Todays History Lesson

Fans wait to get into the calamitous ZZ Top/Aerosmith concert at Three Rivers Stadium on June 12, 1976-PG

JUNE 12, 1976...

Three Rivers Stadium...Beer...Cattle...Beer...Rattlesnakes...Beer...Beer

ZZ TOP...AEROSMITH

$8.75 a Seat!!!

54,000 paid...250 injured...2 dead

PAAARTY!!!

Nice walk down memory lane by PG's Scott Mervis

• The calamities were Texas-sized. The front page headline the next day in The Pittsburgh Press was "250 Fans Injured at Rock Concert," many of them cut by broken glass "when bottle-throwing erupted." The medic on the scene treated people for eye lacerations, drug overdoses, a broken nose and a broken pelvis. A pregnant woman suffered severe burns on her leg when a cherry bomb landed on her lap. At one point, fans rushed a dugout to get on the field, hitting one security guard with a bottle and trampling the other.
• "[It] was the most horrible thing I have ever seen since World War II," Dr. Joseph Finegold, the Pittsburgh Pirates physician, told the paper.
• Two days later came a more ominous front-page headline: "Two Dead in Concert Aftermath." Hundreds of people had been swimming in the rivers before and after the concert, and the morning after, the body of a nude woman, an unemployed school teacher, was found in the Ohio River near Clemente Park.
• "They were all hopped up on dope and booze and running around exposing themselves. When they had to relieve themselves, they just did it in the lot. They didn't care who was watching."
• Still, five days later, Mayor Pete Flaherty laid down the law. If there were going to be any more rock concerts at the stadium, he said, they had to be seven hours max, the gates had to open earlier, there had to be more portable toilets, and drunks and druggies weren't getting in.

To review boys and girls- 54,000 hopped up drunks rioting and exposing themselves to a great soundtrack, all for the price of a gameday beer. And not 1 report of someone bustin a cap.

Oh, and seriously dude, "[It] was the most horrible thing I have ever seen since World War II,"?? Good thing you haven't been around PNC for the carnage the last 16 years.