On this date, a half-century ago, I saw Yes at Roosevelt Stadium.
- Arnold Plotnick
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
The June 17th, 1976 concert has acquired legendary status in some circles.
On this date, nearly half a century ago, I attended what has since become something of a legendary concert: Yes at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City.
I went with my high school friends Danny and Dave, for sure. Whether anyone else was with us is lost to time. (I think Ellen was with us? Maybe?) It was two months after my sixteenth birthday. To get there, we took a train from Brooklyn into New Jersey, and then a city bus out to the stadium. None of us were quite sure which bus to take, but we spotted a long line of stoner-looking teenagers waiting and asked if this was “the Yes bus.” They confirmed it was. Mixed in among us were ordinary Jersey commuters on their way home from work. By the time the bus reached the stadium, the back rows—where we were sitting—were thick with pot smoke. The driver never said a word.
Roosevelt Stadium was officially a 25,000-seat venue, but when they allowed seating on the field for concerts, it could hold closer to 40,000. We opted to sit on the field. It was brutally hot, well into the 90s, and the restless crowd was already edgy while waiting for the show to start.
One of the most memorable things about the evening happened before Yes even took the stage. The concession stands sold orange drink in small square cardboard containers. Someone tossed an empty one. Then someone else did. Within minutes, thousands of those little orange cartons were flying through the air across the field like cardboard missiles. I later discovered that someone online had dubbed this spectacle “The Great Orange Container Jubilee.” That description seems about right.
But the mood wasn’t entirely fun and games. Far from it. People in the stands were tossing lit firecrackers—serious ones, M-80s and cherry bombs—down into the crowd below. It was scary. At one point during the concert, I noticed a fight had broken out in the stands. If you got bored watching the stage, you could look up and see if the fight was still going on. It was, for pretty much the entire concert.
Roosevelt Stadium already had a reputation in the 1970s for rowdy rock crowds, and this show lived up to that reputation. In fact, people who were there—including security staff—have since described it as “basically a riot.”
The opening act was the Pousette-Dart Band. I remember them being loudly booed when they came on. They played a few songs and then left the stage.
Here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn.
About ten or twelve years ago, when I still owned my veterinary practice, a client came in to pick up his cat after a dental procedure. It was the wife who had dropped the cat off, but the husband who was picking it up. I glanced at the chart and noticed the spouse’s name listed: Jon Pousette-Dart. I looked up and said, “Jon Pousette-Dart? From the Pousette-Dart Band?” He smiled and said, “Yep, that’s me.”
I told him I had seen his band open for Yes at Roosevelt Stadium and mentioned how incredibly rowdy that show had been. He immediately nodded. Very rowdy, he agreed. Then he told me something I hadn’t known: someone in the crowd had thrown an apple at the stage with such force that it went straight through his acoustic guitar, destroying it, He said the entire tour with Yes had gone smoothly, except for that night.
A few days later he stopped by the hospital and left three of his band’s CDs for me at the front desk. How cool is that?
The show itself has gone down in Yes lore as a fantastic performance. I liked Yes at the time, though I wasn’t the rabid fan some of my friends were. The band was touring behind Relayer, with Patrick Moraz on keyboards, and the laser light show was unlike anything I had ever seen—lasers mounted on robotic rigs shooting across the entire stadium. Much better than the Laserium show I had seen two months before, at a Tangerine Dream concert.
The setlist that circulates online includes:
Apocalypse
Siberian Khatru
Sound Chaser
I’ve Seen All Good People
The Gates of Delirium
Long Distance Runaround
Patrick Moraz keyboard solo
Clap
Heart of the Sunrise
Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil)
Roundabout (encore 1)
I’m Down (encore 2)
I can’t honestly say I remember the individual songs very clearly. It was, after all, half a century ago—and I was definitely a little… altered. But fans of the group seem united in their assessment of the performance as one of the band's best ever. Luckily, there are no shortages of recordings of that concert, so you can decide for yourself.
Unfortunately, the night ended on a tragic note. After the concert, a teenage boy was stabbed to death outside the stadium by local thugs who hadn’t even attended the show. The mayor responded by banning all future concerts at Roosevelt Stadium. The Led Zeppelin and Grateful Dead shows scheduled for the following week were canceled. A tough break for those ticket holders; I feel for them.
Fourteen months later, I saw Yes again—this time in the far more civilized and non-violent confines of Madison Square Garden. But that wild summer night in Jersey City remains one of the most chaotic concerts I’ve ever attended. Even now, fifty years later, I can still picture those orange cartons flying through the air in the heat while forty thousand impatient teenagers waited for the music to begin.
Some concerts you remember for the music. Others you remember for everything else that happened around it. This one skews toward the latter.
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