Chapter 37: Bruce and Linda

Hampden-Sydney had a great track record of booking musical acts before they burst onto the national scene. One year, the then little-known John Denver played at homecoming. Shortly after, he became the well-known John Denver.

The previously well-known Chuck Berry who had large catalog of hits in the 50s and early 60s was mounting a comeback when he came to campus. We knew his music – every local band played his “Johnny B. Goode” at the campus frat parties – but the British Invasion and acid rock had passed him by. He was just starting to get some airplay again (with the God awful “My Ding-a-ling”). We got him on the rebound.

Because of the quality of the past concerts, the music nuts on campus began buzzing excitedly when posters for the spring concert started popping up in February. The organizers were on a roll. But I doubt even they realized they had booked the “future of rock and roll.”

The headliner was Grin, a band fronted by Nils Lofgren. Lofgren was in Crazy Horse, a group that had been backing up Neil Young in concert and on his albums. And in our minds, anyone who played with Neil Young, who was making very successful albums of his own and with Crosby, Stills and Nash, was automatically great. Plus, Lofgren had gone to high school in Maryland with one of the Theta Chi brothers. They had been in rival, but friendly high school bands.

In addition to Grin, there would be a warmup act, a guy nobody ever heard of. Whatever. I didn’t care about the warmup act. I was excited to see Grin. I wanted to get myself primed for the concert by listening to their music so I drove into Farmville to buy whatever Grin albums I could find. The only place that sold records in town was the 5 and dime store, Rose’s, where the records often sat in the bins for years. Great if you wanted an out-of-print record at a bargain price, which I often did, but not if you wanted a record that wasn’t in the top 10 when Chubby Checker was doing The Twist. So I drove up to Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia and several good record stores.

I found two of the group’s albums and played them for weeks, cranking up the volume with my windows wide open to prime others on campus for the concert. Winter was over and Lofgren’s music fit the optimistic mood of the beautiful spring weather, even when he sings about losing the slip of paper with the girl’s phone number.

The day of the show, we could hardly control our excitement. Remember, we had to drive 7 miles to get to a town called Farmville. We got excited about the arrival of mail.

We planned to drink and smoke just enough to get a nice buzz on and let the music take us away. We usually never drank wine, but someone made a huge bowl of Sangria and we started early because we wanted to leave the dorm early and get great seats in the gym.

Someone had some new pot that hadn’t been tested by our group before. Usually you knew what kind of high you would get, but every batch had little differences and we would discuss our feelings as if we were wine experts describing the year’s Beaujolais.

You did like to know the effects of the pot if you had to function in some way after having smoked, especially at an anticipated event that cost money that you couldn’t get back. It was another thing if you were just going to sit around a room and listen to albums with 6 other guys while drinking a quart of beer, drive to the truck stop, get a 5-day-old bologna sandwich and another quart of beer and call it a night.

By the time we were ready to head over to the gym, we were buzzing big time. I had the bright idea of wearing my sunglasses so no one could see that my eyes were spinning like a kaleidoscope. But the guys pointed out that by wearing the sunglasses at night, it just might be obvious what I was trying to hide.

We couldn’t wait for Lofgren. We arrived so early, we were seated right in front of t