This a New Jersey murder case going on right now about a fatal assault after a ZZ Top concert. While I want to be careful not to diminish the severity of the charge, it reminded me about when I saw ZZ Top in concert.

It was in the 80s and I was a big ZZ Top fan. I enjoyed their southern tinged brand of rock and roll. What was really memorable about the show though, was their opening act. Maybe this won’t seem strange to some, but their opening act was Loverboy, a more pop-oriented band. My friends and I discussed whether or not ZZ Top fans would be Loverboy fans and vice versa.

That was not the only strange concert pairing I saw (most, if not all, of these shows were in the 80s). When I attended a Tom Petty show the opening act was someone called Tom Robinson and his group, Sector 27. The only two songs I remember them playing were “Glad to be Gay,” and “Bitterly Disappointed.” It didn’t exactly dovetail with Tom Petty’s repertoire. When I saw the Who, the opening act wasn’t terribly mismatched, it was the Pretenders, but this was before they had really hit it big, and they got “Who’d” off the stage. When my sister went to see the Monkees, their opening act was a guy named Jimi Hendrix, believe it or not.

Many of the concerts I saw didn’t have an opening act (Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues, et.al.), but most of the ones I saw, I don’t even remember. Have you ever seen a concert where the opening act was mismatched with the headliner?

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