Dramatis personae:
By 9 pm, there will be 30,000 people in the arena.
Things are somewhat different for the boys, however...you hand your ticket to the guy at the turnstile, and you have just enough space to move forward exactly far enough to turn the turnstile, so that the upcoming bar whacks you in the ass. At this point, you must stop, because there is a 200-lb. Irish cop standing there, his eyes blazing ("just take another step forward, punk. Make my day," you would hear if your life had a narrator's voice, which unfortunately it doesn't, which i think is a fundamental difference between you and me...). "Arms up, please" (I raise my arms.)
The man then frisks me from head to toe, with an intensity and diligence which would only be surpassed if this were officially a body-cavity search. (I kept looking with cynical amusement at the sign hanging on the wall behind his head, "spectators are subject to a limited search upon request of the management.")
"You got any smokes?"
"No, sir. I've got a lighter, though, is that okay?"
"Whatever." (pats down ankles, hip pockets, grabs hold of my wallet -- and a small chunk of my butt, neither of which do I enjoy putting into the hands of random strangers, even cops)
"No smokes, eh? Well, what's that?"
"That's my wallet, sir." (I meant to add, "I use it to hold my credit cards and money and stuff, which I have since I'm in college and will never be so much of a failure that I can't even get a real job and have to spend the rest of my life travelling from concert to concert patting the crotches of pseudo-quasi alternatives and angsters in smelly sagging jeans and flannel shirts and fishnet stockings, unable to differentiate between a leather wallet and cardboard Camel hard pack," but I thought better of it.)
So he let go of my butt, gave me a meaningful tap on the shoulder, and said, "Well, have a good one."
So we did. We had a very good one indeed.
"The cops said I couldn't be a rock star tonight" he said near the end of their set. (Hmmmm, I thought, the cops have musical taste? Or do they mean that he's not allowed to do stupid shit like try to incite a riot?) "So wouldn't you say you hate the cops?" (Well, they keep people like you away from my door late at night, and I certainly like that.) "Well, I don't see why you should because you're all just sitting there like a bunch of lame fuckers." (If you left now, could the sound crew get on stage and set up for Trent and get him out a little bit earlier?) "Well, anyway, backstage, they tried to say that we pissed in the trash can." (Gee, what a nasty thing to think; I wonder why they would think that?) "But I got something for you guys, and fuck the police." (Oh great, he's quoting fucking NWA now....)
Then he disrobed. Sort of. I mean, remember how Jim Morrison did the same thing in Miami, where he incited a riot and then disrobed and got arrested on stage? Well, that , figuratively and literally, was quite a display of testicular baggage. This guy, however, incited a ripple instead of a riot, and then took off his pants to reveal a pair of black leather bikini briefs with a gargantuan malformed phallic garden-hose type thing about 14 inches long dangling from the front. That , figuratively and literally, is a display of "wanna-be" testicular baggage....
Eventually, they stopped doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, expectorated a few more times in our general direction, and then went away. We cheered. We didn't cheer too much though, because we were afraid they might think they could do an encore.
Then came the Jim Rose Circus. No words can describe the Jim Rose Circus. It was very very sick, and very very twisted, and he pointed out how the act would be in town for a full two-hour show next year and we're all "fucking invited." Ohhh. Yippee. There was a guy named Mr. Lifto, who picked up two irons by hooking them to his earrings, and a suitcase via a hook which pierced his tongue, and then a coat hanger with a leather jacket on it from his nose, and then, as the grand finale, the piece de resistance, the swan song, the crowd-pleasing, show-stopping, blow-the-fucking-roof-off-the-joint final presentation of his skills, he picked up a cinder block with a chain, and the chain had a hook on each end. And the hooks went (everybody cringe and grab onto yourselves now) through his nipples. (I couldn't really bear to watch, because one time when I was a sophomore in high school I was stretching and Josh Hartranft grabbed my nipples and pinched and I still haven't quite gotten over the pain of that experience.) I thought, that is one sick fuck up there. (Though actually, there were 30,001 sick fucks in this arena.)
Then we went through the orgiastic ordeal which is going to the bathroom at a NIN concert. Boys in the girls room. Girls in the boys room. Boys in the drains. Girls in the urinals. Puke in any receptacle that would hold it. (Actually, it wasn't that bad, although all of the above is true except for the "boys in the girls' room" thing -- who would want to stand in line? And the "girls in the urinals" thing -- although all the female types who wandered into the boys' room were politely invited to use those by a cacophony of voices and catcalls, they opted for the stalls.) EVERYBODY (even the boys who sort of had trouble getting it all into the drain) washed their hands. Only in Boston. Even the great unwashed attend to personal hygiene.
