Pink Floyd's Dark Side of Kent State 1973

- by Jason Prufer

One legendary show that came to Kent that had seemingly been lost to time was a performance by Pink Floyd in what is now Kent State's MAC Center back on Saturday, March 10, 1973. For years there was scant information about the specifics of this night but through some sleuthing and asking around I was able to find out some great information from some folks who were directly involved with this event.

Original Daily Kent Stater ad for Pink Floyd's
March 10, 1973 performance at Kent State.

It’s impossible to discuss this show without talking about Pink Floyd's landmark LP The Dark Side of the Moon because the Kent State performance seemingly occurs at the apex of the Dark Side of the Moon Tour and it's that album that everyone kept referring to when I was asking about the show.

It's also impossible to write about Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon without going over much covered ground but the brief is that it’s one of the top selling albums of all time and it spent 741 weeks on the Billboard top LP's and tape chart between 1973 and 1988. But don't take my word for it, Wiki has done a terrific job with the full breakdown of the recording. Also you can listen to The Dark Side of the Moon in it's entirety here and while you are at it don't miss the extremely well made Classic Albums: The Dark Side of the Moon documentary which you can see here.

There seems to be some dispute as to the exact date of the release of The Dark Side of the Moon and to make this even more confusing, it appears that the album was released on different dates in both the U.S. and the U.K. I have seen the dates March 1, March 10, March 13, March 17 and March 24, 1973 all reported from different sources. While I can't pinpoint the exact date, one thing for sure is that when Pink Floyd came to Kent State on March 10, 1973 the biggest buzz going about them was their new masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon.

Kent State was far from the first time the band had played The Dark Side of the Moon live. In fact they had been performing the piece as part of their live set for just over a year by the time they came to town. Click here to listen to a spectacular soundboard recording of one of the very first live performances of the work.

David Gilmour of Pink Floyd in Kent State's
Memorial Gym on March 10, 1973. Does his shirt
say Kent State? Photo by J. Ross Baughman.

If you want to dig deeper into these shows there is some terrific 8mm film footage from Atlanta from just two weeks after the Kent State show that surfaced recently on Youtube which you can see here. There are also two lone pro-shot clips from this tour from the previous summer that have been floating around for quite a long time. Check those out here and here.

A bootleg recording labeled as being from Kent State has circulated for years though the sound quality is abysmal and it doesn't stream online so you will have to seek it out for yourself. Also other than the fact that the recording is labeled as Kent State there is no real proof that the recording behind the bootleg is in fact from that date and nowhere on that recording does anyone utter "How ya doing Kent State?" For a long time I had assumed the "Kent State" recording was authentic but upon learning that the famous "Bruce Springsteen at Kent State" recording was not from Kent State it has put every other similar recording into question.

There are however several full audience recordings on Youtube that are labeled as being from March of 1973 available to be streamed. This particular recording labeled as being  from the Boston Music Hall 4 days later sounds pretty good (for what it is.) It's likely the Kent State show sounded just like this.

The Daily Kent Stater did some limited reporting on the show though all I really found was one advanced ad and since the concert occurred during spring break there was no review published as the Stater didn't run that week. A few weeks later though The Daily Kent Stater did run these odd photos from the performance and the Chestnut Burr (KSU's yearbook) did publish this terrific photo taken by the late Tom Hudson. Scene magazine which did a great job covering many of the concerts in Kent during this period also curiously had nothing on this show. I suspect much of the advertising on this concert was done through local radio which was just about the best way to get the word out at the time. There are also a handful of full color photos from this show belonging to Getty Images that were taken by photographer John Lynn Kirk which you can sample here though if you want to take a really good clear look be prepared to shell out some money.

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I had the great pleasure recently to talk with Michael Solomon, who was the All Campus Programming Board (ACPB) Concert Committee Chairman from 1972-1974 and was the chief promoter on this concert. Michael turned 21 years old on the day of this event and this is what he told me about putting this show together:

David Gilmour of Pink Floyd in Kent State's
Memorial Gym on March 10, 1973. Does his
shirt say Kent State? Photo by J. Ross Baughman.

"It was unbelievable. The first thing I remember is that they did the show in quadraphonic. There were speakers at the back of the gym and there were speakers all the way up on the right and left side above the bleachers. They brought in the most amount of equipment that I had ever dealt with. I remember that they brought in this forklift and when they started rolling it across the gym floor, you could see the floor buckle and I happened to be standing right there with Keith Raymond, who I worked with and we looked at each other and I just said 'stop! please stop! We can't bring equipment in this way.' So then Keith and I looked at each other and I said 'find the money and go find 20 kids that we can pay $20 a piece and get them to hand carry all this equipment, otherwise we can't do this show.' And we did! So we moved all the equipment into the gym by hand. That's the first thing I remember about the show.

"The second thing about the Pink Floyd show that I remember was that we were worried that there might be some drug overdose that night so we worked with the local hospital and the local police and everybody else to set up like a care unit down the hall from the performance. It was a good thing that we did that because it was unbelievable how many kids were in there hallucinating, just having out of body experiences, out of mind experiences--it was kind of fun to walk through there and overhearing what people were saying. Nobody died and nobody was actually having any serious problems but it was wild. I just remember someone saying 'I saw god, I saw god out there.' Stuff like that.

