Mark writes about this concert that took place a 1968 when he was just seventeen, and you know what I mean, in Brooklyn College Magazine (Volume 4, Number 2, page 27).

“The Brooklyn College concert 1 recall to this day took place on Saturday, May 1, 1968. The Vagrants opened for Richie Havens,” writes Mark Rosenblatt ’73, who was a 17-year-old first-year student at the time.

“In 1968 rock concerts in larger venues in New York City were limited. I remember going to the former Fillmore East (in Manhattan) to see Richie Havens headlining over the Troggs and one of my all-time favorite bands, the United States of America (to this day the band is still the loudest I ever saw). So, when an opportunity came to see Richie Havens again at Brooklyn College, I rounded up a pair of friends and bought three tickets weeks in advance of the show.

What made this particular show interesting was the opening act, the Vagrants, a band whose members were from Queens and Nassau County, and who had a regional hit with the song ‘Respect,’ the same Otis Redding song that is associated with Aretha Franklin. At the time, the Vagrants played predominantly in clubs that were either too rough for me or required IDs that my friends and 1 lacked. To see a real way-out-there rock band at a safe place like Whitman Auditorium was a no-brainer. Richie Havens was the cherry on top.

I would see Havens a number of times in the immediate future, including at Woodstock in 1969, and at a live-to-videotape performance at the Brooklyn College TV Center in 1975 for the broadcast series Brooklyn College Presents Living Screen, which ran on the old WNYC-TV, Channel 31, and on Nassau County’s WLIW-TV, Channel 21.

That Havens show took place in the basement of Whitehead Hall, where the TV Center still stands, and was directed by my grad school friend and later co-worker at the ABC Radio Network, Barbara Silber ’72, who, like me, got her BA and M.S. at Brooklyn. The show was produced by Neil Heller, another BCTV M.S. ’76, and 1 worked the show as technical director. All three of us were under the guidance of longtime and now long-retired Department of TV and Radio Chair, Robert C. Williams, Ph.D. So, for me, one Havens performance blended into another in the long run.

Back at Whitman Auditorium, the Vagrants rocked loud and hard and soulful and put on quite a show. During their final song, which may have been a cover of a Who song, the band members began playing more and more discordant riffs, and then began trashing their instruments on stage, something that in 1968 the Who guitarist Pete Townsend was already known to do.

Moreover, onstage anarchic instrument destruction had been committed to film in Michelangelo Antonioni 1966 movie Blow-Up, in which a very young Jeff Beck, guitarist for the Yardbirds, destroys his guitar and throws pieces into a club crowd. So, when the Vagrants started to trash their instruments, I turned to my friends and we all thought as one, “Didn’t anyone tell them that this has been done before?” We then started joking that one of us should go up on stage to tell the Vagrants to stop, or better yet, do something original. Had the Vagrants not tried to shock their Brooklyn College Whitman Hall crowd out of its complacency, I would not remember the incident as vividly as I do.”

Mark Rosenblatt

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