Take a sad seat and make it better
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- November 14, 2020
- 1008
Let’s start with a rhetorical question.
What’s the first thing you do when you discover that your seats at a concert aren’t all that great?
Well, it’s rather obvious.
You immediately try to find better ones.
This is an immutable law of Rock 101, right up there with never wearing a T-shirt of the band you’re seeing.
It’s self-evident.
There is one significant exception, the one known as the 10-year rule which states, in part, that if it’s been at least a decade between shows, you should always sport that kind of loyalty.
The catch is that the year must be clearly visible on the ragged relic. I’ve taken advantage of this loophole several times, most of them relating to Neil Young, who never disappoints in concert.
Whether he’s on tour with Crazy Horse – always an event – or hitting select cities in a series of his memorable one-man shows, Neil Young always delivers the goods.
He’s authentic, he’s opinionated, he’s smart and he’s one of the greatest guitarists I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of ’em. When Neil’s slashing the chords, shearing the air with electric fire, bounding around the stage like an erstwhile Ahab trying to keep his balance as the Pequod weathers a storm at sea, he’s at his best.
I remember seeing him the night the first Gulf War started in the winter of 1991 and the way he opened with a haunting version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Awesome, simply awesome.
Fortunately, my friend and I had primo tickets for that concert so we were more than content to stay rooted to our seats; well “seats,” in this context, is a bit of misnomer since we spent the whole two hours on our feet, marveling at the man’s presence, his wisdom and, most of all, his seemingly bottomless well of important songs.
And sometimes, when you don’t have the best vantage point, the artists themselves will solve the problem for you.
Back in 1987, my girlfriend – yet to become my fiancée, let alone my wife – drove us up to Cleveland to see the Replacements at the Palace Theater. The band was touring to support the “Pleased to Meet Me,” an intoxicating album I’d been mainlining for a while.
After the Goo-Goo Dolls – an opening act that had yet to break out – had finished their spirited set, Paul Westerberg led the ’Mats out and looked around the place and, seeing all kinds of room in front of the stage, and addressed the audience.
“Hey, guys,” he said, gesturing to us, “if you want to come down here, you know, closer, that’s cool. No reason to stay up there.”
It was a classic rock-star move I’d first seen at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, winter of 1976, when Patti Smith liberated the crowd, inviting the party to kick into a higher gear down close.
Of course, the was the same tour that saw her fall 15 feet from the stage in Tampa, shattering several neck vertebrae, landing her in traction and putting her out of action for quite a while.
But rock’n’roll can be a contact sport as anyone who’s ever jostled through the writhing masses, jousting for a better point of view, can attest. You can put yourself in serious jeopardy if you’re not careful and looking in all directions for menacing obstacles.
That was what happened when I got caught in a swell of humanity, a tidal wave of zealots, all of them trying to do precisely what I’d set out to do; that is, get closer to Carlos Santana as he captured lightning in his guitar and sent it back out into the fevered crowd, striking their sternums with a sonic wallop that combined the aurora borealis and an earthquake into an otherworldly experience.
When Carlos is on, he can transport you places you’ve never been.
Which is how I found myself on all fours that summer night in 1992, crawling in the grass outside the Blossom Music Center amphitheater, trying to recapture some sense of equilibrium.
“Did you feel that? Did you??” I asked the woman in my life, by then my fiancée, as she soothed me. “I thought I was gonna die!”
And it was true.
Santana heard from 25 feet away can be hazardous to your health.
But it’s not always sheer volume and staggering virtuosity that can induce you to leaving your assigned seat in search of a better place.
Occasionally it’s a simple matter of the sight of a beautiful woman.
I had been in college less than a month when a new friend and I scored sweet seats for a concert featuring David Crosby and Graham Nash, on sabbatical from CSN&Y, and we were stoked.
We’d sit up late the nights leading up to the show, leaning against the base of the statue of Father Sorin – Notre Dame’s founder – the Golden Dome illuminated in all its quiet after-midnight glory.
“‘Almost Cut My Hair,’” he said and I replied, “‘Chicago.’”
This was the fall of 1973, a time when Nixon’s fate was still being sealed, the war was still raging and the draft lottery still in effect.
It was a heated, heady time to be in a politically active place but when the “CIA Off Campus!” graffiti appeared one morning, haphazardly spray-painted overnight on South Quad sidewalks, I walked to my first class as if it were just another bit of litter, an empty can of Old Style or a discarded copy of “The Observer.”
Already jaded at 18 years old.
But then Linda Ronstadt walked onstage with her band and I gasped, thunderstruck, even before she’d sung a single note. She was a vision of Southern California cool, beautiful in her long bangs and blue jean cutoffs, a peasant blouse draping her shoulders.
“Um … man … I gotta … see ya,” I said, said slipping out of my 12th row seat and walking calmly down the center aisle, feeling pulled forward as if caught in a tractor beam, unable to stop myself. In years to come, that sensation would be immortalized in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece of alien attraction and the way selected humans were called forward.
Linda Ronstadt never noticed the tall, skinny guy on the other side of the monitors, the one with the beatific expression on his face, long hair blowing back in the rock’n’roll tempest, and that’s fine.
After her all-too-brief set, I returned as if from an “Oz”-like dream and rejoined my friend to wait for the headliners to appear.
“Good trip?” he asked with admirable aplomb and perfect timing.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, holding up a flower petal that had fallen from her hair as she walked offstage into the darkness. “Great trip.”