"The other thing was that this was The Dark Side of the Moon Tour and ya know where there's that giant explosion on the album? For that part of the concert they did this really amazing thing where they caused this big crash at the back of the stage off to the side and there were a couple of us standing in that general vicinity and right on cue there was an actual giant explosion that was so powerful that it left all of our ears ringing for days. Their show was the most technically brilliantly production I had ever witnessed. Being able to bring that to the gym--it was an amazing event."

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J. Ross Baughman who was responsible for taking the never-before-published black & white photos that accompany this piece was only 19 years old and the editor of Kent State University's yearbook, The Chestnut Burr on the night of this show. He arrived at the gym early that evening in order to get in place to be able to take some all access photos. This is what he told me about that experience:

"You wanna know what the mood of that place was? Roger scorned me. Roger Waters personally scorned me from being able to be up on stage when every other major act I'd worked with had no problem with this.

"When they were ready to come out and do their soundcheck, I was out there right on the wings of the stage and Roger looked towards me and said 'What's this guy up here for?' and I said 'Well I'm part of the furniture, I'm part of the woodwork, I'm Kent State here.' Ya know I introduced myself in a friendly way. I was trying to be ingratiating like I'd been able to do with Nazis and murderers--but ya know he wasn't having any of it and he said 'You're finished.' So I just kind of looked around and all the other people running security and running the concert just looked at me and they just kind of gave me that smiling shrug like 'hey, Roger Waters has spoken.' I wanted to reason with him but he wasn't having it.

Roger Waters and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd
 in Kent State's Memorial Gym on March 10, 1973.
Photo by J. Ross Baughman.

"So to shoot my photos I had to squeeze into a scrum of annoyed photographers crouching in front of the stage. They had already staked out their turf and were already elbowing each other. I remember the band was snarling at the crowd. Roger was literally insulting the audience. Someone would shout out a request and Roger would come back with something like 'shut up, we're trying to do something more important up here.' I was just trying to take some decent pictures--and I was impressed with the music and I loved the band and I loved that album--and I was really excited about this but they were--something about that night. They were feeling incredible pressure to be in total 100 percent anal compulsive control over that concert.

"Oh and you know what the other thing was? They wouldn't even let us shoot the entire concert. We were limited to the first few songs--and this was the first time I had ever heard of this. To me it was outrageous. I remember thinking 'What? They are telling us we can only shoot the first 25 minutes of the concert?' Which is absolutely normal now. I think that--as a veteran concert photographer, having shot photos with carte blanche red carpet treatment, this was the first time I had ever known this to happen. Not long after this I covered both Paul McCartney and Wings and the Rolling Stones for a couple of cities and both bands embraced me as one of the guys.

"A handful of these Pink Floyd photos turned out ok though not compared to all the other concerts I shot where you see I'm like right next to these guys. For Pink Floyd I was there for only enough time to take maybe 20-30 frames for the whole concert and only just a few photos even turned out compared to other concerts where I would have had like 50 pictures that I really liked.

"I think that concert was more important to them than people realize. That shirt David Gilmour is wearing--I think it's a red and blue shirt and the star is yellow. I think it was a Vietcong shirt but it may well have been that he added 'Kent State' to it. I am pretty sure his shirt says 'Kent State,' and you know what that tells us? They knew that Kent State was the closest you could get to the Vietcong here in America and I bet you that's what he was all about.

"You could not find a revolutionary red and blue shirt with a big yellow star on it in the campus book shop because that was just too darn left, anti-Vietnam War revolutionary so he must have made it. What I think you are seeing here is Pink Floyd celebrating Kent as not just some generic any-town venue, but as something they cared about. What I find ironic about this is that they couldn't have been less congenial with the audience. They were alienating the audience because they were such artistes."

J. Ross Baughman raises a terrific point about that shirt. Is David Gilmour in fact wearing a customized "Kent State" t-shirt? It certainly looks like it. Doing a quick Google search I found some other photos of David Gilmour wearing the same shirt from what looks like different dates on this same tour and in all the photos that shirt appears to say "Kent State." I compiled all the photos I found (from the other dates) into an album on my Flickr. Look for yourself. Do these shirts in fact say Kent State?

One other note on J. Ross Baughman's photos that were provided for this piece. Look at the two photos showing keyboardist Richard Wright and note that on top of his organ at the left you can see a big bottle of liquor--or at least I assume that's liquor. This is the kind of thing I would expect to see on stage with the Rolling Stones not Pink Floyd but there you have it. Looking at all kinds of other photos of the band from this tour I couldn't find a single other image showing any similar bottles with them on stage.

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Longtime Kent resident Bruce Fulper was 19 years old on the night of March 10, 1973 and had a whirlwind Pink Floyd experience. This is what he told me about his adventures with Pink Floyd in Kent, Ohio:

Roger Waters and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd
in Kent State's Memorial Gym on March 10, 1973.
Note the bottle on the left side of the keyboard.
Photo by J. Ross Baughman.

