Good deeds and bad situations

[PeacefulWarrior]

Thank you for doing that!  I too have "saved" lives at concerts, namely a 311 concert about a year and a half ago.  Basically the same thing: a girl in the pit without shoes (she wore sandals!) and was getting trampled after she got down on all fours to find them.  She started bleeding and I pulled her out of the crowd.  I literally had to punch and claw my way past people who couldn't have cared less if someone was dying...anyway, as soon as I got back into the pit another girl started shrieking...and then, no joke, I started hearing and seeing many young ladies who were crying out for help.  I nearly fainted after I helped the second girl and then, thank goodness, the band took a break and told people to chill out.

I can't stress it enough that: 1) mosh pits, or crazy crowds...whatever you want to call them, are generally stupid and you shouldn't get too close up to the front if you are not 7 feet tall.
and 2) girls just shouldn't go in, unless they know full well what they are up against...

I no longer go into the crowds are concerts, I opt to hang out in the rear with all of the old people (I'm still in my 20's but I feel that way sometimes)

[PeacefulWarrior]

[][xx(][:O][!][V]

Organizers Blamed In Limp Bizkit Mosh-Pit Death
11.08.2002

Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst
Photo: Interscope

Though Limp Bizkit weren't found to be at fault for the death of a teenager crushed at a concert last year, they could've been more helpful in efforts to aid the girl, an Australian court said Friday.

At a coroner's inquest in Sydney, Australia, coroner Jacqueline Milledge exonerated the band in the death of 15-year-old Jessica Michalik, who suffered a heart attack at the 2001 Big Day Out tour stop there, the Australian Associated Press reported. While she didn't find the band liable, Milledge said Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst should have acted more responsibly when it became apparent there was a problem in the pit.

"I accept that it may have been difficult for him to stop because of the intensity of his performing," the news service quoted Milledge as saying. "However, it is very clear that his words were inflammatory and indeed insulting to the security staff who were engaged in their best efforts to extricate crucially injured patrons from the crowd collapse."

The security practices employed by festival organizers Creative Entertainment Australia bore the brunt of the blame. After viewing videotapes and hearing witness testimony, Milledge said it was evident that the density of the crowd was dangerous at the time Limp Bizkit took the stage.

"There appears to be a reluctance on the part of the promoters and [security] to accept that the situation on that day was completely unacceptable. It is obvious to everyone who views the videotape that people are being squashed and jostled and at times are fighting for survival — a fight Jessica Michalik lost."

Although the judge's decision favored the Limp Bizkit camp, they weren't exactly celebrating. "No one is a winner in a court case where a young girl has lost her life," Durst said in a statement. "This has been a terrible tragedy."

After the hearing, Big Day Out organizer Vivian Lees said Limp Bizkit would never again be invited to perform at the festival, according to AAP.

The inquest began a year ago, and in the hearings that followed, some witness testimony pointed fingers at Limp Bizkit and the statements Fred Durst made from the stage. The Bizkit camp maintained that inadequate security was responsible for the death (see "Fred Dust Tells Aussie Court He Warned Fest Promoter").

A coroner's inquest is held when the details of a death, such as the factors that contributed to it, aren't completely clear. It does not determine criminal liability, but civil suits may result. Durst was questioned by police in July 2001, but they did not have sufficient evidence to warrant an arrest.

—Joe D'Angelo

[PeacefulWarrior]

The hidden dangers of concerts... what you should know before you go.
Jun 11 '00



Remember the good old days when you were a carefree youth? When you had fun sitting around drinking iced tea with your friends? The days that you would rush to the store to buy the newest 45 to play on your record player, which you'd listen to with your friends while singing and dancing to the music...

Although the times are changing, many people still do the same things that their parents did thirty years before them. It's true that people still enjoy their favorite groups, buy (or download) their music, and attend their concerts. The only problem is that more and more kids are attending concerts now, which can potentially put them in all kinds of dangers.

As a frequent concert goer, I know the tricks of the trade per say... what to do, what not to do, how to be careful, and what to bring. Parents, try not to go too crazy as I am not trying to scare you, but educate you about what goes on at concerts.

The dangers of concerts:

Mosh Pits: The biggest problem in my mind about attending concerts now a days, are mosh pits. I hear you asking, what is a mosh pit? To put it simply, it is a bunch of crazy people crammed into a small space trying to get closer to the stage. People jump up and down, push eachother, and cram in very closely... simply put, it is like a riot.

Mosh pits have the tendacy of being so packed together that people fall on top of eachother and fall down to the ground and get stepped on. If this happens you can easily break a few bones (I broke a rib when someone stepped on me), but hopefully you will find a nice person who will help you get back on your feet. Another bad thing is that some people lose the ability to breathe and pass out because they are too smushed in the crowd. In extreme cases, such as these, the people have to be pulled out of the crowd by security and revived by medics. Everyone else in the crowd will at least have bumps, bruises, or cuts.

