The bills.

Trinity Cathedral

• The BeansBill Spooner’s band

Two years before The Tubes existed, Bill Spooner was running The Beans out of Phoenix with Vince Welnick on keys. This poster is one of the few surviving artifacts from that era — the band would load into a truck for San Francisco, merge with the Red, White & Blues Band, and come out the other side as something else entirely.

San Francisco Art Institute

• The TubesCafeteria · art show

The band formed on March 22, 1972, and one of the very first Tubes shows was in the Art Institute cafeteria — playing an art show mounted by a classmate of Prairie Prince and Michael Cotten named Kathryn Bigelow, who would go on to direct The Hurt Locker and become the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.

The Village

• The TubesHeadliner · 3 nights

Journey’s manager Herbie Herbert cut a deal with Bill Graham: sell out three local shows, and Graham would hand over an opening slot of Herbert’s choosing. The band booked a club called the Village and sold it out three times with themed nights built on post-hippie San Francisco — The Streaker’s Ball and Mondo Bondage. Earlier still, they had played bills with The Pointer Sisters and Sylvester. Herbert collected on the bet by picking the biggest show on the calendar.

BGP handbill · “supporting acts to be announced”

Bill Graham Presents handbill, Kezar Stadium, Golden Gate Park, 1973

Kezar Stadium

• Led ZeppelinHeadliner
• Roy HarperSupport
• The TubesSupport
• Lee MichaelsSupport

The show that changed everything — and nearly ended everything. Two years before their first record deal, The Tubes walked onto a stadium stage in their own backyard ahead of Led Zeppelin at the peak of the band’s powers. Fee Waybill went out as an early version of Quay Lewd, hurling flour and candy into the crowd as “cocaine” and “pills,” and the crowd threw it back. Bill Graham was furious, telling manager Herbie Herbert the band would never play San Francisco again. He got over it: within a year Graham was booking them at Winterland for New Year’s and Halloween.

The handbill tells you exactly where the band stood that spring. It advertises Led Zeppelin, Kezar Stadium, Saturday 2 June, gates at ten, Zeppelin on at two, six dollars in advance and seven at the gate — and underneath, in place of a lineup: “plus supporting acts to be announced.” The Tubes were one of those unannounced acts. Four hours later they had played to fifty thousand people and Bill Graham was threatening to run them out of San Francisco.

Concert Archives →

Matrix handbill · Sept 1973

Original handbill (AOR 4.16) · via rockposters.com

The Matrix

• New York DollsHeadliner · S.F. debut
• The TubesSupport
• Pristine ConditionSupport
• Naiomi Ruth EisenburgSupport

Three months after Kezar, and the handbill still doesn’t need to explain who The Tubes are — it just draws their logo in a starburst. This was the New York Dolls’ San Francisco debut, three nights at the Matrix on Broadway, and the two bands made a lot of sense together: glam, trash, theatre, and a complete lack of interest in what rock was supposed to look like in 1973.

Admission $2.50. All ages welcome; under-21s had a two-drink minimum.

On stage · Halloween 1974

Still from footage of the show, Winterland, 31 October 1974

Winterland Ballroom

• The TubesAct 1
• CrossfireAct 2

Billed as a Halloween Masquerade Ball. Bill Graham had been wary of the band after Kezar; he got over it, and Halloween at Winterland became a Tubes institution — the one night of the year when a stage show built on costume, spectacle and bad taste needed no explaining to anybody.

Bill Graham Foundation archive →

Winterland Ballroom

• KissHeadliner
• The TubesSupport
• RushSupport

Kiss on the Dressed to Kill tour, The Tubes and a young Rush underneath them, and a line down Steiner Street. The photograph is the Winterland marquee itself on the day — TONIGHT / KISS / TUBES  RUSH — which makes it one of the few surviving bills for a Tubes show that exists as a photograph rather than a print.

