To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. The Concerts Concerts are harder to quantify than sporting events. There’s no final score, no playoffs, no MVP. But there are thousands of Buffalonians who have a soft spot for The Aud, yet never saw a sporting event there. Her rafters heard jazz and blues, metal and punk, rock and roll. “The first concert I went to at The Aud was Alabama, when I was five years old,” remembers Tiffany Krencik. “And the next one I went to after that was Culture Club–I was in fourth grade, sat in the Oranges, loved it. The next year I saw Prince and sat in the Blues. That was just an amazing concert.” The number one concert at The Aud? Was it The Who? Elvis? Bruce Springsteen? It may very well have been the Neil Diamond concert in 1976. it can be done.” There was one other element of that concert that Anderson remembers as being unusual: “By that point I’d seen a lot of concerts at The Aud. I was astounded that people were mostly smoking cigarettes instead of marijuana at that show. It was so strange.” Ironically, this very concert was the first I ever attended. I was ten years old, and I went with my mother. When we got to our obstructed-view seats, Mom reached into her purse for her cigarettes and realized her car keys weren’t in it; she had left them in the ignition. Just as she was telling me she was going to go back to the car for them, the man on my right handed me a joint. Mom stayed. Our bright yellow Datsun 610 was stolen. MICHAEL MORAN COLLECTION “Neil Diamond was in very good form that night, and it was the best sound I have ever heard at The Aud,” recalls Dale Anderson, music critic for The Buffalo News for many years. “I had always thought, it’s muddy, you can’t do “I can remember, they’d pass joints all the way down the Backstage pass from Rush concert anything about it. These rock and roll sound people are rows,” recalls Gary Steczewski, admitting to nothing. just stoners or lazy or they just don’t know how to do it. But the sound “It was equal opportunity.” Even for ten-year-olds. was perfect for Neil Diamond–it was gorgeous. And I’m thinking, well, 2 8