Latest news with #CoboArena
Yahoo
23-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Detroit's fallen stadiums: What happened to Cobo Arena?
This is Part 3 of a six-part series looking back at the arenas and stadiums that housed some of Detroit's greatest teams over the past century. Come back to every day this week for more historic Detroit sports site memories. Cobo Arena stood on some of the most historic land in Detroit and only added to that history. Allegedly built on the spot where the first French settler of the city, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, claimed the land for King Louis XIV in 1701, Cobo was constructed by the city in 1960. It was named after deceased Detroit Mayor Albert E. Cobo, who pushed for the construction of the arena as well as the convention hall attached to it. Detroit Pistons owner Fred Zollner moved his NBA franchise – newly arrived from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1957 – from Olympia Stadium, on Grand River to the newly constructed Cobo Arena at the corner of Jefferson and Washington along the Detroit River for the beginning of the 1961-62 NBA season. The Pistons were a franchise constantly struggling to remain afloat, but Cobo wasn't the issue. In 1990, Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum wrote, 'There was something special about Cobo, an intimacy, a connection with the essence of the game (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, no fan of fans, once called those in Cobo the most knowledgeable in the league) and, above all, a kind of bad-dude charm.' The Pistons played at Cobo for 17 seasons – winning just two playoff series in nine tries – but they left after the 1977-78 when new owner Bill Davidson decided the team needed to move to the suburbs in order to draw crowds. Pistons games were regularly underattended at Cobo; in an arena that could seat 12,000, the highest average annual attendance was 7,492 in 1974-75, and wealthy suburbanites were wary to come downtown. So, the team moved to the gargantuan Pontiac Silverdome, already home to the NFL's Detroit Lions. Of the first game at the Silverdome, The Michigan Daily's Ernie Dunbar wrote, '[T]he crowd at last night's Piston game was predominantly white. … This is exactly what the Pistons hoped for when they announced their move-the financial support of the suburbs. The argument for not supporting the Pistons at Cobo was that Detroit is not safe at night. Well, now the more generally affluent suburbanites must feel that Pontiac is safe, as they turned out in record numbers to the tune of 13,688." Cobo couldn't beat numbers like that. When Davidson's widow, Karen, sold the team to Platinum Equity chairman Tom Gores in 2011, the team stayed in the suburbs. It was only in 2017 that Gores reached an agreement with Olympia Entertainment to bring the Pistons back downtown, but he wasn't bringing them back to Cobo. Cobo survived for as long as it did because of the versatility of the building. An arena attached to a convention center, Cobo could host any sort of event. The horseshoe shape of the arena and its acoustics made it perfect for concerts. Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, KISS and the Rolling Stones were just some of the names that performed there over the years. The current convention center still hosts the Detroit Auto Show each year, as it has since 1965. The arena might be most well-known for being the site of the 'Whack Heard 'Round the World,' figure skater Tonya Harding's attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. The event was held next door at Joe Lous Arena, but practices were held at Cobo Arena. While leaving Cobo after practice on Jan. 6, 1994 Kerrigan was hit on the right thigh with a baton by Shane Stant, an associate of Harding. The aftermath of the attack, with Kerrigan crying, 'Why? Why? Why?' was recorded by a local television crew. Stant went through the glass of one of Cobo's doors as an exit route. Harding won the U.S. title, and a spot in the 1994 Olympics, two days later while Kerrigan watched from the press box. Eventually, Cobo became less popular as a venue as downtown added sites such as Little Caesars Arena and Ford Field. In 2015, the arena was deconstructed internally and renovated to become more convention space. Today, following the sale of sponsorship rights following a review of Cobo's tenure as mayor, and a few bank mergers, it stands as Huntington Place – a testament to Detroit's appeal to tourists, if not to championship sports teams. Contact Matthew Auchincloss at mauchincloss@ The series Come back all week for our series on Detroit's fallen stadiums: July 21: Tiger Stadium. July 22: The Palace of Auburn Hills. July 23: Cobo Arena. July 24: Joe Louis Arena. July 25: Pontiac Silverdome. July 26: Olympia Stadium. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit's fallen stadiums: Cobo Arena
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Iconic '70s Rocker's Shocking Onstage Outburst Has Fans Saying the Same Thing