Concert Archives →

New Year’s Eve · Winterland 1975

Winterland, San Francisco, 31 December 1975

Winterland Ballroom

• The TubesAct 1
• Flo & EddieAct 2
• Eddie MoneyAct 3

Six months after opening for Kiss in the same room, The Tubes closed out 1975 headlining it — their debut album out, “White Punks on Dope” already a local anthem. KSAN broadcast the whole thing live across the Bay Area, and the tape survives.

Hear the KSAN broadcast →  ·  Bill Graham Foundation archive →

“An Evening With” · June 1977

Original poster, Whistle Stop Productions, design by Jan Wick · via rockposters.com

Paramount Theatre

• The TubesAn Evening With

Five months before London, a full-evening headline show on the West Coast — no support, just the band and the production, $7.50 in advance and $8.50 on the day. The poster treats the eight of them as a single silk-screened wall of faces in purple and yellow, which is about right for where the band’s identity had got to by 1977.

Now the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The poster carries no city; it is placed in Portland by its ticket outlets — Meier & Frank, Lipman’s, Stevens & Son — all Portland businesses.

The Tubes · 1977

Bag-O-Bucks Management / A&M Records, 1977 · public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hammersmith Odeon

• The TubesHeadliner · 6 nights

The Tubes booked a week at one of London’s most storied theatres and sold out all six nights — a run the band’s manager Rikki Farr had promoted, with some cheek, as “America’s Answer to Punk.” The shows were recorded across November 1977 and released as What Do You Want From Live the following February: the stage show at its absolute peak, ending each night with Quay Lewd crushed to death under a giant stack of fake speakers. NME’s verdict on the tour became the band’s epitaph in Britain — “They came, they outraged, they conquered.”

“Guildhall bans The Tubes”

Contemporary press report by Keith Howitt, Portsmouth, November 1977

Portsmouth Guildhall

• The TubesCancelled by the council

Five members of Portsmouth’s Leisure Services Committee — average age 47 — travelled to Birmingham to watch the band and decide for themselves. They came back and banned the show in half an hour.

The vote went four to one. “The sexual simulation was too explicit, the violence unnecessary and the language bad,” said Charles Mos, who allowed that the audience had been well behaved and the performance “electrifying,” but wouldn’t want his two teenage daughters to see it. Mrs Elsie Fudge, 63, a magistrate, thought the music good and the sex scenes “totally unnecessary.” Donald Gray, 66, was convinced the audience “would have applauded just as much if the dirty parts had been left out.”

The one dissenter was the youngest, 30-year-old Terry Gregory: “The music was fantastic — out of this world. There was nothing in the act that was as obscene as we were led to believe.” He was backed by the city’s own entertainments manager, Roy Radford, the man who had booked the group: “Everyone in the audience enjoyed it without any doubt at all.” They were outvoted. The ban made national news, which did ticket sales everywhere else no harm at all.

The Guildhall got them in the end. Its own history of the decade lists the band among the venue’s visitors in July 1979 — filed, a little grudgingly, as “the American punk (ish) band the Tubes.”

Official programme · 50p

Official concert programme, Knebworth, 9 September 1978 · scans via the AFKA Zappa scrapbook archive

The running order · Tubes last

Knebworth Park

• Frank ZappaJoint headliner
• The TubesJoint headliner · closed the show
• Peter GabrielSupport
• The Boomtown RatsSupport
• Dave EdmundsSupport
• Nick LoweSupport
• Wilko Johnson’s Solid SendersSupport

Billed, gloriously, as “Oh God, Not Another Boring Old Knebworth.” Zappa and The Tubes were announced as joint headliners — the official programme puts both names on one line, at the same size. The running order printed inside settles who finished the night: Wilko Johnson, Rockpile, the Boomtown Rats, Peter Gabriel, Frank Zappa, and then The Tubes, closing the festival in front of roughly 45,000 people. Peter Gabriel spent his set climbing the stage scaffolding with a large stuffed panda. One of the great strange bills of the decade, and the high-water mark of the band’s standing in Britain.

