The Styrous® Viewfinder: Oakland Coliseum

April 16, 2026

ELO ~ Out Of The Blue Tour (The Big Night Tour)

On Sunday, April 16, 1972, The Electric Light Orchestra played their first live show at the Greyhound Pub in Croydon, Surrey, England. The line-up was Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne, Bev Bevan, Bill Hunt on keyboards and French horn, Andy Craig, Hugh McDowell and Mike Edwards on cello, Wilfred Gibson on violin and cello and Richard Tandy on bass.

Their seventh studio album and most commercially successful, was the double album, Out of the Blue released on the 24th of October, 1977, in the United States and four days later in the UK on the 28th of October. It sold about 10 million copies worldwide by 2007. Jeff Lynne wrote the entire album in three and a half weeks after a sudden burst of creativity while hidden away in his rented chalet in the Swiss Alps. It took a further two months to record in Munich. It was one of the first pop albums to have an extensive use of the vocoder. The opening song on the album, Turn To Stone, is one of my favorite cuts on the album.

In 1978 the band set out on a nine-month, 92-date world tour, with an enormous set and a hugely expensive spaceship stage with fog machines and a laser display.

Electric Light Orchestra - 1978

Out of the Blue stage set

photographer unknown

I attended the August 24 concert of that year, at the Oakland Arena during this tour; it was a truly amazing experience as shown in the images of the souvenir program I got that night (link below).

Oakland Arena

In the United States the concerts were billed as The Big Night and were their largest to date, with 62,000 people seeing them at Cleveland Stadium. The Big Night became the highest-grossing live concert tour in music history up to that point (1978).

Viewfinder links:

Bev Bevan

Electric Light Orchestra

Jeff Lynne

A New World Record reel to reel tape

Out Of The Blue Tour (The Big Night Tour) 1978 program

Richard Tandy

Net links:

Out Of The Blue 1978 Tour info

YouTube links:

10538 Overture

Jungle

Starlight

Steppin' Out

Turn To Stone

Styrous® ~ Thursday, April 16, 2026

~
Music Notes

MAIN MENU - Blog Articles

February 21, 2025

The Oakland Daily Tribune ~ 1874

Oakland Tribune Tower - 2023

photo by Styrous®

A hundred and fifty years ago, on February 21, 1874, the Oakland Daily Tribune began publication and became an influential daily newspaper.

The Oakland Daily Tribune was first printed at 468 Ninth Street. The first editorial stated, "There seems to be an open field for a journal like the Tribune in Oakland, and we accordingly proceed to occupy it, presenting the Tribune, which is intended to be a permanent daily paper, deriving its support solely from advertising patronage."

The paper was renamed the Oakland Tribune on August 28, 1891, and was a charter member of the Associated Press upon its founding in 1900.

The newspapers of San Francisco were destroyed in the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906. The Tribune printed many "extras. Owner William E. Dargie lent the Tribune's presses for a joint edition of the San Francisco Call-Chronicle-Examiner. In the aftermath of the conflagration, San Francisco Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz, declared the Oakland Tribune the official San Francisco newspaper.

The Tribune was moved to its present location at 13th and Franklin Streets on March 25, 1918. The 305 feet tall Tribune Tower, an Oakland landmark, was completed in 1923. The Tribune moved its business into the tower in 1924; that year the Oakland Tribune held a "Dream" contest; a woman won the contest and a film about her dream was created (YouTube link below).

The Tribune had a conservative editorial position and a reputation for being strongly pro-business. As the city of Oakland became more ethnically and politically diverse in the 1960s and 1970s, the Tribune was unable to respond quickly enough to the demographic changes (and the political and social unrest exemplified, among other factors, by the University of California, Berkeley, student uprisings and the Black Panther movement). The Tribune's readership declined after the early 1960s as a large portion of the paper's traditional subscription base relocated to the newly developing suburbs south and east of Oakland.

In 1983, Nancy Hicks Maynard, and her husband, Raymond Maynard (link below), purchased the Tribune for $17 million in the first management-led leveraged buyout in U.S. newspaper history. It was also historic for the Tribune becoming the first major metropolitan daily newspaper owned by an African-American. This was seen as especially notable as Oakland was developing a relatively large African-American community which, by the 1980s, was becoming increasingly influential in local business and politics. Maynard helped restore the paper's reputation, earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

The Tribune Tower was severely damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake of October 17, 1989; the paper continued to publish there until it moved it to a building located in Jack London Square in Oakland at the edge of San Francisco Bay. The Tower sat empty until 1995, when John Protopappas purchased it for $300,000. His company, Madison Park Financial Corporation, renovated the Tower in the late 1990s. The Tribune returned to the Tower after it reopened in 1999.

On May 20, 2007, the Tribune moved permanently from the Tribune Tower to new offices on Oakport Street, across Interstate 880 from the Oakland Coliseum. The Tribune Tower, a local and national landmark, remains, now housing several businesses and a ground-floor cafe.

With the decline of print media, in 2016, the paper announced that the Tribune, along with its owner's other newspapers in the East Bay, would be folded into a new newspaper titled the East Bay Times starting April 5, 2016. The last daily edition of the Tribune was published on April 4, 2016.