Iconic '70s Rocker's Shocking Onstage Outburst Has Fans Saying the Same Thing originally appeared on Parade. As the man behind one of the most successful live albums of all time — Frampton Comes Alive! — Peter Frampton definitely knows a thing or two about keeping audiences entertained. And as a recent video proved, the legendary musician has no problem putting disruptive concert-goers in their place — much to the delight of his more respectful fans. In a clip shared to TikTok this week, Frampton, 75, paused in the middle of a live performance to chastise audience members who were apparently talking loudly throughout a song, saying, "Pay attention! I don't want to see you talking all the time." "Why'd you come?" he continued, adding, "Just go sit somewhere else! Cause you're pissing me off." Commenters were quick to praise Frampton for the way he dealt with the situation. "They have the honor and privilege of seeing Peter Frampton and they talk the whole time. Wow," one person wrote, with a second social media user calling noisy audience members their "number one pet peeve." "It must have been really bad for him to react like that. I've seen him in concert and he's pretty chill," somebody pointed out. "Peter Frampton does not love their way. Every day," another fan quipped, as someone else joked, "Frampton comes alive!!!" Considering Frampton has been playing music live onstage for over 50 years, he's surely dealt with his share of unruly crowds over the course of his career. In a 2024 interview with Louder, Frampton reflected on his rapid ascent to mega-stardrom, recalling the moment he realized Frampton Comes Alive! was going to change his life. "1976 was going to be the first headline tour for me," he recalled. "I'd been in the middle position for years, being a great support act. I sold tickets, but I was still playing with other bands. As the album was coming out, I went away to the Bahamas for ten days. Before I left, my agent Frank Barsalona said: 'Guess what? You've sold out a show at Cobo Arena in Detroit.' I couldn't believe it." "Ten days later we've sold out three nights at Cobo," he continued. "That's when I thought: 'Wow, what's going on here?' Comes Alive! was just starting to get played at radio at that point, and it just kind of took off immediately. As for why it turned into what it did, I still don't know."Iconic '70s Rocker's Shocking Onstage Outburst Has Fans Saying the Same Thing first appeared on Parade on Jun 23, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 23, 2025, where it first appeared.
Forbes
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Judas Priest's Decades-Old Live Album Is Finally A Chart Success
Judas Priest's Live in Atlanta '82 debuts at No. 13 on the U.K.'s Rock & Metal Albums chart, giving ... More the band its second new win of 2025. English singer Rob Halford, of the English heavy metal band Judas Priest, sings on stage during the 1982 World Vengeance tour at the Cobo Arena in Detroit, Michigan, September 25, 1982. (Photo by) Judas Priest has been busy in 2025 — not necessarily with brand new music, but by digging into the vault and offering fans what they've been craving: vintage material that still sounds as powerful today as it did decades ago. The legendary metal act is back on the charts in the United Kingdom at the moment with Live in Atlanta '82, a release that was recorded more than 40 years ago, as its title suggests. Judas Priest returns to the Official Rock & Metal Albums chart in the U.K. with Live in Atlanta '82. The project blasts onto the ranking at No. 13 on the genre-specific roster that only tracks the bestselling titles in rock and metal across the nation. Including Live in Atlanta '82, Judas Priest now claims 16 total appearances on the Official Rock & Metal Albums chart. It's the band's second new win of 2025 alone. Just a few months back in February, Rocka Rolla reentered the conversation when it was reissued and made available again. That full-length originally arrived in 1974, and while it wasn't new by any stretch, it was new to the U.K.-based list, as fans of the group sent it to No. 7, though it did disappear just one frame after arriving inside the top 10. Like many of the titles that launch this week in the U.K., Live in Atlanta '82 is a Record Store Day exclusive. The performance was recorded on December 11, 1982, during a stop on the band's World Vengeance Tour. The music had previously only been available on CD as part of the 50 Heavy Metal Years of Music box set, which limited access for some fans. Now, for the first time, the concert has been issued as a standalone release. This week's Official Rock & Metal Albums chart is absolutely packed. An incredible 15 new titles debut, which makes any appearance — even one outside the top 10 — feel like a win. Live in Atlanta '82 lands at No. 13, and yet it is still the ninth-highest arrival of the bunch. Judas Priest trails genre peers like Yes, Motörhead, and Black Sabbath, as well as a somewhat surprising name: Post Malone.
