On April 9, 1987, every last one of the 7,200 seats in the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena was sold, and Bon Jovi walked out in front of a hometown-loud crowd at the exact moment they were becoming the biggest band in America.
Slippery When Wet had turned them into superstars — “Livin’ on a Prayer” and “You Give Love a Bad Name” were inescapable — and Binghamton had them at full boil, a complete sellout of the downtown arena, the box office receipts filed away at just over a hundred thousand dollars. It was, in fact, the second time in seven months the band had come to Broome County on that tour. Binghamton did not just get Bon Jovi. It got Bon Jovi twice, at the peak.
That is the quiet genius of this Southern Tier city. It is not a major market. Its arena is a workmanlike mid-sized building on the edge of downtown. And yet, for two decades, that building had an uncanny knack for catching the biggest names in music at the exact right moment — sometimes on the way up, sometimes at the very top, and once, on opening night, with a total unknown warming up the stage. This is the story of the greatest concerts Binghamton ever hosted. This is where we prove it.
The rules
The same promise we make in every chapter of this series holds here. Every concert below actually happened, on the date we give, at the venue we name; where the record is contested, we say so. And the venue at the center of this story is the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena, which opened in 1973 and has since been renamed more than once — the Floyd L. Maines Arena, and today Visions Veterans Memorial Arena. Nearly every concert on this list happened under the original Broome County name, so that is what we will mostly call it. One entry, at number three, predates the arena entirely and happened across town, in a college gym. Let’s count down.
10. Reba McEntire — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — November 16, 1991
At the height of her reign as the queen of country music, Reba McEntire brought her show to Binghamton on November 16, 1991, touring behind For My Broken Heart. The setlist that survives is a greatest-hits reel of one of the most successful careers in the genre’s history — “Fancy,” “Whoever’s in New England,” “Somebody Should Leave” — delivered by a performer at the absolute top of her powers. It is a reminder that the Broome County Arena’s golden run was never only about rock and metal: when country’s biggest star came through, she filled the building too. (And keep Reba in mind — her name is going to come up again, in the strangest way, three years later.)
9. Van Halen — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — May 2, 1980
On May 2, 1980, the classic Roth-era Van Halen brought the World Invasion tour to Binghamton — David Lee Roth in full flight, Eddie Van Halen rewriting the rules of the electric guitar, the band touring the one-two punch of their first two albums that had just detonated across rock radio. The proof it happened is wonderfully tangible: a dated ticket stub from this exact show still survives, traded among collectors decades later. Early Van Halen at their most dangerous, in a Southern Tier arena, at the dawn of the decade they would help define.
8. Phish — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — April 9, 1994
Here is the strangest, most charming night in the building’s history.
On April 9, 1994 — seven years to the day after that sold-out Bon Jovi show — Phish sold out the Broome County Arena, at the very moment they were graduating from clubs to theaters to arenas. And according to the story that Binghamton fans have told ever since, the arena’s marquee out front still carried the name of a previous headliner: “REBA McENTIRE,” it read, with “PHISH — SOLD OUT” tacked underneath. Reba had played the building in 1991. Some believe that accidental marquee is exactly why the band chose to drop “Reba” — one of their most beloved compositions — into the setlist that night. A jam band, a country legend’s leftover marquee, and an inside joke that became local legend. Only in Binghamton.
7. Rush — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — 1975 to 1992
No band ever loved Binghamton quite like Rush loved Binghamton.
The Canadian power trio played the Broome County Arena eight separate times between 1975 and 1992 — an extraordinary loyalty for a mid-market building that far bigger cities could not claim. They first came through in December 1975, kept coming back through the Hold Your Fire tour stop in November 1987, and returned as late as 1992; a 1976 Binghamton show still circulates among collectors as a prized audience tape. For a certain kind of Southern Tier music fan, “we’re going to see Rush at the arena” was simply a recurring fact of life across two decades. That kind of bond between a legendary band and an unglamorous room is its own kind of greatness.
6. Alice Cooper — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — July 15, 1975
The city tried to ban Alice Cooper. It did not work, and the show became legend.
In the early 1970s, alarmed by Cooper’s theatrical stage show — the simulated guillotine, the live snake, the mock violence — Binghamton’s city officials moved to bar him from performing, and by Cooper’s own telling, Binghamton was the first city in America ever to ban him. Public pressure reversed the decision, and on July 15, 1975, Cooper brought the full Welcome to My Nightmare spectacle to the Broome County Arena as scheduled — the guillotine, the works, in front of a crowd that had, in effect, fought for the right to see it. A city that tried to shut the show down and then packed the building to watch it: that is a Binghamton story if there ever was one.
5. Kiss — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — November 29, 1984
Some concerts are footnotes in rock history, and this one is a genuinely poignant footnote.
When Kiss brought the Animalize tour to Binghamton on November 29, 1984, the man on lead guitar was Mark St. John — a dazzling player who had joined the band that spring, only to be struck almost immediately by reactive arthritis that swelled his hands and made playing agony. Binghamton was the very last full concert Mark St. John ever played with Kiss. He managed only two complete shows with the band — Poughkeepsie the night before, and Binghamton this night — before the condition forced him out; within weeks, Bruce Kulick had the job permanently. A brilliant, doomed tenure in one of the biggest bands in the world, and its final full night happened here. (Not to be confused with Kiss’s other 1984 Binghamton stop that spring, on the Lick It Up tour — a different night, a different guitarist.)
4. Metallica — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — April 12, 1992
By the spring of 1992, Metallica were no longer the scrappy thrash upstarts of a decade earlier — the self-titled “Black Album” had made them the biggest metal band on the planet, and on April 12 they brought the Wherever I May Roam tour to Binghamton for three hours of it. The full show was filmed and still circulates today. This was Metallica at the exact hinge of their career, the moment they crossed over from the underground into stadiums and the mainstream, and Binghamton got a full-throttle night of it — “Enter Sandman,” “Master of Puppets,” and the rest, at ear-splitting peak.
