Berlin at Magic Mountain in 1983

Berlin at Magic Mountain

February 20, 1983

Forty years ago this week I was on a family vacation in Southern California and we went to Magic Mountain amusement park. Included with park admission that day was a free concert by Berlin. As every 15-year boy is wont to do, I broke away from the family unit so I could spend a little time walking around the park by myself. Timing my escape to coincide with the start of the show, and already something of a concert veteran, I entered the outdoor amphitheater and walked right up to the lip of the stage where I shook singer Terri Nunn's hand in the middle of a song. I don't remember any of the tunes they played, nor did I stay for the whole show.

With only one full length album and a 7-song EP available at the time it’s safe to assume their set consisted mainly of tunes from those two records of course. I was just a geeky midwestern kid on vacation but somehow I was already aware of who they were in spite of the fact that their initial success on Mtv would not come until later in the year. Best I can figure is 97-X out of Oxford might have been playing them or perhaps I had seen their record in the racks of a mall record store I frequented. At the time, Geffen Records had just picked up the band and it’s likely a major label promotional push managed to find me in the tall grass of Ohio.

At the time of the performance I saw, Berlin was just three months away from being featured at the 1983 US Festival. Safe to say I caught them as their star was rising.

Here is footage of their performance at the US Festival in May 1983:

It was only recently that I found out more about the venue. Known as the Showcase Theater from 1971 until 1992, it was the setting for a great many legendary concerts in its day. You can be certain this venue was where hundreds of SoCal New Wave kids and skate punks caught their first real exposure to the likes of Oingo Boingo, The Tubes, A Flock of Seagulls, INXS, Eurythmics, Joan Jett, R.E.M., the Psychedelic Furs, Missing Persons, Gang of Four, and many more.

Magic Mountain is also the park where KISS filmed a lot of their 1978 made-for-television train wreck of a movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.