My advice? Don't allow your children to go in a mosh pit! If they are like me, they will complain and tell you that all their friend's parents let them mosh... but then again, most parents aren't educated to what actually occurs in mosh pits. Besides, you don't get to enjoy the band if you are concentrating on staying alive or in an extreme amount of pain. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins was so concerned for my health, that he made me promise to never go in another mosh pit... a promise that I plan on keeping.

If you can, stay away from buying General Admission tickets. Why? Because this is a standing room ticket, not seats (there isn't moshing in seats). If your children are in seats, they're not even going to be near the mosh pit and thus won't get hurt. Some concert venues are made up of all General Admission tickets though, so the ideal thing is to find a bench to sit on away from the mosh pit which will let you enjoy the show without getting hurt.

Drugs and alcohol: Just like when you attended concerts back in the day, drugs and alcohol are part of the whole concert scene. Although concert venues do not allow drugs inside their buildings, people still somehow manage to sneak the drugs in and do them. As the use of drugs are against the law, security guards will take the drugs away and kick the users out of the concert... but then again, they only catch a small fraction of those who do them. The three main drugs of concerts are marijuana (smoked), ecstacy (taken in pill form at raves), and nitrious oxide (breathed in and stored in balloons).

Alcohol is also a large part of the concert scene, as it is part of the social scene and is sold in bars at most concert venues. To get alcohol from a bar, you need proper ID stating that you are of legal drinking age (in the United States this is age 21 and up). Many people do get drunk at concerts, whether they are of age or not. So how do kids get beer? The same way they do outside of concerts, either using a fake ID or by asking someone to buy it for them.

So what do you do? Make sure that you teach your children the horrible things that drugs and alcohol can do to you. You know what to tell them better than I, but I know that I never did any of that simply because my parents told me not to. If you honestly tell them something like that, they will probably listen to you.

Other factors: In the summer months, a large number of concerts are held outdoors under the sun. This presents the problem of becoming dehydrated. Kids NEED to drink plenty of water, I can't stress this enough. Make sure that you give your children plenty of money so that they can buy food and beverages which are usually priced insanely high. Don't be surprised if a bottle of water costs three dollars...

Another thing that you want to keep in mind is when and where you will pick your children up. Set a time and a place beforehand, and make sure that you be there at that time. It's better for you to be on time and have them show up late, than the other way around which can possibily put them in a scary situation. Using your common sense, buy a few tickets so that you can have your child go with a friend or two. If they stay together they will be a whole lot safer than being alone in a strange place with potentially strange people.

You may want to encourage your kids to wear sunscreen. Getting burned is never fun and your kids will thank you for the nagging later in life when they don't develop skin cancer.

What to bring: It's good to carry a small backpack or bag which holds sunscreen, a hat, a bottle of water, some quick food items such as a granola bar, extra money, a towel or blanket (not necessary, but it can be to sit on if it is an outdoor concert), and a cell phone (in case of emergencies).

But mostly, stress that they use their common sense. If your children follow their common sense, they will be fine. Don't worry too much (I know you will though), because generally everyone has a great time at concerts.

[PeacefulWarrior]

Just one more (I feel strongly about this and hope that people will become better educated about the dangers of large crowds...I am sure you have heard of the infamous soccer riots that have broken out time and time again across the world, some of them ending in dozens being killed and hundreds injured)

Are the Kids Alright?
Moshing Tragedies Abound at Recent Rock Shows

"The Music is All. People should die for it.

People are dying for everything else, so why not for music."
-- Lou Reed

By JESS BARRON / Last weekend ten randomly selected Vassar students and I made a spontaneous road trip to catch the free Green Day show at the hatch shell in Boston. (Now before you all start getting Mardi Gras flashbacks, just chill -- there were no near accidents or engine failures on this journey.) In fact, this story is much shorter because by the time our two-car caravan arrived in Beantown on Friday night, the show had been closed down by the police and public safety officials. According to the front-page article in the Boston Globe on Saturday morning, the crowd of plaid-shirted alterna-teens barely filling up their Doc Martens Air Wear Boots had swollen to 70,000 -- that's 20,000 more angst-ridden kids than the planners had expected.)

As it turns out, Green Day only played for twenty minutes. You would've left the stage too if you were pelted with beer bottles by your fans. When the State police were sent in to break it all up, the horde of 15-20 year-old neo-rioters apparently hurled rocks at the cops too. As has been the trend at recent large-scale concerts -- injuries abounded, with a large number of fans breaking their ankles and/or legs in the chaotic bee-hive of the mosh pit.