3. The Grateful Dead — Harpur College — May 2, 1970
Three years before the arena even existed, the greatest concert in the county’s history happened in a college gymnasium.
On May 2, 1970, the Grateful Dead played the men’s gym at Harpur College — now Binghamton University — and delivered a five-and-a-half-hour, three-set marathon: an acoustic Dead set, a set from the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and a long electric Dead set to close. The tape was so good that it was eventually released, commercially, as Dick’s Picks Volume 8 — one of the crown jewels of the Dead’s official archival series, and once voted the number-six favorite Dead tape of all time in a poll of the band’s obsessive tapers. A legendary, professionally documented night by the most beloved touring band in America, captured forever, in a Binghamton college gym. Nothing else in this county’s history is quite so enshrined.
2. Bruce Springsteen (opening for Chicago) — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — June 13, 1973
The very first rock concert ever held in the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena had, as its opening act, a completely unknown twenty-three-year-old from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen.
On June 13, 1973 — the brand-new arena’s inaugural rock show — Springsteen and an early version of the E Street Band opened for Chicago, playing a seven-song, forty-five-minute set to a crowd of about sixty-eight hundred people who had come to see the headliner. Almost nobody in the building knew who he was. He even threw in a one-off cover of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” that he reportedly would not play again for nearly three decades. Months later, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle would begin the ascent that made him Bruce Springsteen. The building that would go on to host Bon Jovi and Metallica and the rest opened its doors to rock and roll with a future legend nobody had heard of yet, second on the bill. You could not write a better origin story.
1. Bon Jovi — Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — April 9, 1987
And so we come back to the night the building was fullest.
By the spring of 1987, Bon Jovi were the biggest rock band in America. Slippery When Wet had spent weeks at number one, minted anthem after anthem, and turned a hungry New Jersey bar band into a stadium act almost overnight. On April 9, they sold out the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena completely — 7,200 seats, not one empty, a gross of just over a hundred thousand dollars — and it was the second sellout-caliber Binghamton show of that single tour, after a near-capacity stop the previous September. Two visits, seven months apart, at the exact peak of the biggest moment of their career.
That is why it is number one. Not because it was the most historically enshrined night — the Dead’s gym show has that — nor the best origin story — Springsteen owns that. It is number one because it is the purest distillation of what the Broome County Arena did best: it caught the biggest band in the country at its absolute zenith, sold every seat, and gave a Southern Tier city a night it has never stopped talking about. From an unknown Springsteen opening the doors in 1973 to a chart-topping Bon Jovi filling every seat in 1987, this unassuming arena spent its golden years hosting the very biggest music had to offer — and Binghamton showed up, every time.
A city that makes its own
Binghamton does not only host greatness; it produces it. The clearest hometown hook is Fred Coury, born in 1967 in Johnson City — one of the Triple Cities, minutes from the arena — who grew up to become the drummer for Cinderella, one of the defining glam-metal bands of the MTV era, behind hits like “Nobody’s Fool” and “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone).” A kid from Johnson City, on MTV in prime hair-metal. The county’s musical bloodline runs wider than that, too — the fierce punk and social-justice artist Taína Asili was born in Binghamton, and the region has quietly turned out respected jazz players for generations, from the big-band trumpeter Chris Griffin, who blew alongside Benny Goodman, to the contemporary composer-drummer John Hollenbeck. The Southern Tier makes its own music, and always has.
The ones that just missed
No list of ten could hold all of it. Black Sabbath, in their Ronnie James Dio era, brought the Mob Rules tour to the arena in 1982 after rescheduling it twice. Aerosmith treated Binghamton almost like a tour regular, playing the building at least eight times between 1979 and 1994. The Charlie Daniels Band brought Southern rock to town in 1978. And across the decades, the downtown Forum theatre has carried the torch for the jam and blues faithful, hosting moe., the Trey Anastasio Band, Umphrey’s McGee, Joe Bonamassa, and the Tedeschi Trucks Band. From a pre-fame Springsteen opening a brand-new arena to a Grateful Dead marathon enshrined on vinyl, from a banned-then-triumphant Alice Cooper to a marquee that accidentally made Phish history, Binghamton has been quietly hosting the greats for more than fifty years. It is all here, and it is all true.
🎫 Upcoming Shows in the Southern Tier
The legends made history here — now go make your own.
Image credits
- Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena — photo: Doug Kerr, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
- Reba McEntire, 1999 — photo: Keith Dillon / U.S. Army, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Van Halen, 1978 — Billboard, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Phish, 2024 — photo: Shelby L. Bell, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
- Rush, 2010 — photo: Clalansingh, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
- Alice Cooper with Vincent Price, 1975 — ABC Television, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Kiss, 1984 — Polygram Records, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- The Grateful Dead, 1970 — photo: Herb Greene / Billboard, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Jon Bon Jovi, 1987 — photo: Jonathan King, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
- Cinderella, 2011 — photo: Adrián Pérez, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
What did we get wrong? Which Binghamton night belongs on this list that we left off? Tell us on Facebook and Instagram — your picks help decide our upcoming ranking of the greatest concerts in all of Upstate New York.
This is the latest chapter in The Greatest Concerts Ever, Upstate Concerts’ city-by-city search for the most legendary nights in New York live-music history. Catch up on the rest of the series: Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, Rochester, Ithaca, Poughkeepsie, the North Country, Saratoga, Utica/Rome, Woodstock, Jamestown, and Glens Falls.
