The band had no idea who they were opening for. When they arrived at the Civic Center Music Hall in Oklahoma City and saw the marquee lit up with KISS, they thought it might be a mistake.
If it’s not one of the best stories in country music, it certainly one of the best in the arsenal of Vince Gill. Today, we all think of Vince Gill as the mild-mannered, clean cut, all-American Country Music Hall of Famer whose songs like “Go Rest High On That Mountain” and “One More Last Chance” defined some of the best of ’90s country. But like all country greats, Vince Gill had to pay his dues, do time as an opening act, and sometimes not in the most ideal of environments. Before Vince Gill was Vince Gill, he played in the country rock band Pure Prairie League, and in the Kentucky-based bluegrass bands Bluegrass Alliance and Boone Creek with Ricky Skaggs. But one of the first bands he performed with in his home state of Oklahoma was a bluegrass band called Mountain Smoke. They might’ve not been big on the national level. But after he graduated high school, Vince Gill and Mountain Smoke became pretty big in the Norman/Oklahoma City area, so much so that they were one of the go-to opening bands whenever some big name would tour through town. One such band happened to be the legendary rockers KISS. Mountain Smoke was not initially scheduled to open the show for KISS. After all, you’d have to be pretty daft to think a bluegrass band would be well-received at a hard rock show. But when the opening band scheduled to perform ahead of KISS ducked out last minute, the local promoter went into a scramble drill, and reached out to Mountain Smoke feature an 18 year old Vince Gill. The band had no idea who they were opening for. When they arrived at the Civic Center Music Hall in Oklahoma City and saw the marquee lit up with KISS, they thought it might be a mistake, or maybe they were playing in the basement as part of another gig. Nope, they were told to tune up their acoustic instruments and get ready. This was also the biggest gig Vince Gill and Mountain Smoke had ever been booked for at the time. And when you’re 18 years old, you’re not in a position to turn down a paying gig. So they took the stage. As you can imagine, it didn’t go well. “They’re ready for blood and guts and rock ‘n roll,” Vince Gill says about the show on March 4th, 1976, “And we get out there, ‘Deedle leet deet dee!’ So we didn’t last very long. The first song finished, and the whole place started booing. And not just lightly booing, but angrily like a bad football game ending where the ref blows the call to cost the game. It was intense.” But according to Vince Gill, he kind of liked the negative attention. “I enjoyed hearing that many people pissed off,” he says. Instead of feeling ashamed about the situation, he decided to embrace the fun and absurdity of the whole thing, thanking the crowd for the boos, and starting the second song. This is when beer bottles and other projectiles started flying, and Vince and Mountain Smoke had no other choice but to vacate the stage. Vince Gill wasn’t going out lightly though. “On my departure, I hung them the bird, and bent around and grabbed my ass and said, ‘Kiss my ass!’” Vince recalls. The review in the paper the next day recalled the incredibly poor booking choice for the opening act, and said, “Group member Vince Gill on his departure showed the crowd which part of his anatomy they could KISS.” Vince Gill would live to fight another day and become a country legend. But his story about opening for KISS shows another “(back)side” of Vince Gill country fans rarely if ever got to see. – – – – – – – – –
Vince Gill wasn’t going out lightly though. “On my departure, I hung them the bird, and bent around and grabbed my ass and said, ‘Kiss my ass!’” Vince recalls.
The review in the paper the next day recalled the incredibly poor booking choice for the opening act, and said, “Group member Vince Gill on his departure showed the crowd which part of his anatomy they could KISS.”
Missed opportunity. Imagine Vince Gill doing a bluegrass call-and-response cover of “Calling Doctor Love.” It’d bring about world peace.
Whoever the promoter for this venue was…was a complete MORON!!! I mean, what do you expect? A theater full of KISS fans is not going to take to Bluegrass very lightly. Hopefully, they got paid and weren’t fleeced.
This probably happened more than you would expect. I remember reading an interview with Tommy Shaw of Styx, and he said a country band he was in before he joined Styx got to open for KISS. Same deal.