Can't people just enjoy a free concert without turning the event into an emergency-room land-mine waiting to explode? Which leads me to ask that age-old question, "Dammit, what is wrong with the kids today?" Don't get me wrong -- I am not opposed to moshing. At the tender age of fourteen, I returned home from an all-ages Dead Milkmen show at the Living Room in Providence, Rhode Island, with a virtual demographic map of varicolored bruises covering my torso, a bloody gash on my calf, and a huge grin on my face.

Pumped full of adrenaline, I couldn't wait to show the "war wounds" to my friends the next day at school. Surrendering to the power of the throbbing crowd, fighting to stay on afoot, slamming into friends and foes alike -- it was the ultimate rush (even more exciting than stealing ashtrays from local diners). The post-show afterglow brightened my cheeks for at least a week. Moshing in a downscale, club-sized atmosphere with a moderate number of people can be an incredible experience. In such situations, the attitude in the pit, although rambunctious, is often quite considerate -- when people fall down, fellow dancers will help them up, before they receive a combat-booted kick in the head.

A concert without a mosh pit today is basically a historical anachronism. Exuberant fans slamdance at soothing ethereal Cranberries and Lush concerts. When formally dressed, high-heel and loafer-clad suburbanites smashed around to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" three years ago at my senior prom, it proved to me that moshing is as much a part of mainstream teenage American Culture today as football and fast food.

"We're gonna have three pits at Lolly-paloser this year," Ad Rock, of the Beastie Boys explained on MTV last May, "the tough guy pit, the hippie peace pit, and the orgy pit." I'm not sure if Ad Rock's dream was realized at any of Lollapalooza's other stops in the country, but the August 5 show at Quonset Point airport in Rhode Island the entire venue was converted into a slam-o-rama by the 30,000 smart-drink-sipping music fans.

"We've brought ourselves into a vortex. Now how do I get out of this one?" asked Billy Corgan, singer/game-show host for Smashing Pumpkins, Lollapalooza's head-lining act as he surveyed the wasteland jam-packed with sun-baked, dirty, sweaty bodies.

"Did he just say Gortex?" asked some fool in the crowd who had taken one too many hits with the pipe. Corgan was not making a random reference to the waterproof material found in ski gloves; rather he was referring to the fact that the Pumpkins, after smacking the kids with a six-deep succession of their best-known songs -- pop, pop, pop -- were unsure what to play or say next.

I didn't envy Corgan, and his bandmates position one bit. Those feedback-charged, flannel-wearing, bundles of hormones had exploded into an eternal mosh. The kids were hungry. In fact, they were starving. 30,000 young adults stared expectantly at their stage-bound heroes awaiting The Answer.

Minutes before, during the band's orchestrally-enhanced performance of "Disarm," I shivered despite the August heat as 30,000 mud-slathered undulating urchins sang along with the haunting chorus: "I used to be a little boy, so old in my shoes, and what I choose is my choice, what's a boy supposed to do? The killer in me is the killer in you, my love." The scene absolutely haunted me. The orphans of Generation X-cess felt certain that Corgan and Co. understood their pain, confusion, and angst, and they desperately wanted Billy to say something profound and/or comforting.

To fully understand my perturbation at this moment you would have to take into account the entire panorama that was Lollapalooza '94 at Quonset Point Airport in Rhode Island. The surrounding fields of the military airport were littered with tripped-out teenagers, the long faded grass was splattered with vomit and the crumpled bodies of those who had replaced their entire bloodstreams with alcoholic plasma substitutes, and in the distance loomed the industrial gray defense plant buildings which created an ominous backdrop. A sign on one of the buildings said, "DEFENSE PLANT. No Trespassing. No photographing. Violators may be subject to criminal penalties under the espionage laws of the U.S."

A medical tent was set up to aid victims of bad trips ad broken bones -- the mosh pit casualties. The joke going around the parking lot was that all the black lipsticked Goths, bouncy nineties nouveau hippies, and backwards baseball capped hipsters had been lured to this dubious location to be bombed into extinction. It seemed almost plausible that some government official might want to clean up the area by killing off the drug-using, graffiti-painting, trouble-making teenagers from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. After the relatively conservative eighties (where attending a Madonna concert could be viewed as a major act of rebellion), nineties youth culture has become a runaway train out of control and gaining speed.

While sharing Rolling Rocks and hamburgers with some well-prepared hibachi grill-possessing strangers in the parking lot before entering the concert, I shared my apocalyptic destruction fantasy. One of the quick-thinking college guys blurted out, "Nope, They wouldn't do that. Look around -- we're just a bunch of middle-class white kids. No politician in his right mind would blow us up."

