Listen to Boston Play Philadelphia and Kansas Play New York in the ’70s
From the vault: What was it with all the geography bands in the 1970s?
Photo: Getty Images Music Features Boston
Did you know that Paste owns the world’s largest collection of live music recordings? It’s true! And what’s even crazier, it’s all free—hundreds of thousands of exclusive songs, concerts and videos that you can listen to and watch right here at Paste.com, from Louis Armstrong to The Who to U2 to Wilco. Every day, we’ll dig through the archive for the coolest recording we can find from that date in history. Search and enjoy!
There were lots of, er, interesting trends in the 1970s: bell bottoms, double denim and, in the music world, bands named after places. For some reason, musicians really wanted to evoke locations in the ‘70s, whether or not they were actually from those places. From Chicago to Europe, Alabama to America, listening to the radio was akin to a geography lesson. Of all these groups, two of the most successful were Boston and Kansas, with huge hits that still enjoy rampant radio play today. The two bands performed shows on this date—Boston at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1976, and Kansas at the Palladium in New York City in 1977. That’s a lot of sonic travel.
Here’s the former playing their biggest hit, “More Than a Feeling.”
And here’s the latter playing their biggest hit, “Dust in the Wind.”