With the summer concert and festival season fast approaching, Local Spins asked readers and writers to recount their most outrageous show experiences. Some of the tales are shocking.
The Woodstock ’99 Cesspool: A festival a Local Spins writer would like to forget. (Courtesy Photo)
In the realm of “outrageous” concert experiences, virtuoso West Michigan musician Bruce Ling of Hawks & Owls recalls the mid-1970s riot that broke out during a rock show by Heart, Blue Oyster Cult and other bands in the normally quiet Michigan hamlet of Lowell.
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“Gate crashers tore the fencing down and swarmed in. It started to pour and the bands left. Too much alcohol and drugs riled everyone up, and the 1000-plus crowd went wild,” recalled Ling, who was 19 at the time.
“Rioters broke into Lippert’s Pharmacy and took the drugs. Local, county and State Police piled in. The National Guard arrived.”
Bruce Ling: Decades after his craziest concert experience. (Photo/Hunter Gamble)
At one point, Ling saw a female fan with a 12-inch carving knife start “poking it into the people that were in her way” as the crowd dispersed and fans fled. Ling escaped by swimming across the Flat River.
“Walking downtown the next day, it looks like the aftermath of a war zone.”
With Michigan’s summer concert season on the immediate horizon, Local Spins recently asked readers for the most outrageous or weird spectacles they’ve ever experienced at a concert or festival.
Dana Kuzee remembered a classic performance by the Butthole Surfers at Walker’s Stadium Arena (later DeltaPlex) when a totally naked woman took the stage to dance and “a large cymbal filled with lighter fluid” was “set on fire with flames leaping high into the air” — and this after a sex-change surgery video was projected on a big screen.
Photographer Paul Jendrasiak was in the photo pit for a 1992 concert by Skid Row at Kalamazoo’s Wings Stadium when a fan threw an M-100 firecracker that exploded near the front row and injured 11 people. “I heard later that one person almost lost their eye. Boggles my mind that somebody would come to a show to do something like that.”
Lee Chase was at a Los Angeles concert by The Damned when the band’s naked drummer lit his drum kit on fire, “dousing it with more and more lighter fluid as the band played in front of him. Show over. Drum kit over.”
And that just scratches the surface.
A few years ago, Local Spins asked some of its concert reviewers to recount their weirdest and most bizarre concert/festival experiences:
Tricia Boot Woolfenden
Writer Tricia Boot Woolfenden reflected on the cesspool debacle of Woodstock ’99 in New York, with “raw human sewage that flooded the campsites and water stations,” numerous logistical failings, misogyny and assaults, and “mountains of trash” amid a sun-scorched setting. And that was just one of three abominable concert experiences that topped her list. Read the gory details here: Bizarre, agonizing, disgusting: A Local Spins music critic’s 3 weirdest concert experiences
Metal-meister and wordsmith John Serba, meanwhile, described the horrors of covering the “endless noodling” of much-revered jam band Phish at Van Andel Arena in 1998, when a female fan in mid-song pulled down her pants and urinated right at her seat and then proceeded to dance “in the puddle like all of this was totally acceptable behavior.” His descriptions of a 2014 Motley Crue disaster at the same arena and 1993 Lollapalooza mess were equally entertaining: Dolts, depravity, lightning, heat & hippie horror
Writer Troy Reimink had his own “favorite” miserable concert experience: A Pearl Jam concert at Chicago’s Wrigley Field that was interrupted by a “terrifying thunderstorm,” forcing an interminably long delay that eventually convinced him to skedaddle late at night before the last commuter train departed – while still getting drenched in the rain to boot. And, yes, Pearl Jam later took the stage for an “epic show” that Reimink could only follow on Twitter. Check out his other classic oddball experiences here: Rain, misery, shame, ejection and a Phil Collins hoax
Read plenty more wild reader experiences online here.
And if you have your own crazy festival or concert memories, provide them in the comments section below.
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