They were the biggest names in popular music: The Beach Boys, The Supremes, Jimmy Hendrix. And from the mid-1950s into the 1970s you could go see them play at venues such as the Portland Expo, at Lewiston City Hall, the Palace in Old Orchard Beach and at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, where Aerosmith performed in Sept. 1973.
A new book by Ford Reiche of Freeport, "A Long, Long Time Ago: Major Rock and Roll Concerts in Southern Maine, 1955-1977," chronicles the era as recalled by those who were close to the concert scene at the time.
Reiche spoke with Morning Edition host Irwin Gratz about the book, the proceeds from which will go to the Maine Historical Society.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Reiche: I started tracking down some of the folks who were personally active back in that period in Portland, the folks who ran Erebus and folks who were promoting concerts. Local high school bands that were opening acts. And I tied into all these 70- to 80-year-olds, who all know each other, and they know who's still around Portland and I got into their personal collections.
Gratz: Who are we talking about? What kinds of artists were here in the '60s and '70s?
It's an impressive list. Blood, Sweat and Tears; Peter, Paul and Mary; Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, The Four Seasons, Herman's Hermits. You look at the list — and the book is arranged year by year — you look at the list and you go, 'Wow, that's really, I had no idea.' And I lived here, and I had no idea.
Do you have any idea why the city was so attractive to these artists?
It wasn't just the city. It turned out to be southern Maine. The reason they came here, I finally figured out, was that southern Maine had the ability to put 4,000 or 5,000 people under one roof for an event. And that's really all you cared about if you're Gary Lewis & the Playboys, or James Taylor later on, Dave Clark Five. If you could put that many people in one place, they'd play here.
Given the sentiments sometimes that surrounded rock 'n' roll artists and acts, was there any pushback in Maine?
There was not enough pushback to stop things, but loads of resistance. No racial overtones at all. Two sets of concerts that stand out where there was a big community pushback was in 1969 and 1970. The folks who had set up Erebus, which some folks who were here back then, we know that was like the first place that brought waterbeds and bell bottoms and drug paraphernalia. It was on Center Street in Portland. Those folks had basically a year and a half of free concerts outdoors where they were bringing 5,000 people to the Oaks and particularly the Eastern Prom. City Hall did not like that at all. They shut that down a couple times. And then in Lewiston, there were some very large concerts later on, in the early '70s, where they characterized it as riots, and that basically shut down the big concerts in Lewiston. But, coincidentally, right before the Civic Center opened.
Talk about, too, the time period. You write from 1955 to 1977 —1955, of course, is kind of the birth of rock 'n' roll. You get Bill Haley & His Comets doing "Rock Around the Clock."
They played on a Sunday in 1955, late summer, on The Ed Sullivan Show. Just to show you how significant Maine was, that following Thursday, they were at Old Orchard Beach. So that was an easy beginning point. My cutoff point of 1977 just arrived when I realized in the work I was doing I was mentally attached to the pre-'77. But more than anything else, it's when the Civic Center opened. The Civic Center could see almost 10,000 people and it was, in terms of national productions, they viewed it as a rock palace. They called it a rock palace at the time because there were no other venues other than Boston Garden in New England that were that large. So the music was changing in '77. The Civic Center basically shut down effect effectively all the other venues in southern Maine.