But still, what kind of place was this to hold a concert? An airport/defense plant? If concerts were meant to be held on runways singers would have been born with wings. Sure, The Great Woods Performing Arts Center in Mansfield, Mass. had vowed after the Lollapalooza '92 fence-becomes-bonfire fiasco that the humongous concert and (more importantly) its rampage of rambunctious fans would not bring their body piercings anywhere near the hallowed grounds of Mansfield.

So, the destructive kids and their day-long concert were banished to some radioactive airport in the middle of nowhere.

"I open my heart to you," Corgan announced in a moment between songs, "and I ask you what have we got? Nothing! Not rock and roll."

Corgan used the stage as a soapbox and tried desperately to stir some emotion in the kids. "Oh, by the way, the governor of your fine state tried to make this show not happen. Lord knows that the governor would not want the fine youth of his state tearing up this empty bonking lot. There are very important missiles underneath, and he doesn't want anything to go off."

Corgan tried everything -- from tap-dancing, to copping Van Halen riffs, to spoofing Lisa Loeb's "Stay." The renegade alterna-teens who had survived an entire day of fashion competition, high pressure bong salesmen, and the inescapable magnetic field of the mosh pit were not satisfied one bit .

Finally Corgan just apologized, "I'm sorry we suck." Smashing Pumpkins played a predictable encore, and fled the scene leaving the swarm of exhausted kids to plod through the garbage-strewn fields back to their cars.

[Tisha]

Solution, Parents!  Go to concerts with your kids.

OK, some kids would rather die than be seen with you.  But that's ok, you're the one holding the credit card, and if you don't go, they don't go.  It's that simple.  Maybe it will make your kids so uncool that no one will want to go to mosh pits and drug parties with them anymore.   AWWWWWWWWWWW.    

Of course this solution doesn't work once your kids are out of the house with their own jobs and money.  But by that point, as a parent you are off the hook, and your worries become more of an indulgence than a legal requirement.

I hope my bespectacled, brainy little baby girl never wants to go go a mosh pit.  I hope she's uncool and dateless, with her nose in a book, totally uninterested in mosh pits and drug pits, and whatever other hell holes will be dreamt up by the time she's 16.  UG!

Mom

[kakkarot]

unfortunately, tisha, most kids who go to mosh pits and concerts CAN come up with the money by themselves. so the parents might not even know until their child is running out of the house yelling back to them "bye mom and dad. i'm going to a concert now." and the parents are then like "huh, what? concert? what concert? did you say she could go to a concert? no? neither did i. why didn't she tell us?"

so it's better to educate the kids themselves. if you can ever ram anything into their thick skulls! [][]

~kakkarot

[Fenris]

Hello everyone!

I did something I feel really good about yesterday and I wanted to share the story with you.

Yesterday I was at the Big Day out music festival, at the very end of the night in the mosh pit for the foo fighters things got far more violent than anyone anticipated, it was more like what you would expect with a punk or metal band. I was with my lady friend Khayla who is fairly little (and I'm a 6ft 57kg skinny boy myself), and it didn't take long for us to both be short of breath battered and physically wrecked. Khayla got kicked in the face by a crowd surfer and then I put myself over her ( I'm a lot taller) and sheltered her. Anyways things went form bad to very bad when a girl next to me fainted (another little person who just shouldn't have been there). She dropped on the ground and got stomped, so I left Khayla and jumped down to get this poor girl who was unconscious and bleeding from what looked to be a broken nose. I got hit in the throat by something and a received a good bruising, I couldn't get a breath in, but I really thought this girl and I were going to die and had a burst of strength that got myself and a girl about my weight off the ground onto our feet. The crowed didn't even stop when they saw her and I had to stand there holding up this past out girl as the band didn't take even five second break between songs. And if you have ever held up a person with completely relaxed muscles you will know how hard it is to do – then add the onslaught of shoving we were receiving, it wasnt pleasent. Eventually I almost fainted and dropped, stood up again and someone else apparently had caught the girl and she somehow was forced through the crowd and over the barricade where the lovely paramedics were waiting. When I went to the medical tent later on because I had feared the worst for Khayla, I saw the girl there. She had broken ribs and was still out cold and on oxygen. My phone was smashed while I was on the ground and I couldn't find Khayla at all, who having just talked to her on the phone at home also got pretty beat up. I feel terrible about that, but fantastic about what I did for the other girl. No one else was prepared to go all the way down to pull her up, and the fact I did it without thinking showed me a quality of myself that I had always hoped I had, but had never had the chance to test before. I felt so good it was like I was floating that night, and it was a lesson worth a bruising and a lot more than my fancy mobile.

Well that's my rambling for the day, if anyone else has any stories of doing something you feel great about and want to share please do.
Best regards []

David