UK Rock Festivals archive →

Chateau Neuf, Oslo · 29.11.77

Photo © Helge Øverås, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chateau Neuf

• The TubesHeadliner

Straight off the Hammersmith run, the band pushed on into Europe. This photograph from the Oslo show is one of the few freely licensed images of The Tubes on stage anywhere — the full production still intact, weeks before the tour turned into a front-page argument about what British councils would allow.

“Five performances only”

Pantages Theatre poster, Hollywood, February 1978

Pantages Theatre

• The TubesFive performances · nightly at 8:30

Five nights on Hollywood Boulevard at Vine, billed as “Five Performances Only” with a gala opening night on the 22nd — please dress accordingly. The poster also trails what was coming: “watch for The Tubes’ upcoming live double album, What Do You Want From Live.” The Hammersmith tapes were about to land.

The run drew Cher, Gene Simmons, Kate Jackson and the cast of Laverne & Shirley. The set by then included a staged bomb-threat routine called “The Terrorists of Rock” — convincing enough that Cher fled the theatre believing it was real. She later asked the band to appear on her TV special.

De Montfort Hall · 9 May 1978

Ticket stub, De Montfort Hall, Leicester · Straight Music · £3.00

De Montfort Hall

• The TubesHeadliner · cut short

The band went back to Europe to build on the Hammersmith breakthrough and got as far as Leicester, where Fee Waybill fell off the stage and broke his leg. The rest of the tour was cancelled; they returned to play the dates that autumn, and went straight from them to Knebworth.

A stall seat cost £3, VAT included, doors at half past seven, promoted by Straight Music — the same firm that would bring them back to Britain the following year. The small print absolves Leicester City Council of liability for any damage to the ticketholder’s property during the evening. It makes no provision for the singer.

UK itinerary · May 1979

A&M Records tour advertisement · via the Packet of Three Squeeze archive

Opening night · Glasgow Apollo

Ticket stub, Apollo Glasgow, 11 May 1979 · Straight Music · £4.00

UK tour · seven nights at Hammersmith

• The TubesHeadliner
• SqueezeGuests

Seventeen dates behind Remote Control, the Todd Rundgren–produced concept record about television eating the culture — and seven straight nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, 21 to 27 May, eighteen months after the six-night run that produced What Do You Want From Live.

Squeeze came along as guests, riding “Cool for Cats,” though the tour ad notes they sat out the two-show nights at Newcastle, Manchester and Birmingham. The full run: Glasgow Apollo, Edinburgh Odeon, Newcastle City Hall, Liverpool Empire, Manchester Odeon, Birmingham Odeon, Bristol Colston Hall, Hammersmith Odeon × 7, Leicester De Montfort Hall, Southampton Gaumont and Brighton Centre. The ad signs off in the album’s own voice: PROGRAM TERMINATED. ENDS.

A surviving stub from the opening night pins it down: Apollo, Glasgow, Friday 11 May 1979, doors at 7.30, presented by Straight Music. A seat in the circle cost £4.

YMO in Los Angeles · August 1979

Yellow Magic Orchestra outside Madame Wong’s, LA Chinatown, where they played on 6 August 1979 — two days after closing the Greek run

Greek Theatre

• The TubesHeadliner · 3 nights
• Yellow Magic OrchestraSpecial guests

One of the more improbable pairings of the era, and a genuinely historic one. Yellow Magic Orchestra — Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, then in the middle of inventing most of electronic pop — opened all three nights. These were YMO’s first performances outside Japan. They flew in as an unknown quantity supporting an American art-rock band and went home on their way to changing the sound of the next decade.

They came as a six-piece — Hosono, Sakamoto and Takahashi with Akiko Yano, Kazumi Watanabe and Hideki Matsutake. Recordings from the run went onto Public Pressure the following February, and the final night was later released in full as YMO Live At The Greek Theatre 08/04/1979, mixed from the original multitracks. The Tubes’ own set from the run came out on home video in 1982.

Two days after the last Greek night they played Madame Wong’s, the restaurant and floorshow in LA Chinatown — a room several orders of magnitude smaller. The photograph above was taken on its doorstep.