When a quarter of the Aloha Stadium topples over and hits the parking lot, it isn’t as loud as you might expect. It’s a crash, for sure, but the Cardi B concert was louder.
Yes, that was my last concert at Aloha Stadium, on December 27, 2018. Cardi B with Snoop Dogg, the act that actually convinced me to say yes to attending the show. I don’t have the date memorized, I found it on this online chronology of Aloha Stadium concerts going back to opening day.
What has me reminiscing about Aloha Stadium is that on Tuesday, ASD Social Media & Marketing Manager Kady Pascual and I attended a media event to watch one of the last sections of the stadium get torn down. That was pretty cool, as was the setting. The viewing party gathered atop a closed on-ramp on the mauka side of the stadium and, really, how often do you get to just wander around on an on-ramp? Practically never!
It was a good-sized crowd for the viewing. Lots of media, politicians and contractors. Lots of reminiscing. I overheard one man talk about playing high school football at the stadium when it was brand new.
My sports memories of the stadium are pretty limited. My dad would take us to Pro Bowl games in the ’80s. I must have gone to a few high school games, too, because I remember running around the stadium with friends with the energy you only have at, say, 16.
For me, Aloha Stadium was really about concerts.
Before Cardi B was U2, in December 2006. This one was disappointing in a way I hadn't expected, but shouldn’t have been surprised. I had seen U2 exactly one other time, during college, in the Hoosier Dome in ’87. This was during the Joshua Tree tour, when the band was in that magic moment of “becoming U2,” if you know what I mean, making the excited crossover from obscure college band to arena-packing mass fame. And of course, I was younger too, that age when music can grab your emotions. By ’06, me and the band were older and, at best, the show felt like U2-flavored corporate entertainment.
Prior to that, The Rolling Stones, January 1998. A friend had won two front row seats in a radio contest, so there we were, mere inches from living legends. I don’t think I owned a single Rolling Stones record at the time, but you didn’t really have to, their music had been ubiquitous for decades by then.
Contrast and comparison: In 1998, The Rolling Stones had been performing for 36 years. In 2006, U2 had been performing for 30 years. Who put on a better show?
The Stones, hands down. For all the energy and fun they were having on stage, you would have thought it was their first show. It was a party.
But the best one, hands down was The Police, with opening acts Bryan Adams and Stevie Ray Vaughan, in 1984. It was the last American appearance of the band on the Synchronicity tour. The band then played Japan and promptly broke up. If you don’t recall that album title, you surely know the songs, “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” and more.
It was one the great albums of a year packed with decade-defining albums: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Prince’s “Purple Rain,” Sade’s “Diamond Life,” U2’s “The Unforgettable Fire,” the Footloose soundtrack; The Cars’ “Heartbeat City,” Huey Lewis & The News’ “Sports,” Van Halen’s "1984."
Maybe you should just click here to see a page from Radio & Records Magazine listing the top 84 rock albums of 1984. It’s like a message in a bottle from another country. Kids, you don’t even know! When I was your age, awesomeness rained down out of the sky and into our radios, every day, all day, for free.
So with all the music from all those bands running through my 16-year-old life, an entire world of music from globe-trotting bands that seemed so far away from little Hawai‘i, the one time I connected with any of it in real life was that Police concert. It’s a special memory, too, because my big sister, Beth, took me to it. Eight years older, and I'm afraid long lost to us now, she had all the cool records of her time and I think she was thrilled to take me to see this show.
One last memory of that concert: With two opening acts, it was a marathon, that started with the sun beating down into the stadium and ended in the dark of night, and at one point between acts, a helicopter flew over the stadium and dropped rose petals on the crowd.
More than 31,000 people attended the show, making it one of the stadium’s biggest events ever. If you missed it, well, I can’t recreate the 1980s for you but, wow, someone has uploaded a recording of show to YouTube, click here and settle in. It’s incomplete but is an hour’s worth of the performance. And here’s a one-minute clip archived at Hawai‘i News Now.
As for Cardi B and Snoop Dogg, I felt lucky to get out alive — we were in the loges and when everyone was on their feet dancing, that loge got to bouncing up and down in a way that had strangers looking at each other like, “Is this thing gonna fall down?”
I won’t miss the building itself. I’ve had a good half-century of taking its pre-rusted naked structuralism. Now it just strikes as very ’70s, the architectural equivalent of bell bottoms, corduroy and fringes on jackets. Bleh. Can we all admit that we might feel certain relief about finally getting rid something that has been famously broken for decades? One high-tech feature of the stadium was that entire sides of it could be floated on air to change the shape from a football to a baseball configuration and back. By 2007, that was broken and the stadium was locked into a football configuration. By the time the stadium was closed for good in December 2020, it needed an estimated $30 million in repairs just to stay functional.
The stadium will live on, in a way. I chatted with Stanford Carr, leading the redevelopment of Aloha Stadium, at the media event. The steel will be scrapped and sold on the open market, he said. I don’t know who buys millions of pounds of used steel, but someone will, and it will be turned into other things. Maybe even a stadium somewhere else.
And, oddly enough, this feeling of nostalgia as we remember the stadium, coinciding with the physical reality of the steel moving on to be parts of other stories, is a kind of synchronicity. I'm pushing the definition of synchronicity a bit. Maybe just play the song and don’t think about it too much!
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
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A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
