Archbishop Kennedy hosted The Hooters

Really, Thirty Years Ago

Archbishop Kennedy Hosted The Hooters

By Jack Coll

It was a bitter cold January night back in 1985 when more than 1300 students packed the Tracey Hall Gymnasium at Archbishop Kennedy High school to see the rock band the Hooters. The school with the help of the student council booked the band just as they were exploding onto the national music scene.

The Philadelphia based band had released their first album “Amore” a year earlier and got airplay with songs like “Fightin’ on the Same Side,” “Hanging on a Heartbeat,” and a song that keyboard player Rob Hyman co-wrote with Cyndi Lauper that appeared on her album “She’s so Unusual” called “Time After Time,” where the Hooters played back-up, the song was nominated for a ”Grammy” music award.

The band played a large selection of new songs that night off an album they released two months after playing Kennedy called “Nervous Night” that album charted at number 12 on the Billboard Hits list and went multi-platinum in the United States and Gold in Canada.  The “Nervous Night” album produced singles like “All You Zombies,” “And We Danced,” and “Day By Day.”  The band took the radio and MTV by storm getting airplay on the regular rotation.

Just six months after playing Archbishop Kennedy the Hooters were on the world stage when they opened the Philadelphia portion of the benefit concert called Live Aid.  Live Aid was a benefit concert held for the ongoing Ethiopian Famine, the all day concert was held at John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia Pa., and at Wembley Stadium in London, England, United Kingdom.  More than 100,000 people attended the concert in Philadelphia where temperatures reached into the mid 90’s, you may recall Philadelphia Fire trucks spraying down the crowd and another 72,000 music fans attended the concert in London.  On the same day, all day concerts took place in other countries such as Australia and Germany.  It was the largest-scale satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time: an estimated global audience of nearly two billion viewers across 150 nations watched the live broadcast and at 9:00 A. M. the Philadelphia based band, booked by music promoter Billy Graham, The Hooters took the stage.

The band played “And We Danced,” a song that reached number 21 on the US charts and number 3 on the Canadian charts, and they also played “All You Zombies.” The 16 hour long concert on both sides of the pond lasted just over 16 hours and raised nearly 300 million dollars.

The Hooters follow-up album to “Nervous Night” was the successful “One Way Home” which produced the singles “Where Do The Children Go,” “Johnny B,” and “Satellite” which all scored air play on MTV.

The bands success led them to play a concert in Europe where they played at The Wall in Berlin in 1990.

On January 18, 1985, I stood in the audience at Kennedy’s gym snapping pictures of the band, I knew who they were, but didn’t realize the global impact they were about to make.  I remember the excitement on the student’s faces and the dancing and swaying in the crowded gym.  The band was fabulous that night, I remember Eric Bazilian, lead singer and Rob Hyman on keyboards looking like rock stars, Andy King and John Lilly on guitars and David Uosikkinen on drums.  Man they had a sound, a good sound, you just knew then that they were going places, we didn’t know they were going around the world.

The funny thing is they never really left Conshohocken, three of the band members still live in Conshohocken and West Conshohocken.  You just might spot Eric Bazilian at Vince Tatoro’s restaurant on Spring Mill Avenue checking in for his lunchtime sandwich, Rob Hyman still has a studio on Elm Street, and West Conshohocken resident David Uosikkinen spends a lot of time with his side band “In the Pocket” at Studio Four located on East Second Avenue and I recently saw him at the opening of Pudge’s Restaurant.

From Conshohocken, to the Country, to the world, the Hooters are an internationally successful band, from the time they agreed to play Archbishop Kennedy High School to the time of the appearance at Kennedy, the band exploded and could have cancelled Kennedy, but they kept their word, something hard to find in rock and roll, and for that we thank them for making us one of their stops to a very successful career.

As for the students who attended that concert back in 1985, well I’m guessing a lot of you are pushing 40 years of age, perhaps with kids of your own, pushing out into that work week.  Take a moment to reflect, Archbishop Kennedy Spirit Days, pep rallies, Friday night football and Kennedy’s cafeteria, your memories will get you through.

It’s Thanksgiving, a time for reunions, call someone you haven’t talked to in a while, they’ll be glad to hear from you.  While chewing the fat you might want to ask, “Hey, did you go to the Hooters concert back in 1985”, you’ll have a lot to talk about.  And for the record, school officials were nervous about the concert, very nervous, concerned about students behavior not only Kennedy students but students from other schools that attended that night, it was fun to watch them sweat.

Thirty years ago, Thanks for the memories.