible, the building manager was busted for stealing water a few years later. typical, cheap, bullshit
People blamed drugs, booze, youth & RocknRoll but the next summer 7 people died trying to see the pope in Brazil.
There's a double disk bootleg of the concert called "Stampede". It is very poor quality. The kids recording it were oblivious to what had happened in the entryway. They talk a lot & get high (that part is kind of funny). They are excited and jiggle the hell out of the tape recorder, though.
The Fishwrap has a bunch of posts here from people remembering the show.

Baby, Don't Do It
The Who, Dayton Hara Arena 1971
The ad was in the Springfield News Sun. We all saw it. We hightailed it to the gift wrap department at Wren's Department Store to buy tickets from the little old bag (few years earlier it would have been my grandmother) working there. Tickets were $6.50. My sister told me I was getting ripped off. No rock concert should cost more than $4.00 !
The seats were about a third of the way back up on the left side. Back then different outlets got real tickets and different locations had better or worse seats. Later we would drive to Dayton and get tickets at Rikes or Hara for better seats, but then Ticketron/Master came along and added a little democracy to the process.
I digress.....
I forget how we got there. I think Pete drove that weird gold colored Oldsmobile ?
Walking across the parking lot (The Hara parking lot parties were pretty nuts) we spotted columns of police in riot gear. Ferreal, helmets, batons, clear plastic shields. Absolutely nothing happened, but it was kinda neat to see. Doubt the Dayton PD had much call to ever put the stuff on.
The Who were touring Who's Next. All those iconic songs like Baba O'Reilly, Behind Blue Eyes and, of course, Won't Get Fooled Again were all brand new at the time and absolutely blowing our teenaged minds.
During this tour, Townshend was asked when was the last time he had smashed a guitar. He relied, "Last night". He explained he had a contract with Gibson that stipulated free SGs as long as he smashed them. Kalamazoo sell out.....
From the first song, Love Ain't for Keeping, with it's first three chords thundering through the hockey arena through to the end, it was just glorious rock and roll. After Won't get Fooled Again, somebody in the audience called out, "Play some rock and roll !" Townshend asked, "Play some rock and roll ? What do you think THAT was ? Mantovani ?"
By the end of the show my friends & I were hoarse from singing along at the top of our lungs (nobody could hear, so what the heck ?) and our legs aching as we had Keith Mooned our legs with our fists the whole time.
We were happy boys.

Some folks from Antioch's WYSO recorded the concert and I believe that is where the bootleg recording of the show came from. It was released as a single and double vinyl disk edition. Not sure what all is on the double album, this is the setlist:

• Love Ain't for Keepin'
• Pure and Easy
• My Wife
• I Can't Explain
• Substitute
• Bargain
• Behind Blue Eyes
• Won't Get Fooled Again
• Don't Know Myself
• Baby Don't You Do It
• Pinball Wizard
• See Me, Feel Me
• My Generation
• Magic Bus
• Naked Eye

The Who 1980
I drove to this show in Lexington with Tom, Mark, Dan & Lynn. Mark and I rode bicycles back along Route 68. Tom drove my car back & dealt quite admirably with my muffler falling off.
We spent the night with one of Mark & Lynn's old neighbors and her husband who was working on his degree in geology. He was a rather serious young man but the night of the show he got a ticket and cut loose. Really loose. Like bachelor party loose. Before Mark & I left, he gave us a rundown on what we would be riding over - a crash course on the geology of the NKY & SWO Ohio River Valley. It was pretty fascinating. We promptly rode 100 miles in 100° heat smack dab into the middle of a dry county. Things improved when we got into Ohio. ah, breakfast beers in Xenia listening to King of the Road in some crappy little bar on the south end....
The concert was good. Kenny Jones was a good fit & I thought a lot more into doing his own thing at that point. I guess Daltrey disagreed. I had seen the Who several times and I really didn't care to see them - I liked their music & their jamming - I wanted to hear them. Everyone on the floor was standing on their seats staring at the band like zombies. I had gotten into the "punk way" and chose to dance like a madman. Didn't work standing on a folding chair. So I dismounted the chair and stood on the relatively empty floor. Now, for years security got unhinged with people standing on their chairs but they had fairly given up trying to stop people. What was weird at this show was the security guy who came up to me and grabbed me by my shoulders and shouted, "What's wrong with you ? Stand still on your chair like everybody else !".
Kentucky.....

The Who 1982 in Louisville
I hadn't been in Cincinnati a year yet when this show happened. It was one of the first times I realized how weird the locals are. They all had this attitude of, "I will see the band if they come here to play. If they won't play here, fuck 'em". Coming from a smaller town that nobody came to, it was a pretty weird attitude to me.
Anyway, I got my girlfriend to borrow her dad's car. The janitor at her church had never been to a "rock show", so the 3 of us piled into the big brown LTD station wagon & headed south to Louisville.
The Who rocked - good show as usual.
Girlfriend drove back & I crashed in the back as I had been up since about 5 AM. They woke me up to change tires when she had a blowout. I changed it in a dreamlike trance - very strange.