I attended way too many loud concerts in the 60’s and 70’s. Many of them were in large (for those days) venues - the Spectrum and original Electric Factory at 22nd and Arch in Philadelphia (saw Jefferson Airplane at both - most memorably the Electric Factory, in 1968), Baltimore Civic Center (as it was then known) - that somewhat mitigated the sound intensity via cubic footage and crowd size.
It was the smaller venues that exacted their toll, mostly due to Hot Tuna. I saw them at Ryder College in NJ in a small auditorium (loud!) They played almost all night at The Academy of Music (now the Palladium) in New York in the early 70’s; it was so painfully loud that my ears didn’t stop ringing for days. (I saw them at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in NJ in 2014 and 2015. They weren’t as loud as they had been “back in the day”, but my wife and I came equipped with ear protection just in case.)
I also had an Olds W31 that I ran with open headers, mostly at Atco Dragway in South Jersey. The ends of the header collectors were right under the front seats, and even with a helmet it was like being in a closed oil drum that was being whacked with baseball bats thousands of times a minute.
My tinnitus has been present for so long that I can’t actually remember when it started; maybe 10 - 15 years ago. It’s in both ears and loud, but not something I tend to dwell on. I have noted that some things make it worse, for example NSAID medications. When listening to music at home, a moderate Scotch, etc. helps mitigate the tinnitus (although it seems to make it a little worse the next day - a relatively small price to pay, I guess).
I have also found that my hearing anomalies make me extremely sensitive to distortion in recorded music. In response, I have put together a system that is very clean sounding and prefer AAD CDs, Qobuz 24bit/192K recordings and really cleanly mastered vinyl.
