WYAB talk show host and resident bomb-thrower Clay Edwards relates on Facebook how David Allen Coe kept Billy Idol from appearing at the Coliseum in the 1980's. Enjoy the storytelling. KF.
A Friday night show with outlaw country legend **David Allan Coe** and The Burrito Brothers had been locked in. But ticket sales were catastrophic. When the promoter called coliseum director Billy Orr that Friday morning, only 450 to 500 tickets had moved for a 10,000-seat arena. It was, Orr later said, the lowest sales he could remember for any paid event there. The show was canceled immediately.
The next day, the Clarion Ledger ran the headline “Coe concert canceled.” In the article, Orr didn’t hold back: cancellations didn’t just cost the venue money—they blocked potentially bigger shows. “We could have booked something better,” he said. “We had a contact for **Billy Idol**, but we already had a contract out.”
That “something better” was the *Rebel Yell Tour*—Billy Idol at the absolute peak of his fame, riding hits like “Rebel Yell,” “Eyes Without a Face,” and “Flesh for Fantasy.”
Just two days earlier, on Wednesday, August 22, 1984, Billy Idol had delivered a fiery show at the MS Coast Coliseum and Convention Center in Biloxi. The Gulf Coast got its full-throated Rebel Yell. Jackson got silence.
What happened next is the most Jackson, Mississippi thing ever & one of the biggest "what if" in Mississippi music history.
Billy Idol’s next date was Sunday, August 26 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. That left Thursday the 23rd, Friday the 24th, and Saturday the 25th as off days. The tour buses headed north on I-55 — the same highway that runs straight through Jackson.
The band drove right past the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson on Thursday, August 23 and/or Friday, August 24 — the latter being the very night the David Allan Coe show had been scheduled and then scrapped.
Urban legend has it that Billy Idol’s band might have stopped, partied, and possibly even jammed at the legendary 1980s South Jackson nightclub, The Embers Club, located at the McDowell Road exit off I-55. (The building is no longer standing. It sat right at the railroad tracks near what is now a UPS facility and later became an adult bookstore and XXX video store—if that helps paint a clearer picture of the location.
Okay, I made that part up… but admit it — you believed it for a second, didn’t you?
Hell, it might have happened. NASCAR legend Darrell Waltrip has told stories about stopping at The Embers Club after racing at the Jackson International Speedway in Clinton and getting into a barroom brawl one Saturday night. Charlie Daniels Band also sang about getting into a fight at a bar in Jackson, Mississippi on a Saturday night in their hit song “Uneasy Rider,” and many locals assume the song was talking about The Embers Club, which became legendary during the peak Urban Cowboy era of the early 1980s.
It’s unknown exactly why they couldn’t (or didn’t) play Jackson on Thursday night, or why the tour didn’t route through the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis or the coliseum in Tupelo as they made their way toward St. Louis. In 1984, the Mississippi State Fairgrounds Coliseum and similar venues were heavily booked year-round with fairs, sports, and other events — something that’s hard to imagine in 2026 given how quiet many of those buildings are today compared to 1984.
They most likely skipped Saturday night in Jackson because the drive from Jackson to St. Louis is long enough that playing a show would have left the crew with almost no time to load out, travel, and set up the massive 1980s rock production in time for Sunday’s load-in.
And missing a Friday night on a major tour is especially painful. You still have to pay the entire crew, the buses, the trucks, the sound, lights, and hotels whether you play or not. Fridays are traditionally the biggest draw of the week — it’s payday, the weekend has just started, and people are off work and school the next day. Losing one because of a conflicting contract and another act’s dismal sales is the kind of financial and momentum hit that lingers.
So that's got to be one of the more frustrating missed opportunities in Jackson concert history, I just happened to stumble across the clipping in an old Clarion Ledger while I was looking up on wrestling & concert dates at the coliseum in the 1980's. I wish Drake Elder was still alive for so many different reasons, but getting him to tell me stories like this is one of the things I miss the most about him being gone. For those that don't know, Drake owned Be-Bop Record Shops & Be-Bop Productions which brought the majority of the concerts to Jackson in the 70's, 80's, 90's before Beaver Productions became the primary promoter and prior to Live Nation Alabama & Mississippi pretending Jackson didn't exist for 20+ years before the Brandon Amphitheater got built.
The coliseum kept its $1,250 deposit.
Jackson kept its quiet Friday night.
And the Rebel Yell rolled on — just not through the capital city.
Kingfish note: The Kingfish is very familiar with the antics of David Allen Coe. I first saw him at Hal & Mal's around 2000. He put on a great show before a packed house. I saw him again when he came through Jackson and enjoyed the show. Unfortunately, those were the last two decent David Allen Coe concerts I ever saw.
I went to four more of his shows in the early 2000's and it was always the same story whether it was Rodeos, Fire, or the Texas Club. DAC would show up late, drunk off his ass. Hell, sometimes he would still be in Vicksburg gambling at the boats when it was showtime. Coe would play anywhere from a couple to half a dozen songs before he would get mad about who knows what and just storm off the stage. Show over. No refund.
2 comments:
He showed up and raised hell at the KA house at state in the early 90s when he came for a show in the (brand new at the time) amphitheater. I watched it all from the rocking chairs.
DAC played at the Sigma Chi house at Ole Miss around 1994. Was quite the event. Had to accommodate a bunch of biker groupies too.
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