FLAGGING DOWN THE DOUBLE Es: Janis Joplin Gets Arrested, Patti Smith Breaks Her Neck, and Bob Dylan Prepares for Prime Time | RAY PADGETT

Janis Joplin Gets Arrested, Patti Smith Breaks Her Neck, and Bob Dylan Prepares for Prime Time

1976-04-21, Curtis Hixon Convention Center, Tampa, FL

RAY PADGETT APR 21 ∙

Photo by Gerald Bettman, via Reddit

What I didn’t realize until doing this series is that the first three shows of Rolling Thunder 1976 were all in essentially the same place. For those who don’t know their Florida geography (guilty), Lakeland, St. Petersburg, and Tampa are all basically in the same metro area. They’re about 45 minutes apart. It’d be like playing shows in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens—they sound like different places, but only barely. 

They’d remain in this same area to tape the special in Clearwater (I guess that’s The Bronx in this analogy?) the next day, which we’ll get to tomorrow. These first three shows basically served as local warmups for the TV taping. And then afterwards he stayed in the same area again to play Orlando, right next door.

Out of curiosity, I mapped it out. He’s playing five different cities, including mostly big venues, all in this tiny slice of Florida.

The first five stops of Rolling Thunder 1976

And all that’s before he heads north to play three more Florida shows. Did Bob decide he never wanted to be on the bus for more than an hour between stops or something?

Perhaps not surprisingly with so many shows in the same small chunk of Florida, the shows didn’t sell that well. Yesterday’s St. Petersburg venue was smaller and sold out quickly, but the other two didn’t move anywhere near as fast as Rolling Thunder 1 famously did. You get a lot of articles like this:

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Today’s third show took place at the Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa. As it turns out, this giant convention center hosted some notable musical moments in the years before and after Dylan’s show. A few:

1969: Janis Joplin arrested for obscenity onstage. The real story isn’t as wild as that sounds. Police officers were demanding the crowd sit down, and she cursed them out. Good for her! Let the people stand up. Here’s the Tampa mugshot:

via The Florida Historical Society

1973: The Grateful Dead play a show that, years later, is released as the very first installment of the famous Dick’s Picks series. The series’ titular curator Dick Latvala said at the time, “December 19 had this version of ‘Here Comes Sunshine’ that just kills me. So I was really swayed for that show just to have that in there because when you folks hear it, I’m telling you, it will raise the hair on your arms.” (Learn more about this show in recent correspondent Rob Mitchum’s podcast 36 From the Vault.)

Here Comes Sunshine - Live at Curtis Hixon Convention Center, Tampa, FL, December 19, 1973 Grateful Dead

1977: Patti Smith falls 15 feet off the stage while opening for Bob Seger and breaks several vertebrae in her neck, ending up in a wheelchair. “I fell during [the song] ‘Ain’t It Strange,’” she told Melody Maker not long after the accident. “Just like the guy at Altamont got shot during ‘Under My Thumb,’ I fell just as I was [singing] ‘hand of God, I feel the finger.’ And I did feel the finger push me right over. It was like, I spend so much time challenging God when I perform and in everything I do…that I feel it was his way of saying, ‘You keep battering against my door and I’m gonna open that door and you’ll fall in.’”

via Rock Scene Magazine

Here’s her hanging out with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs a few months later still wearing a neck brace:

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