On Halloween night in 1994, Phish walked onto the stage of a hockey arena in Glens Falls and, as their costume, played somebody else’s album, all of it, start to finish.
The fans had picked it. They voted by mail for the record they wanted to hear, and the winner was the Beatles’ White Album: thirty songs, two discs, “Revolution 9” included. Phish learned the whole thing and played it as the middle of three sets in a sold-out Glens Falls Civic Center, on a night that started at 9:30 and didn’t end until after 3 in the morning. It became the template for every Phish Halloween that followed, and it is where this list has to begin.
Upstate New York has a long Halloween history. Legends have played here on October 31 for half a century, some by design and some because a hurricane, a postponement or a routing map put them here on the right night. These are the ten that matter most.
The rules
The same promise we make in every chapter of The Greatest Concerts Ever holds here. Every show below happened on October 31, at the venue named, and every detail is drawn from a setlist archive, a contemporary review or the band’s own records. Where a story has been told for years but can’t be documented, we left it out. Let’s count down.
10. Alice Cooper — October 31, 2003, Seneca Niagara Casino, Niagara Falls
If anyone has earned a Halloween gig, it’s Alice Cooper. In 2003 he spent October 31 in Niagara Falls near the end of the Eyes of Alice Cooper tour, with a “Halloween Story” intro to “Under My Wheels” that had been added to the show earlier that month. Niagara Falls also got something rarer: according to fan tour archives, a section of “This House Is Haunted” was played for the first time that night, and only at the final two shows of the tour. The godfather of shock rock, a haunted-house song premiere and a casino on the edge of the Falls on Halloween: the pieces fit.
9. Sonic Youth — October 31, 1986, Kline Commons, Bard College
Some bands dress up for Halloween. Sonic Youth already had a song called “Halloween,” and at Bard College in 1986 they opened with it. The night came on the Flaming Telepaths tour, with fIREHOSE and A Subtle Plague on the same bill in a college dining commons in Annandale-on-Hudson. A soundboard recording survives in the Internet Archive, running from “Halloween” into “Death to Our Friends,” “Tom Violence” and “Shadow of a Doubt.” It’s the most purely underground night on this list, and the most fittingly titled opener.
8. moe. — October 31, 2001, Shea’s Performing Arts Center, Buffalo
moe. were born in Buffalo, and they have treated Halloween as a holiday ever since. In 2001 they took it to Shea’s, Buffalo’s gilded movie palace, for what they called the Sensory Overload show. The band played in hats and capes emblazoned with symbols of the five senses, covered the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Frank Zappa’s “Stinkfoot,” and stopped in the middle of “Recreational Chemistry” for a costume contest, with costumed fans joining the band onstage. Of all the Halloween traditions in Upstate New York, moe.’s is the most homegrown, and this is its high-water mark in the city that made them.
7. Talking Heads — October 31, 1978, Bardavon Opera House, Poughkeepsie
In the fall of 1978, Talking Heads were touring More Songs About Buildings and Food, and on Halloween they played the Bardavon, the 1869 opera house on Market Street. We know how it went because Fritz Hager of Vassar’s WVKR filed a concert report with the college-radio trade sheet The Walrus: about 900 people in the house, a band that rocked the “aging but venerable” theater for 90 minutes and three encores, and showmanship he rated “Astounding.” The next night they were in Albany. Within two years they would be one of the most important bands in America. On Halloween 1978, they were a new-wave band in a Victorian opera house, and a college-radio reporter knew he had seen something.
6. Aerosmith, Mott and Slade — October 31, 1975, Dome Arena, Henrietta
This one wasn’t supposed to happen on Halloween. Aerosmith’s own tour records show their Dome Arena date on the Toys in the Attic tour was originally set for October 24 and postponed to October 31. The reschedule produced one of the great triple bills in Rochester history: Aerosmith on the rise, Mott, and Slade, the British glam band billed as special guests, whose set that night included “Gudbuy T’Jane” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now.” Three bands from the height of the platform-boot era on Halloween night: the costumes took care of themselves.
5. Lynyrd Skynyrd — October 31, 1976, Utica Memorial Auditorium
Skynyrd came to Utica two nights after Buffalo, touring behind One More from the Road, the live album released that fall, with Nils Lofgren and the Alpha Band opening. General admission was $6 in advance. The weight of this one comes from what followed: less than a year later, on October 20, 1977, the band’s plane went down in Mississippi. Utica’s Halloween with Lynyrd Skynyrd was one of the last they ever played.