Then I looked at Jen and said, "You know, I can feel the lights getting dimmer"...and the lights went out....
and it all started at once:
the screaming
the yelling
the jumping up and down
the flinging of bodies from person to person in ecstatic exclamation: "Trent is coming! Trent is coming!"
the chanting
the panting
the whistling
the stomping
and that was just Steph....
Anyway, behind the curtain you could see a silhouette...and the silhouette was huge. It was larger than life. It was Trent. With the characteristic hair, but rather filled out (I think he must have stopped using one of his drugs, because he looked rather stunningly built -- not strung out, like usual)...and the silhouette got smaller and smaller and smaller and suddenly Trent came flying through the curtain, pulling it down behind him...and there they were....
Now, for those of you who have never been in the ninth row at a concert as big as this one, just imagine orgasm...multiply that by 10 billion. That was for the 12 seconds before the music actually started....
For those of you who haven't experienced orgasm...well, don't even bother if you've ever been in the ninth row at a concert like this one, because comparatively speaking, it's not that great. For those of you who haven't done either...
I'm so very sorry.
The music started, and they jammed through the first song. Trent cussed us out for just standing there at our chairs and not doing anything. Then they went into "Sin," and some young man tried to oblige Trent. He knocked his chairs over (the chairs were welded together in sets of three), and started to mosh. With himself. It was rather an amusing sight.
Not so to the event staff man who weighed nigh onto 400 pounds and was built of a substance that i thought remarkably like granite. He grabbed the young man by the nape of his neck and said, "Come on. Let's go." I never saw the kid again....
So we thought, "Well, looks like ain't gonna be no pit tonight." Obviously, Trent thought the same thing. so he was a little frustrated. you could tell when he walked up to the keyboardist and unplugged the keyboard in the middle of the song, or walked back to the drum set and gently began to knock cymbals off the platform, or threw his mic stand across the stage at the bassist. Of course, that was not so much of a problem because the stage crew would come running out and set everything back up again. Once, though, after Trent threw his mic stand to the back of the stage, some diligent lackey came running back up to the front with a new mic stand. Trent hurried over, took the microphone out of the stand, and threw the stand at the kid's retreating back. It was neat. (Trent, by the way, is a real asshole sometimes. I guess it's part of his charm.)
Finally, he couldn't take anymore. He crossed his arms over his head, and everything stopped.
Trent: "We really shouldn't be playing here. We should not be doing this. I shouldn't be playing in this fucking shithole. Fucking faggot sports arena. We should not be here, guys; of course, not that I didn't know that six months ago, but our manager said we had to play here. Everybody's got a fucking chair. We really should not be doing this. (to some guy in the front row) Yeah, fuck you, too. You got something to say? (walks over with the mic, starts to hand it down to the guy, changes his mind) You ain't got shit to say. All right, well, roll the curtain down and let's get on with the show. But we shouldn't be doing this. I don't want to be doing this. This is for you; this is not for me. The show must go on. I'm sorry you guys can't run around and have some fun, but I'll make it up to you if I can get around there."
I personally was a bit offended. Had I really paid $27 to be insulted? I told Jen that this is how big bands become nothing -- when they start abusing their power. But Trent had decided he was going to fix things a bit.
While the TDS video was playing, Trent was devising his plan. No one could see him. We figured he was hiding again. (He'd hidden away throughout the concert, often by lying down behind the monitor speakers.) But when the song started, he was standing in the 11th row. So of course there was a stampede -- thousands of people trying to get back there and touch him, maybe ask how he's doing, perhaps if he wants to go out for coffee some time or something....
So the event staff -- the same ones who checked our tickets four times in 15 feet to be sure we were where we were supposed to be and then told us to get down off our chairs when we stood on them, or dragged people out of the place by the napes of their necks -- decided that they had their own lives to worry about, and went away. They just disappeared. (I personally think they took off those obnoxious white uniform shirts and joined the crowd.) Either way, there was nobody there to tell the thousands of people who had not stood in the butt-cold for 6 hours waiting in line so that they could get floor seats that they had to stay in the shit seats they got. So they came forward. All at once. About 2,000 or more people just poured into the front section of the floor.
That's when things started to get fun. Stephanie and Annette turned into the human juggernaut duo, casting a quick glance left and right, and then donning their crash helmets (figuratively speaking) and putting on their evil "fuck with the anarchy before the anarchy fucks with us" grins, lowered their heads, elbows in front, and used their towering 4-foot-and-not-much-else statures to weave through the crowd, bounding over chairs and between people till they disappeared.
