Big Bands and the Danger

I'm starting the new year off great. I fell asleep at nine-thirty and woke at four. Early to bed, early to rise. . . .

But I have a confession. I've screwed up my teen angst narrative. Somehow, I skipped a year. Well, as they say, memory is famously fallible. And so, I will attempt to correct it (the narrative, not my memory). I must go back to the eighth grade before I met Emily, my own true love, for I did not meet her until the ninth grade. And so, in the finest sense of 19th century fiction, I address the audience (Dear Reader, etc).

After our appearance on "The Jimmy Harper Show," the band got more gigs. As I've already told you, playing in front of foreign audiences wasn't all that I had expected. But we were learning how to be "A Band." Suddenly, I was aware that some of the big, national groups were playing in my own home town. This was before the big mouse came and changed everything. My town was still a sleepy southern hamlet, a paradise in many ways, but a cracker hell in others. Wayne, Steve, and I took to going to see the bands play at the local venues. I saw The Turtles play at the huge teen center that served every school in town, a place where you had to be in the ninth grade to get a membership card. Wayne and Steve were older and had cards, but I was still a year away. No problem. They helped me sneak in.

Once in, though, I felt I had made a mistake. The hall was filled with a frightening energy. The danger of sudden violence was palpable. Boys ran around in groups from their own schools twitching and jerking with pent up emotion, big boys, hard and alien. The hall held maybe five hundred people, and there were always another hundred or so hanging around outside. Girls, too, were crowded together, but the risk of talking to any of them was too great for me. I got bumped a few times by sneering boys, but I was savvy enough to lose myself in the swirling crowd before things got rough. One group of boys, however, had singled me out, and I spent the whole night playing hide-and-seek with them, never staying in one spot very long.

Perhaps I was too worn out with emotional turmoil to appreciate the music when The Turtles finally took the stage, but I was disappointed. The lead singer was nerdy looking fat guy. The band wasn't cool at all.

Another night, we hitch hiked to the big skating rink on a lake where Bob Seger and the Detroit Wheels were playing. It was early evening and we were excited to get there, so we started out early. We jumped into the first car that stopped to pick us up and were brought up quick. It was Johnny G, a famous local DJ we all listened to every day on the only rock and roll station in town. He was a smallish man with thinning, greasy longish hair and regular glasses, a bit older than I expected, driving a bland coupe that was no cooler than my parents'. Still, we were excited to be riding with Johnny G and told him all about our band. He said for us to come by the station one day and he would show us around. Yes, our luck was good that night. We were validated.  We were big.  We rode all the way to the skating rink with Mr. G who was going to introduce the bands.

This concert was not like the one at the teen center at all. It was a marvel. The motions of the crowd were normal, not the quick, explosive movements, the sudden eruptions, of young teenage boys. There was a modicum of decorum here. People were paying real money for tickets to see Real Famous People. That was the bad part for us. We had no money.

And so we walked to the back of the rink, looking for a place to sneak in. We were used to sneaking into movie theaters by this time, so we knew there had to be a way. And there was. It was still early and people were bringing equipment into an open door behind the stage. All there was for us to do was stay close and follow some of them in. In memory, it seems we may have even picked up some things to carry. Surely we did.

Once in, we slid beneath the stage, hidden in the dark amid the steel scaffolding where we would stay until the music began.  It seemed that we were there forever.  Finally, we heard Johnny G talking on the PA system, and we stepped into the dim lights backstage where we took up positions at the side of the stage, a vantage point from which we would have a great view of the bands. It wasn't long, however,  before a security guard rolled up and told us we couldn't stay back there, that we would have to leave, and began pushing us toward an exit. With horror, we told him that we had come with Johnny G, that we had helped haul in equipment and were told that we could stay to see the show.  Unimpressed, he said we couldn't. As a compromise, however, he set loose in the crowd. We were disappointed, of course, but we were, at least, on the floor with people who'd paid to get in.  We would see the show that night.