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    When pop music got big: 1968 and the birth of arena rock

    by Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times Apr 24, 2018 7 minutes

    Most of them probably didn't know it when they took the stage at their biggest concerts, but Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, the Who, Paul McCartney, Kansas, Queen, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and others among rock music's most celebrated acts owe a debt of gratitude for their lucrative paydays to the National Basketball Assn. and the National Hockey League.

    Thanks to back-to-back league expansions by the NBA in 1966 and the NHL the following year, a bumper crop of new sports arenas - most notably the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., and Madison Square Garden Arena in New York - opened to house multiple new sports franchises: 14 NBA teams and a half dozen for the NHL in a relatively short period.

    An unanticipated but monumental side effect of that growth spurt in the world of sports was the flowering of the era of "arena rock," a transformation of the concert business that brought dramatic changes not just to the size of venues regularly hosting pop music's biggest names, but to its structure, content and finances.

    "I would say that the first few giant concerts we did at Madison Square Garden and the Forum, it was a real high

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