Tampa’s Curtis Hixon Hall made music history

Aug 14, 2023

Published

on

By

Part 1 of 2

It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, but Curtis Hixon Hall – the boxy, 62,000 square foot convention center on Ashley Street in downtown Tampa – was ground zero for rock, pop and country music concerts for decades.

The arrival of bigger, more comfortable venues, of varying capacities, rendered Curtis Hixon Convention Hall (as it was formally known) obsolete. The building was demolished in 1993, and the land given over to the Tampa Museum of Art, the Glazer Children’s Museum and Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.

But if those walls were still there, boy, could they talk. So much rock ‘n’ roll history was made in the 8,000-seat-capacity main hall, including the bay area debuts of Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Yes, The Eagles, Ozzy Osbourne, the Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, James Taylor, Carole King, Cat Stevens, Alice Cooper, Supertramp and Van Halen.

Many of those acts soon graduated to stadium concerts, performing for tens of thousands at once.

Curtis Hixon Hall. Postcard image.

Until the larger Tampa Convention Center was built in 1990, Curtis Hixon Hall was the city’s destination for trade shows, home shows, boat shows, fashion shows, dog shows, cat shows, garden shows, bridal shows, graduations, the circus, Christian evangelist crusades, political rallies, Holiday on Ice, Ice Capades, Lipizzaner Stallions, Sesame Street Live, basketball, wrestling, boxing, closed-circuit boxing and more sporting events. Uri Geller once bent a few spoons there. Because there was no proscenium arch, and no fly space or backstage as such, big theatrical productions were out.

As rock music became big business, in the late 1960s, there were fans to thrill – and money to be made.

Convention centers, said longtime Florida concert promoter John Valentino, now Senior Vice President at AEG Live, were not ideal. But scheduling – working around the other events – sometimes made Curtis Hixon “the only alternative,” given the available dates on an artist’s touring calendar. “So we made it work. If you wanted to play the market, those were your options.”

Curtis Hixon Hall was named for the mayor of Tampa from 1943 to 1956 (Hixon died while still in office). The city of Tampa spent $5 million, financed through the sale of municipal bonds, and the multi-room event space opened Jan. 25, 1965 with the Benny Goodman band.

This was just four months before the debut of the similarly-sized Bayfront Center Arena across the bay in St. Petersburg. The Bayfront was a competitor, in that rock and pop shows were also booked there, but Tampa – more centrally located, and right on the interstate highway – was where concert promoters preferred to do business, at least in those nascent days

Valentino, who began promoting shows in 1970s South Florida, recalled that a tour going from Atlanta to New Orleans to Dallas would lose money by bringing the company all the way south to Miami for just one show. “These bus and truck tours, they’re expensive,” he noted. “And they can’t take a lot of days off.” For booking agents planning tours, therefore, Tampa Bay was not always high on the priority list.

Over time, that began to change. “Give me four or five dates, and I’ll build in another week,” the agent would tell the promoter.

“So we had to go out and create a circuit,” Valentino said, “and find places to do shows. Maybe Tampa on the way in, then Miami, Orlando on the way out, maybe Jacksonville. It was built out of necessity.”

Curtis Hixon, which unlike the St. Pete venue could be re-configured for more intimate needs, using curtains and moveable grandstands, was rarely dark during the “classic rock” heyday of the 1970s.

“Artists always want to play the places they can fill up,” Valentino said. “Curtis Hixon was pretty much the mid-size place to go.”

There were, naturally, smaller ad-hoc concert venues in the area, including the University of Tampa’s McKay Auditorium, the University of South Florida Gym, Fort Homer Hesterly Armory and the 2,000-seat Bayfront Theatre (now known as the Mahaffey Theater). The Tampa Jai-Alai Fronton and the Agora Ballroom became concert venues in the late ’70s. Unless an act could fill Tampa Stadium (as many eventually did), Curtis Hixon was the biggest of them all.

The drift began with the arrival of the Lakeland Civic Center (now known as the RP Funding Center) in 1974. Promoters liked this 8,000-seater because it was halfway between the Tampa and Orlando markets, and drew ticket-buyers from both.

USF’s state-of-the-art Sun Dome (now known as the Yuengling Center), with a capacity of 10,000, opened in 1980. And the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center (now known as the David A. Straz Center) made its debut – within spitting distance of Curtis Hixon Hall – seven years later. The center’s Morsani Hall seats 2,610.

Clearwater’s Ruth Eckerd Hall (2,100 seats) opened in 1983.

Curtis Hixon had a well-publicized rat problem in 1980, and was later tented for termites, but the arrival of those newer, more comfortable concert venues was the death knell for the aging venue.

The Ice Palace (now known as Amalie Arena) was dedicated in 1996, long after Curtis Hixon Hall was dust.