4. Guns N’ Roses — October 31, 1987, The Lost Horizon, Syracuse
Three months after Appetite for Destruction came out, and the night after a show at CBGB, Guns N’ Roses played Halloween at the Lost Horizon, a small Syracuse rock club. The set ran through “It’s So Easy,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and “Paradise City,” and tape traders still circulate it as “Halloween on the Horizon.” Within a year the band would be among the biggest in the world, and they never played a room this size again. When Slash came back to the club in 2001, he went looking for the spot where he had signed the wall, and found it.
3. Bob Marley & the Wailers — October 31, 1979, Cotterell Court, Colgate University
Bob Marley spent Halloween 1979 in Hamilton, New York, a village of a few thousand people in the hills of Madison County. The Survival tour stopped at Colgate’s Cotterell Court, with Betty Wright as special guest and a student-made flyer billing it as an “exclusive upstate N.Y. appearance,” and setlists from the night include “Positive Vibration,” “Exodus,” “No Woman, No Cry,” “Jamming” and “Get Up, Stand Up.” One Colgate alumnus still remembers hitchhiking back from Ithaca to make it. Marley would tour America only once more before his death in 1981, which makes a Halloween gym show in rural Central New York one of the most improbable and precious nights in the state’s concert history.
2. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band — October 31, 2012, Blue Cross Arena, Rochester
Bruce Springsteen was booked for Rochester on October 30, 2012. Then Hurricane Sandy tore into the Jersey Shore, the show moved back a day, and Rochester got a rare Halloween night with the E Street Band. A fan’s sign asked for “Monster Mash,” and Springsteen obliged with the band’s first-ever cover of it, joking, according to the Backstreets review, “Of all the great Halloween songs… this is not one of them!” The night also brought “A Night With the Jersey Devil,” his own Halloween song, along with “Wrecking Ball,” “My City of Ruins” and “Spirit in the Night.” With his home state reeling, Springsteen played a Halloween show for Rochester that was part party and part prayer.
1. Phish — October 31, 1994, Glens Falls Civic Center
So we come back to Glens Falls. Tickets were $18.50, the stub said 9:30 PM, and the 7,800-capacity arena sold out. The first set was Phish. The second set was the White Album, every song, with the band introduced as if they were on The Ed Sullivan Show, a birthday cake carried out for road manager Brad Sands during “Birthday,” and Jon Fishman credited on vacuum cleaner for “Cry Baby Cry” and “Revolution 9.” The third set was Phish again, and the encore folded in “Amazing Grace” and a costume contest before “The Squirming Coil.” The music ran until about 3:20 in the morning, the longest Phish show up to that point. The band released it as Live Phish Volume 13 in 2002, and the “musical costume” became a Phish tradition fans wait for every year. They have since dressed up as the Who, the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads and the Rolling Stones. They did it first in a hockey arena in Glens Falls, and nothing on this list comes close.
Honorable mentions
- The Disco Biscuits — October 31, 2020, LaFayette Apple Festival Grounds. The last night of a pandemic drive-in Halloween run in the cold and mud south of Syracuse, with a bust-out of Gary Numan’s “Cars” and a James Bond theme tease for Sean Connery, who had died that week.
- The Levon Helm Band — October 31, 2009, the Halloween Midnight Ramble, Woodstock. A Halloween parade through town, Elvis Perkins in Dearland on the bill, and Larry Campbell calling everyone back out for “The Weight.”
- moe. — October 31, 2002, RPI Field House, Troy. The Simpsons Halloween: the theme song, “Itchy and Scratchy,” and, inevitably, “Flaming Moe’s.”
- Albany, October 31, 1997. The Beach Boys and Chicago at the Pepsi Arena, Ratdog and From Good Homes at the Palace Theatre: one city, one Halloween, two very different parties.
- They Might Be Giants — October 31, 1986, Binghamton University. A “Fallfest ’86” show in the Susquehanna Room, the same year as their debut album.
Image credits
- Phish Halloween 1994 poster and ticket, Bob Marley 1979 Colgate flyer, Lynyrd Skynyrd 1976 ticket and moe. Halloween 2001 poster — collector memorabilia.
Which Halloween night did we miss? Were you in Glens Falls in 1994, or at the Lost Horizon in 1987? Tell us on Facebook and Instagram.
Part of The Greatest Concerts Ever, Upstate Concerts’ search for the most legendary nights in New York live-music history. Read the city-by-city rankings: Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, Rochester, Ithaca, Poughkeepsie, Glens Falls, Utica/Rome and more.
