Pop, rock, jazz schedule Tanglewood 2016

Epic rock concerts at Tanglewood

While Tanglewood, established in the 1930s by Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Serge Koussevitsky, is first and foremost about classical music, in performance, education, and training, since 1968, it also has hosted folk, jazz, rock, and pop concerts. Established during Erich Leinsdorf’s tenure as a way of broadening the Tanglewood audience, the initial performers – Judy Collins, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ravi Shanka, and The Association were followed the next year by Janis Joplin, Iron Butterfly and the start of two years of productions by legendary promoter Bill Graham, dubbed The Fillmore at Tanglewood. Triple bills such as The Who, Jefferson Airplane and B.B. King gave Tanglewood status beyond the blue-stockin longhair set, but so aroused the neighbors that something had to be done.

And so no shows were held in 1972 and from 1973 on, bookings were limited to acts and artists that unlikely to attract a rowdy crowd. Among the effects of several lawsuits were in-concert decibel monitoring. Outright bans followed for some periods, and related controversies continued into the new century, when a hard limit of 18,500 was put on ticket sales in the wake of a James Taylor appearance with the Boston Pops in 2002 that drew 24,470 patrons.