Over the years, I have seen several high-profile comedians in concert. The first of these was Steve Martin. Steve came to my attention with his appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970’s. I memorized his comedy routines from his first album Let’s Get Small and would share them with my friends who were also Steve Martin fans. I was happy when I heard the news of a concert appearance on April 7, 1978 in Memphis at the Ellis Auditorium North Hall.
On the way to the concert, my friends and I stopped at a Peaches record store. This was my first ever trip to a deep catalog music store. As a fan of comedy albums, I was impressed to find a store with a comedy section that had more selection than just George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Cheech and Chong and Bill Cosby’s Greatest Hits. I bought a copy of Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks 2000 and Thirteen, the 4th album in their 2000 Year Old Man series.
Steve Martin did two shows that night and our tickets were for the late show. You could feel the energy of the anxious crowd as we waited on the sidewalk outside the theater. When the crowd from the first show spilled out the doors, we asked them what the show was like and they said it was great. It probably didn’t matter how good he was, this audience was going to be happy just to see him.
Singer/songwriter Steve Goodman was the opening act. Even if you never heard his name before, you have heard of a couple of his songs. He wrote City of New Orleans, made famous by Arlo Guthrie and You Never Even Call Me By My Name popularized by David Allan Coe. Although the ads for the show said that Steve Goodman would be the opening act, the crowd was not in the mood to listen to him. While there were no boos, there were people shouting from the crowd to bring out Steve Martin and cheers after these pleas. The crowd was more polite when Goodman was singing one of his famous songs. I felt bad for him but was happy when it he was done.
Before Steve came out on stage, they showed his short film, The Absent-Minded Waiter, which had lost a Best Live Action Short Film Academy Award earlier that week. I had heard of the film even before that but never imagined that I would ever get to see it. It is a great 7-minute film with Buck Henry and Terri Garr that can easily be found on YouTube.
Steve’s performance included all the routines that I was familiar with from his TV appearances and his first album. It also included familiar routines that would appear later that year on his second album, A Wild and Crazy Guy. I was literally rolling in the floor at several points in the show. At the end of the concert, he performed King Tut, the hit novelty song that was included on the second album. This was about two weeks before he would sing it on Saturday Night Live in a memorable performance.
40 years later, I would see Steve Martin with Martin Short in Memphis at the historic Orpheum Theater. Steve would mistakenly claim that he had appeared on that same stage 40 years earlier, maybe because the Ellis Auditorium is no longer there.