Forbes
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Fender Highlights Customization With New Player II Modification Series
DETROIT - AUGUST 13: American musician, songwriter, producer, and inventor Eddie Van Halen ... More (1955-2020) plays his custom Frankenstrat guitar at Cobo Arena during Van Halen's "Hide Your Sheep Tour" on August 13, 1982, in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Ross Marino/Getty) Put a guitar in the hands of an artist like Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Tom Morello and you have a template, not a finished product. Since Leo Fender started Fender with repairable guitars, that concept of adaptability has been at the core of the Fender guitar. Now the company is bringing that to the forefront with the new Player II Modified series, 'Featuring select electric guitar and bass models enhanced with performance-driven upgrades, Player II Modified offers modern players refined tone, performance, and style straight out of the box,' according to a press release. I spoke with Justin Norvell, EVP of Product, and Jason Klein, Artist Marketing Lead, for an in-depth look at how customization has shaped Fender's history and instruments. Steve Baltin: So where are you guys today? Justin Norvell: I'm LA -based, but I'm in our Arizona office. Jason Klein: I'm in the Kurt Cobain room in our Fender office in LA. Norvell: Our different conference rooms and common rooms, like there are pictures on the wall. There's Nile Rogers, Johnny Marr, we have Clapton, George Harrison, we just name them all instead of some other name for the rooms. Klein: My personal favorite's the Tom Morello editing bay. Baltin: Does Tom ever come in there? Klein: Sure, yeah. Baltin: That actually is a good lead in cause my guess is you get a lot of really cool product ideas and ideas for what you want to do going forward dealing with all these artists who have so many innovative ideas. Norvell: All the way back, Leo Fender was a repair guy. He was a service guy, radio repair guy. So, he decided to build guitars that were repairable. He made a modular, because if you look at an old hollow body, an old jazz guitar, if the neck twists or something happens, it's broken. So, he created this bolted together Henry Ford style guitar, but it was too service. But players took that modularity and were like, 'I can upgrade, change, modify, get a guitar out of a pawn shop, hack the wood out of it and throw different pickups in it and start doing all this different stuff.' That's what's kind of led to this, the modular nature of Fenders, which is unique, has led to modification from Kurt Cobain right behind him had a Jaguar that famously had two big humbuckers in it and he changed the switching and everybody, like most of our signature models, Johnny Marr has a blade switch and different electronics in his and Eric Clapton has a boost circuit in his. It's like a base platform that then you can personalize to your own style and taste, and it can evolve with you too through your life. Klein: Yeah, a lot of the mods can be done DIIY. We had artists like Hendrix and Clapton, who were modifying their three -way switches with matchsticks to create extra spaces and the pickups to up to create more sonic sounds. And then years later, we have the five-way switch. It's just like paying attention to our artists and the changes they make. And it's this great reciprocal thing back and forth. Norvell: It's like crowdsourcing before crowdsourcing existed. Klein: Yeah, particularly just hearing what people are doing with stuff. Then we made modifications to our products based upon what people were doing with them. Baltin: The pawn shops thing is interesting to me because as a music geek I read all these memoirs like Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards, and they can't really afford new guitars, so they'll buy something at a pawn shop and make something out of nothing. I imagine it starts from there. Norvell: Yeah, and a lot of artists throughout their career continue changing and evolving their gear because that never goes away. Experimentation leads to innovation. It's not just 'I want X sound out of my pickups or whatever,' it's literally making changes to the instrument, which can change the way it sounds, it reacts to change the way it feels, and it can build something new. Putting a big beyond a Tele can change [so much]. Everything's all liquid and swimming now and it changes the whole artist's sound or something. Klein: The pawn shop thing is interesting. It's cool to see how genres can actually come out of the ability to obtain certain instruments. The Jazzmaster, for instance, is a very high-end instrument made for jazz, and it was meant to be played a certain way. Then, as it ebbs and flows with musical trends, it became really common in pawn shops. So, then you had all the bands that would create shoegaze and grunge and noise rock buying Jazzmasters and Jaguars cause they were obtainable. And then it creates entire genres and trends from that. It's very cool to see. Baltin: Is there one sound or one thing that emerged that surprised you guys the most and that you got most excited about? Norvell: Yeah, all of that stuff. Distortion, which is now a mainstay of someone's sound was an accident, like amps weren't supposed to drive that hard or whatever. And the tremolo was supposed to approximate a classical guitar player, and it was used for all those whaling solos that Hendrix did. So, all that stuff's crazy. I would say, for Fender, it's the putting a humbucker, which is more like a Gibson style thing, into a Stratocaster or a Telecaster, which created this kind of hybrid instrument. It used to be like Fenders were single coils and were