There send to be a promoter in Denver named Barry Fey, Feyline Presents. He would book crazy combinations of people who couldn’t fill his venues by themselves. 1970s. I don’t remember any as crazy as this, but there were some head scratchers.
Historically, the craziest that I remember was Heads Hands and Feet (I believe this was Albert Lee’s original band from England), The Eagles (1st album support tour) and Steely Dan ( Can’t Buy a Thrill tour). At 68 they are all still in my wheelhouse but as a 10th grader I was , lite, WTF?
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Vince could have written “Kiss This” years before Aaron Tippin grabbed it and ran with it.
[It was a #1 hitin 2000, and those were rare events for Tip.]
I’m guessing back in the 60’s and 70’s, when concert production was pretty localized and less streamlined/corporate like today, stories like this were more possible. Trigger, have you seen any opening acts that were total one-eightys from the headliner?.
Unfortunately I had to sit through a Sierra Ferrell opening band called Dinosaur Burps at a San Francisco Show last year. They were two West Virginia Dudes doing hip hop on loop pedals. It was awful and no one there was enjoying it. The audience only applauded their last song because they were glad their set was over. I almost left to go to the lobby because it was so jarring to my ears. Worst opening band ever (Comic Book Guy reference).
I definitely have seen some bad opening acts over the years. But my policy is to just not talk about them if they’re bad. They’re often opening for a reason.
Didn’t Shane Gillis do a comedy set before a Zach Bryan show recently? That’s definitely a strange combo, but it was also the original billing, so folks knew ahead of time.
It used to be common for comedians like Cheech and Chong to open for rock acts. Many of the old guys talked about it on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.
I saw a painter open for KISS about ten years ago. He painted a huge canvas, then spun it around, and it was Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Worst booking combo I’ve ever witnessed in person was at a late 80’s show in a smaller venue [under 3000 seats] that featured Lyle Lovett and Merle Haggard.
Lovett opened the show but by his 3rd or 4th song only 1/3 of the audience had not departed for the bar area. I felt kinda bad for Lyle.
After intermission the seats were only about 3/4 full as clearly most of Lyle’s fans were not into Merle. Both performances were excellent but the two acts attracted widely different fans.
The same year, The Jimi Hendrix Experience opened for the Monkees .Quite possibly the greatest mismatch of all time.
I lucked into seeing Leon Redbone open for David Allen Coe at the outdoor Chastain Park here in the ATL sometime late in the last century/millennium…
I saw The Mahavishnu Orchestra open for the Guess Who in 1976….also in OKC🙄… both were excellent. Audience was baffled. Ambrosia opening for the Beach Boys, British band Fashion opening for the Police, Jean-Luc Ponty for Little River Band were some other notables. All in the late 70s.
Among the other bizarre instances of pairing acts on a double bill that made no sense, Linda Ronstadt was involved in two of them early on. While still with the Stone Poneys in early 1968 (coming off of the success of “Different Drum”), they opened for The Doors (no pun intended), which meant that Linda, the gentile folk-rock hippie she was at the age of 21, was often exposed to Jim Morrison’s bizarre, animalistic onstage and offstage behavior (stimulated by booze); for that reason alone, she had no admiration for him and said as much in her first memoir.
And then in 1969, after Linda had gone solo and started establishing herself in the country-rock scene, she did some opening gigs in Los Angeles for Alice Cooper. In this case, the two of them were both managed by Herb Cohen, who had a reputation for being something of a gonzo soldier of fortune prior to his stewardship in rock music management (and who may even have been involved in a murder in his previous “line of work”). Still, it was just weird for someone like Linda, whose reputation would always be with the music and her voice, to be paired with someone like Alice Cooper, who penchant for shock-horror and onstage theatricality were starting to become his stock-and-trade.
Actually Daniele, we were asked to but had to turn it down because we had no singer at the time, but thanks for thinking of me….lol
Source: savingcountrymusic.com