Last edited Sat Mar 19, 2022, 11:19 AM - Edit history (1)
some hearing due to music that was way too loud.
But in the case of the concert you saw with Golden Earring and Procol Harum, part of the problem might have been an audience that was too small for the venue, which would have made the sound problem worse.
I did some googling, couldn't find anything about Procol Harum and Golden Earring ever being at the Astrodome, but did find a number of websites about their concert at the Houston Coliseum in July of 1974 (so I'm guessing that's the one you mean), when both Golden Earring and Poco opened for Procol Harum, but the audience was surprisingly small.
The fewer people in any enclosed space, the louder sounds will be. That's because the human body absorbs sound, dampening the sound, lowering the reverb volume. So what might have been a tolerable volume if the Coliseum was packed was much too loud with only a fraction of the possible audience there.
Poco and Procol Harum would have had time to make adjustments after Golden Earring opened the concert. But apparently even Procol Harum hadn't been able to adjust enough, since one review mentioned the drums drowning out everything else. From what I understand, bass and drums would have been particularly loud without enough people in a large enclosed venue.
I looked for but didn't find any review of that concert mentioning Golden Earring being too loud (didn't find any, but I found only three reviews of that 1974 concert). I also did some quick googling and found a few pages on various sites where fans mentioned them as the loudest concert they could recall, at other venues, but a lot of other bands got more mentions, and when I looked for lists of "loudest bands" and "loudest concerts" they didn't show up on any of those.
But that night at the Coliseum was unfortunate in terms of acoustics.
Here are links to the three concert reviews I could find, transcribed on Procol Harum's website. The headline for the first revew was Poco, Earring Little Help: Procol Harum Battles Cavernous Coliseum and the second review mentions the "thunderous" drums that drowned out everyone else in the band:
https://procolharum.com/ph-houston_740703_b.htm
https://procolharum.com/ph-houston_740703-c.htm
https://procolharum.com/ph-houston_740703.htm
Editing to add, re what the first review there said about how the audience in the Coliseum that night could "almost" have filled the adjacent Music Hall -- I just checked Wikipedia and the Music Hall was less than a quarter the size of the Coliseum. So the Coliseum was 80% empty, which would have meant much more reverb volume than if the concert had sold out.
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