TRIUMPH - Fried Alive! Page 2
By Martin Popoff
"I didn't really pay much attention to that," recalls Levine, on whether the event caused a nice spike in record sales. "I don't know if it did or it didn't. We just know that that album went gold, and I'm sure with that many people there, we must have sold some product as a result. It was a big promotion. It was all over L.A. and San Diego, actually, right up the West Coast. People came from all over the place. But yeah, Just A Game is gold, approaching platinum now. Allied Forces is platinum approaching double platinum. Never Surrender is gold, approaching platinum. Progressions Of Power is getting near gold; it's not really there yet. What's next? Stages, the live album, I think we've applied for certification on that. And the Classics album is way past gold, just approaching platinum."
So er, were there really "half a million" people there?
"Some numbers are lower, some are higher. It's kind of an average number, I think. We know there were somewhere between 280,000 and 300,000 tickets sold and then the gates came down, the fences. They couldn't sell tickets fast enough at the venue. Everybody got paid a lot of dough for doing that show, because they were all headliners. Basically Steve Wozniak took out his checkbook and he had his wish list and he paid what he had to pay to get everybody there. It was by far our best payday. Steve's told me that he lost money; I don't doubt that he did. He spent a lot of money just building that infrastructure. Actually, I guess it's now burned up with the fires down there. I think the wildfires went right through there. It eventually became a real amphitheater; they put seats in it and everything. He's said somewhere between five and $10 million, he lost on that. But to his credit, the tickets were cheap, even for those days. On the metal day, it was 20 bucks. To see those bands?! Just to go into an arena and see one of those bands, I think in those days was 18 or 20 bucks.
