One more time won’t hurt, I thought. And it didn’t. At least for a little while.
Honestly,
if there had been seats at the venue, like there are in an arena or
theater, buying the concert tickets would have been an easy choice.
There are only a few things more pleasing to me than sitting and
watching a good band perform live, and most of those things involve
being naked.
Remove
seats from the equation, and you’re talking about a lot of standing
around … at best. At worst, you’re talking about a mosh pit.
For
a longtime metalhead such as myself, it’s amusing to note how many
non-metal fans aren’t sure what a mosh pit is, exactly. They vaguely
associate mosh pits with the music they warned their children not to
listen to, so they assume it’s something evil -- a goat-sacrificing
ritual, perhaps, or some kind of stadium-wide satanic pact made in
blood. They’re nothing of the sort, although admittedly
it would be kinda cool to see a goat at a concert. Not to harm it in
any way -- I’m not into that stuff -- but because goats are cute. In
fact, they should be mandatory for all concerts. Wouldn’t you love to see a random goat at
the Kenny Chesney show? Of course you would.
No goats in the mosh pit, though. Too brutal, as I rediscovered only recently.
Mosh
pits typically begin during the speediest, heaviest songs in a band’s
set, the ones with breakneck rhythms and fretwork that could blow
the quills off a porcupine. In the standing-room-only section, on the
floor in front of the stage, a churning begins to happen, a brewing
cyclone of young drunkards and over-pierced malcontents. After a while
the cyclone becomes a full-blown tornado and a
circle opens up amidst the standing masses, a rapidly rotating
maelstrom of bodies and pumping limbs. It’s like the heavy metal version
of a country line dance, only way more chaotic, and someone usually
ends up eating concrete.
Sounds
violent, and it can be … but not maliciously so, if that makes sense.
There’s a certain mosh pit etiquette: You can shove and jostle
and ram into people, but it’s a faux pas to outright hit anyone. If
someone hits the ground, the action halts and someone helps the fallen
regain their feet. And if someone doesn’t want to participate, they
don’t have to -- although the more passive concert
goers in the crowd may be intermittently pinballed around by the pit’s
rhythmic undulations. It’s like a raucous rally for a rabble-rousing
dictator, only instead of Mussolini on the stage it’s four long-haired
musicians who look like the cast of “Designing
Women.”
Pits
were sort of fun when I was 21, 22. They were a way to channel the
band’s energy, to blow off steam. Now that I’m older, calmer and more
prone to lower back pain, I prefer the seats. I sip a beer, I enjoy the
music, I watch the tattooed freaks stomp around and froth at the mouth.
Fun stuff.
Only, when I went to see Megadeth in New Hampshire a couple weekends ago, there were no seats at all. Standing room only. Gulp.
Which
I knew going in, of course. When considering whether to go, the lack of
seating arrangements was a consideration. Ultimately my love
of the band won out. After 30-plus years of recording and touring,
Megadeth is in the mid-to-late autumn of its career, so when they come
to within shouting distance I’m usually right there with my faded tour
shirt and a fist raised high in the air. I have
to seize every opportunity to see them before they drink themselves out
of the music business and into retail jobs putting price stickers on
juice blenders.
Strategically,
I knew I had to come up with some sort of plan to avoid unwanted
physical entanglements. Standing in one place for two-and-a-half
hours is bad enough, but it’s worse when you’ve got a sweaty, drunken
lout pinwheeling his arms in the general vicinity of your face.
It’s
my luck, I guess, that my favorite musicians tend to be old farts.
Older bands typically draw older crowds, and while there are still
a good amount of under-30 animals who show up to these shows looking
for a cathartic bruising, many are people like me, nearing middle age
and in no damn mood to be swatting away half-crazed hellhounds. Rock and
metal fans in my age range want a simple concert
experience. They want to play air guitar to their favorite solos, swing
their arms to all the good drum fills, shout along to whatever cheesy
lyrics are on offer, and go home happy. That’s it. We’ll save the
bruises for when we fall down the cellar stairs
with a load of laundry.
Looking
around the venue, it was clear there were plenty of greybeards like
myself. This made the strategy simple: Find the point in the crowd
where the silver whiskers and receding hairlines began, and plant
myself there. So I did. And it was great. Another show under my belt,
and I escaped it without some rum-swilling idiot taking me out at the
kneecaps.
Regardless,
the excessive standing did a number on my beleaguered glutes, which
made me ask myself the question: How long can I keep doing
this? The floor in front of the stage belongs to the animals, and I
left that group forever the minute I started playing Scrabble on the
computer. But one day soon my geezer bands will fade into the night;
part of me feels obligated to see them whenever I
can, seats or no seats. It’s part of an unspoken pact between band and
fan: They give me joy, and I give them my body.
A quote from Michael Corleone in “The Godfather Part III” sums it up nicely:
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