Among the hundreds of concerts held at Curtis Hixon Hall between 1965 and 1987 (the year the neighboring Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center arrived), rock ‘n’ roll history was made numerous times. Here’s a rundown of the most famous incidents:

11-23-68 Jimi Hendrix Experience. This was Hendrix’s second appearance at Curtis Hixon in 1968; he’d sold it out in August, and returned promoting the just-released Electric Ladyland album. The venue was near capacity, with 7,000 excited fans. Attendees and newspaper reviews noted he appeared tired – or was he high? – and didn’t seem to put a lot of energy into the music. Popping flashbulbs annoyed him, he told the audience. During “Purple Haze,” Hendrix stopped singing altogether, and turned his back to the audience. When it was over, he put down his guitar, flipped the audience his middle finger, and strode offstage. He never returned to Tampa Bay.

Joplin under arrest. Tampa police photo.

11-16-69 Janis Joplin. Perhaps Curtis Hixon’s most famous concert found the troubled rock and blues singer protesting police treatment of the “kids” by the front of the stage. She had started singing the sensual “Summertime” when a cop, using a bullhorn, ordered them to sit down. Joplin exploded. “Don’t f— with these people! Hey mister, what are you so uptight about? Did you buy a five dollar ticket?” When someone in her crew suggested she ask the fans herself to sit down, she said “I’m not telling them shit!” And that was enough for the security force. Joplin was arrested after her performance, handcuffed and hand-delivered to the city jail, charged with two counts of using indecent language. Promoter Phil Gernhard posted her $500 bond and she was out in an hour, returning four days later for her preliminary hearing. Joplin did not show up for her trial in May, 1970, and from all accounts the whole thing simply “went away.” She died of a drug overdose that October.

Bootleg CD of an audience recording

12-1-70 Derek & the Dominos. Gernhard was forbidden from billing this as an Eric Clapton concert – it was Derek & the Dominos, plain and simple. Clapton and company had recorded the just-released Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs album in Miami, where they were joined in the studio by incendiary slide guitarist Duane Allman. He was not part of the band, and not part of the cross-country tour. However, Allman – who happened to be in the bay area at the time – turned up at Curtis Hixon and played the entire show, his lead guitar intertwining with Clapton’s on blues chestnuts and songs from the album. Allman got on the band’s bus and played the next night in Syracuse, N.Y., but that was it: Only two shows, ever, as a fully-fledged Domino. He was dead less than a year later. An audience recording exists.

8-25-73 Cheech and Chong. America’s favorite stoner comedians “used obscenities and simulated masturbation while on the stage,” according to a sworn complaint by the building manager and nine members of the Tampa police department, who by God were there and saw the whole thing. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong were arrested in their dressing room and brought to headquarters, where they mugged for photographers, paid the $502 bond (each) and beat it out of town.

Bootleg CD of an audience recording.

7-2-74 David Bowie. Even by Bowie standards, the Diamond Dogs tour was over-the-top theatrical. Wrote the Memphis Commercial Appeal a few days prior: “It’s when he sings to a telephone in a suspended chair 20 feet above an inviting crowd, or when he strokes the thumb of a six-foot hand bedecked with blinking lights, that the entertained know it is no run-of-the-mill rock show.” That’s not what the Tampa crowd saw, however: The tractor-trailer containing the sets, props and costumes ran off I-75 on the way south from Atlanta (that was the official story, anyway), into a swamp and a “nest of rattlesnakes.” It could not be extracted in time. Rather than cancel, Bowie and company opted to do the show bare-bones, without bells, whistles or choreography. It was the only such performance on the world tour, and a grateful Bowie played an encore – something else he didn’t do anywhere else. An audience recording exists.

1-23-77 Bob Seger, Patti Smith Group. Seger was on top of the rock world at the time, and having the New York “punk poetess” open shows for him was questionable at best. The audience … did not love her. Smith’s Curtis Hixon set ended abruptly when, during a “dervish” spin, she tripped on a floor monitor and fell off the stage, seven feet to the concrete convention center floor, and fractured her skull and several vertebrae in her neck, requiring 52 stitches at Tampa General Hospital. She spent the next year in a brace, during which she had a big hit with Bruce Springsteen’s “Because the Night.” Fast-forward to July 7, 1978: Smith returned, brace-free, for what should have been a victory lap at Curtis Hixon. Instead, her own opening act – the up-and-coming Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – had the crowd on its feet and cheering. By the time Smith’s set was half over, most of the modest crowd had already left.

SATURDAY IN THE CATALYST: Part 2 – The concerts (a complete listing 1965-87)

Lopez Lauren

August 4, 2023at3:52 pm

I was at that Jimi Hendrix concert. I was 14 years old. WOW.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Add your idea below. Review Catalyst posting guidelines here.

Name *

Email *

Subscribe to the St Pete Catalyst Daily Spark newsletter

By posting a comment, I have read, understand and agree to the Posting Guidelines.

Δ

Get the latest right to your phone

Name

Email

Subscribe

Company bringing factory-built homes acquires dozens of sites

Places This Week: First look at Olivia; Hampton hotel sells

September networking event will have a rock soundtrack