clean. Then there were other brands that did other stuff. Players started taking stuff and hacking openings. Edward Van Halen, his main guitar was kind of a Stratocaster-esque self-built guitar that he very crudely put a humbucker in. That started a whole revolution of modification in the late '70s to this day of people taking routers and drills and stuff to their instruments and it's really its own cottage industry. If you look into it, there are people that sell templates, and they sell all these different things and you can buy any type of Stratocaster aftermarket pickguard with any type of number of different holes or different pickup configurations. There's a whole modification industry that now exists based upon this obsession. Klein: Yeah, and it's still super strong. Speaking to how our guitars are modular and they can be combined, you have artists like Nick Reinhardt who you're speaking with today and Mickey who's creating a new sound by mixing Jaguar and baritone components and then using other preamps to create this sound that is super unique and harkens back to a little bit of a Pink Floyd thing but sounds totally new and really could only be done by combining these two Fender instruments . Baltin: Has there been one that people come to you and you're like 'This is crazy, but it's awesome?' Norvell: I think there are some that really want to deconstruct and modify the instrument deeply. And that's cool, but then when you're talking about Ed Van Halen and Eric Johnson as a guitar player, those people have the kind of dog whistle hearing that is on a different plane. When we were voicing amp's, pickups, guitars with Ed, it was years and it was tiny detail things, but things that they could hear that they were or were not reacting to. And Eric Johnson, I think the first time we did a guitar with him, we went through 69 sets of pickups. He can hear the most subtle things in instruments. I think that's a thing that keeps us honest, as we're kind of testing these things out in the world. But then there's this guitar behind me that's three humbuckers, chrome pickguard and a Strat head stuck on a Tele with a strap tremolo on it. So that's John 5, who played with Rob Zombie and is in Motley Crue right now. So yeah, these things are just platforms for people to express. That right there is the Malcolm Young from AC/DC and it's got holes in it because he pulled the pickups out and it's just open. So, some of it's to upgrade it and make it look beautiful and sometimes it's just a complete Frankenstein garage project. But it's fascinating; it runs the gamut from someone wanting to take a chisel and a hammer to a guitar and make it look really rough; the Sonic Youth guys had these satin finished very not cosmetically like overdone instruments, and then some people go hyper-detailed and hyper-nuanced and want it to be like Strata various to use a pun. Klein: Yeah, and it's cool. I really like seeing how these really big mods and the things that are grand adjustments to a guitar lead to quality-of-life changes in our products as they come out in real time. So, as a bass player myself the preamp and the new player mods is just a major improvement on past preamps where you can blend in passive control, have like a much more refined EQ. Those conversations are through ongoing mods and custom projects and whatever with our bass players and experimenting with preamps until we get to this space where we have the perfect preamp in our player model line. It's this ongoing process of starting really big or granular or making big changes to the instruments and just refining it to a point that it's this great quality-of-life adjustment too. Norvell: This series is reminding people of the modification nature of the instruments and how important it is and how you can very simply make upgrades. Locking tuners, noiseless pickups, different wiring, like treble bleed circuits and stuff like that. That's all stuff that takes a baseline instrument and knocks it up a couple levels. It really is doing as has been done since the earliest days of Fender and it just keeps evolving. Baltin: How does all this tie together for the player mod campaign? Norvell: We're working with Idles and stuff like that. The player series is our best-selling series of instruments. We took the player series and said, 'What are the most desirable or easily upgradable modifications that would be compelling to musicians as that level up if you just want to say this is cool as a base model, but I want something that's a little bit plus.' That's why we're talking about new preamps, active passive bases, we have improved bridges, new different wiring, better pickups, locking tuners, all of that stuff. This is not a vintage replica guitar. This is a modern contemporary taking these classic forms, Strat, Tele, PJ, et cetera, to their contemporary height as products. So, it's like if you took your hot rod in somewhere and said, "Do your thing, this is what someone would do." And then the way that we're taking that out to the world is telling the story of modification as a hallmark of Fender, a hallmark of what our artists have always done to our instruments. Klein: It was important for us to work with artists that embody that. So be it the sounds they're creating and sonically and who their audience is and what they're interested in, but also the individual players in the bands or the ones done with the instruments and our history with them and what we know they do with their guitars. So, it was a very organic fit. Idles, sonically they really do embody this, taking things to a next level by mixing genres, but always keeping the core aggression of being a punk band. And we've been modifying their guitars for years.