"On Friday March 9th I woke up in Fort Sill Oklahoma, having just completed my AIT (Advanced Individual Training.) I was damn lucky that I was not chosen to go to Vietnam as a few of us had been held over for two weeks until Uncle Sam made up his mind. I got to go to Germany instead. So, Friday was it. Two weeks leave until I had to go overseas. I had bought a real clean 1955 Ford 4 door and decided to drive it back to Kent.

"Neatly enough a few guys who lived along the way helped with gas and driving. We left at noon that Friday and dead headed straight through. If my memory serves me correctly two guys were dropped off in Illinois and two in Cleveland. I rolled into my parents driveway on Fairchild Ave at 11:30am sharp on the morning of Saturday, March 10. After the typical 'Hi mom and Dad' stuff I called my pal, Rob Ginther. The first thing Rob said to me was, 'Aw man, I wish you would have told me you'd be home because Pink Floyd is playing the gym tonight!' Of course tickets had long been sold out. So with nothing else to do, and the show being the biggest thing to ever hit Kent (as far as we were concerned,) we decided to just go up and sit at the north end of the gym because we knew the stage was at that part of the building.

"So, there we sat, watching the crowd go by, listening to people asking for tickets. LOTS of people asking for tickets. Just forget it. No one was selling tickets. Crap. Oh well. So we were killing time, glad we got a spot where we hoped to hear the show, and then a guy walked off the sidewalk and came over to us, just on his own without us even motioning that we wanted tickets. He saw us sitting over there by the building which was probably 10, 15 feet off the sidewalk and he walks up to us and asks, 'You guys want to buy some tickets?' Really??? YES. How much? 'oh, just face value. $4.50 each.' And he says, 'They're pretty good seats too.' Ya think!!??

Nick Mason of Pink Floyd
 in Kent State's Memorial Gym on March 10, 1973.
Photo by J. Ross Baughman.

"You know the part where life hands you CRAP too often, but every once in a while you get lucky? Well, certainly I've had my split of super highs and super lows, but this day--wow. Giddy as you were the day of your first good sexual experience. We were freaking out that NOW we're sitting in the fifth row, center section.

"So--the show. It's the first time I got to see Pink Floyd and btw, I had just been turned on to them the previous Xmas so I had only known of them for three months. My initiation to them was through a pal's headphones as he put on Meddle and said 'sit back' etc. So I thought I was ready.

"Ha! NOT. The first half of the show I remember well was stuff off Ummagumma and they ended the first half with 'Careful with that ax Eugene.' Now that was the first stunner. I remember for that song Roger had a tiny black light on his mic that they turned on and it lit up his teeth--creepy cool sheet. During that song, a monster half-sphere rose up from behind the drummer. It was covered with tiny mirrors. When it got to full height it slowly began to rotate. On each side of the stage were five red lasers. Ten total. As this mirrored half sphere turned clockwise the lasers started firing at what looked like five foot long beams of light, filling the entire place with what looked like red snow. You could see the lengths of the beams just screaming by every which way. If you're familiar with the song you know it builds to an incredible climax, and at the moment of that climax they set off a fireball explosion from behind the sphere that was so huge we felt the heat from the blast. It was later reported that one or two people fell off the balcony when that happened. It was stunning.

Ticket stub from Pink Floyd's March 10, 1973 performance
in Kent State's Memorial Gym. Bruce Fulper archives.

"Then, they took a break. Now not being as hip as I wished I was, I had not heard that they had a new album. I'm not sure if anyone had heard it yet. I think they planned it that way. What can one say? They played The Dark Side of the Moon in it's entirety. I remember the three black backing vocalists--stunning and of course the sound system. The first ever quadraphonic live sound system.

"Hearing the cash register in 'Money' ping ponging 4 ways from stack to stack was incredible. A future roommate of mine was an electrician for KSU and told me he worked three full days helping them set up those speakers in the rafters. There were troubles though. The stage right speaker column went out three or four times and it nearly killed the show. You know what it's like to unplug a guitar with the live end of the cable, you touch it and it goes "WHOMP!!" Well imagine a massive speaker rack doing the same thing, at a zillion more db's. It was brutal. You know it bummed out the band. But they kept playing and got through it.

"That's it in a nutshell, as much as a nutshell as I can put it in. I went to see them in Pittsburgh a few years later when they had the flying pig and it was almost a 180. We sat under the model plane at the very top of the stadium. Decent show but it was no comparison to the fifth row....center section."

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Sounds like an incredible night for most who attended. Whenever I ask locals who were young and in town around this time about the concerts they used to have in the gym almost everyone brings up this Pink Floyd show so for a lot of people this night left quite an impression. Even though there's lots of examples of huge events like this that came to Kent, it still boggles my mind that the legendary Pink Floyd came and played their most famous work when it was brand new right up the street from where I am writing this now.

Big thanks to Bruce Fulper, Michael Solomon, J. Ross Baughman and Kent State University Special Collections and Archives for providing me with much of the great original content for this story. If you like this Kent story don't miss my others here.