Do you remember the very first concert you ever went to? I'm talking about a rock and roll concert. I do. Believe it or not, I was seven years old, and it was 1958.
It was Battle Creek, Michigan. That's where it was. It was in Battle Creek, Michigan. Hi, everybody.
Welcome to The Daily Grateful. My name is Michael Kroos, and we're here today to talk about music and concerts and the importance of it all. Now, when I was a seven-year-old kid, I lived at 528 West Michigan Avenue in Battle Creek, Michigan. If you're going to go there now and look me up, it's a whole lot.
They tore down every house on the lot, including the house we lived at. Oh, just tore them all down. It's like a giant field there now. Nothing is the way it was.
It's all blank. But in 1958, I lived at 528 West Michigan Avenue. Directly behind us, it was Van Buren Avenue. And through our back fence, there was the Lesh kids, Doug Lesh and his sister and a bunch of kids.
We all hung out. We all played. And I remember getting toy firemen. I remember this.
Little rubber toy firemen that had separate hats you could put on them, and that was cool, and it was like a little fire truck. That was my life. That's what I liked. And we'd go out there, and we would dig holes and have the fire trucks coming out of the little holes like little tunnels.
That was my life. And then my sister, Judy, who was a young teenager at the time. I don't remember how old she was. I'll have to look that up.
But anyway, a young teenager was going to a concert at Kellogg Auditorium, Kellogg after the cereal. Kellogg's real big in Metal Creek back in those days. And so she was going to the show, and my dad, who was somewhat of a controlling kind of guy, said, you're not going by yourself. She goes, no, I'm going with my girlfriend.
You're taking your brothers. Well, my brother Al didn't want to go. He just had better things to do. He wasn't going.
So I got to go. I had to go. I was the tag-along obnoxious little seven-year-old brother who went to Kellogg Auditorium with my sister and all of her friends. And we go there, and we had tickets, and we were like midway back, midway back.
And we were just sitting there, and the first person that came out was some local band. And I could not believe I'd never seen live music before like that, a band playing. They had a saxophone and a trumpet player. And then they brought out this woman.
And the big thing that she had done, her big thing in life, was that she did the ooh-ooh-oohs on some Elvis song. I don't remember which one, but she was a backup singer on an Elvis record. And they had her sing the ooh-ooh-oohs that she sang in that record. Yeah, that was the thing.
I mean, everybody's, you know, okay, how cool. And I'm kind of bored at this point in time. It was interesting seeing the band. It was interesting hearing the drums.
It was interesting. All that stuff was very interesting to me. I liked it. It was good.
And then the emcee comes out as a local radio disc jockey, and he goes, and now the star of our show is coming out to perform for you, and it's going to be fabulous. And there it was. They opened up the curtain, and out comes Jerry Lee Lewis. Now, do you remember Jerry Lee Lewis?
Yeah, Great Balls of Fire. 1958, the year the song came out, he is out there pounding on this piano, had a band behind him, everybody's rocking. This totally changed my life. I'm saying, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
This is so much better than a little plastic fireman. I love this. This was just, yeah. This was at one point during the concert.
He takes off his shirt, his white shirt, and he throws it out into the audience. And the crowd went wild, I'm telling you. And they were just ripping that shirt apart. Everybody was ripping that shirt apart.
And part of the shirt came over by us. And my sister's girlfriend ripped off a section of it. I don't know, about five inches by about five inches. A little square.
She just ripped it up like that. And then she tore that half and gave half to my sister, and she kept that. And the shirt just kept working its way through the crowd. I'm telling you, I've never seen anything like this.
It was like hypnosis. It was fabulous. And after that, my life had changed forever. Because I started going with my sister to the record store in Battle Creek.
We lived on West Michigan Avenue. We would take the bus downtown, and they had a record store there. And we would go in. And in those days, you could take a single.
They had these little booths. And you could take the single, you know, record. And you could go in the booth and put it on the turntable and pop it on there. And you could listen to it.
They had like a little headphone, just like one thing. Stick it in one ear. And you could listen to the songs if you liked it. And if you were going to buy it, because the singles were 55 cents or something like that.
And we would just go there. And I would just listen to records. And it was cool in the world. And I found out about all the, I found out about Frankie Avalon.
I found out about, oh gosh, everybody that was popular back then, I found out about. And I didn't have the money to buy these records. But, but, every Saturday, my mom would give us each money to go to the movies in downtown Battle Creek. You either went to the Bijou or the State Theater.
And it was 20 cents to get in. And then you had enough money to buy popcorn and stuff like that. Well, I didn't go to the movies. I took the money and went to the record shop.
My brother went to the movies. I didn't. I went to the record shop. And I would listen to it.
And I would pick up a record. And I would buy the record. And I'd just wait around Battle Creek until the movie was over. And everybody would come out.
And we'd ride the bus back. I'm young, man. I'm eight, nine years old about this time. And we're riding the bus back to 528 West Michigan Avenue.
And I got a record. And every week, I'd get another record. That's what I did. And I was building my record collection.
Boy, I wish I had those now. I am telling you, I just wish I had those now. But that was the beginning. And from there, 1964 came, and there was the Beatles.
And I've talked about that before. I have loved music every day since my sister took me to see Jerry Lee Lewis at the Kellogg Auditorium. It has enhanced my life. It has healed me.
It has made me get through a lot of bull crap that, you know, things come down on you. You stick the headphones on, and you listen to music. And it's just that good. Music is so important to all of us.
I'm so damn grateful for it. And the one thing I do when I'm having a stressful day is I come into this studio, this very studio, and I plug in my Rode Procaster. And I hook it in through the interweb, and I listen to music on my headphones. My broadcast quality headphones, by the way.
Yeah, really grateful for music. Have a super Monday. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.