Jen had never seen a mosh pit before, and had been serenaded by Carla all the way down on the T with horror stories about mosh pits from hell, when Randy Beaman lost an eye because some 42-year-old man kicked him in the face with his Doc Martens while crowd-surfing, and how nobody comes out of these concerts without a cast on some part of their body which makes sex impossible (or at least very painful) for at least 8 weeks, and some people disappear completely and are never heard from again until they turn up in some industrial-alternative-musical internment camp in New Mexico ten years later, still bloody and deformed from their experiences, etc. etc. etc. So when I told her what was coming, she put her head on my shoulder and started to scream.
"WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE'RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEE GOONNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"
"Jen, relax. It's going to be fun!"
"WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE'RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEE GOONNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"
"Jen, trust me. Just keep the crowd surfers from kicking you, and don't get caught in the middle of a pit. Stick to me. It's going to be fun."
"WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE'RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEE GOONNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"
"Whatever."
Now things kind of got exciting. Mosh pits grew out of crowds. Crowds grew into mosh pits. Surfers got up and made their way to within inches of Trent's sweat (of whom one of the most diligent was our very own Steph, who got tossed in the air so high once that Jen was able to pick her out from about 50 feet back. "Hey look, there goes Steph!" "Where?" "Up there.") If I told you every funny, exciting or memorable thing that happened during this experience, I'll never get done with this, and it has taken just a bit too long as it is.
It was fucking incredible, but remarkably polite. People would be insane, beating the shit out of each other, pushing each other all over the place, then one guy would fall down. "HO! STOP!" they would all shout. Everybody would stop, and they'd help him up, and then the pit would reform. A guy shook my hand once. (He was falling, I caught him: I mean, I wanted to fuck with people a bit, but I didn't want anybody to actually get hurt.) So he shook my hand and thanked me for catching him. I was very confused....
Then came "Head Like A Hole." Trent snuck up behind his bassist, unplugged his guitar, ripped it off his chest, and threw him (the bassist) at us. It was sort of fun. The bassist makes it back on stage, and the guitarist dives almost simultaneously. The guitarist makes it back on stage and Trent sings one more chorus: "Bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve." The song comes to an end, he casts this oh-so-wistful look back at his drummer, and drops the mic, hops over the monitor speakers, and dives into the crowd. The room immediately went black, and Trent had to be retrieved by his security guys ultimately. Then he disappeared.
He came back and said, "If it were up to us, we'd play all night. you guys are fucking great. this has been great. but we'll see what we can do for you here." Then he played "Closer"...and the surfers went crazy -- close to 3 dozen people were up there, scuttling around on the outstretched arms, heads, and necks of the crowd. It was really neat to watch them all gliding, falling, sailing, bouncing...and I can only imagine what it must have looked like for Trent et al. from up on the stage. No wonder they get a high off this stuff.
At the end, they played "Something I Can Never Have." A whole lot of people whipped out their lighters and started to sway...cheesy, but nonetheless exciting, especially when it is recalled that the crowd surfers did not stop for this song. I don't think it's a good idea to be up there while the guys who are supposed to be holding you up all have flames in their hands, but then again that may just be me....
At the end, Trent looked out over the carnage. The stage was trashed. People had been so desperate to throw stuff to him that, having run out of stuff of their own, they had been ripping articles of clothing off of OTHER PEOPLE, which now lay in heaps around the edges of the stage. Crowd bubbles (mosh pits, etc.) expanding and contracting and a general sense of anarchy had combined to turn anything that looked like a crowd-control device (bike racks, barriers, chairs, security guards, strategically placed speakers) into fodder for steel-toed Doc Martens -- and they lay in disarray all over the place. The few event staff (remember? the 400-pound granite men?) who survived the ordeal were standing in a corner hunched over and panting, gently weeping to themselves about how they didn't want to catch any more crowd-surfing kids, they didn't want to hold back the surging masses any longer, they were tired and couldn't they just go home, please, because they couldn't take anymore....
Sweating fans were nearly passing out on each other (the Boston Garden, by the way, is not air-conditioned), disoriented stoned people (you didn't have to smoke it; just breathe) were staggering in little tiny circles, and there was just sort of a general sense of pandemonium and the low drone of people trying to cheer only to discover that their lungs had exploded about 45 minutes ago.
Very calmly, he said, "Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot."