[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[no subject]



The Who tragedy: Can it happen again? 

Officials blamed festival seating. The truth is more
complicated. 

By Larry Nager
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Any concert by Bruce Springsteen and his legendary E
Street Band is cause for excitement. But before the
Boss thrashes out the first chord on his trademark
Fender Telecaster Tuesday at U.S. Bank Arena, the
event has made history. 

For the first time in 23 years, "festival seating"
will be permitted at the arena, formerly called
Riverfront Coliseum. This type of general admission
was banned in Cincinnati three weeks after the Dec. 3,
1979, Who concert where 11 young people died in a
pre-concert crush on the plaza outside. It remains the
worst concert disaster in American history.

To create an even more powerful concert experience,
Mr. Springsteen has demanded that every venue on his
46-city world tour offer general admission seating,
considered a cause in those deaths. In August, the
arena was granted a one-time variance by Cincinnati
Police.

"Festival seating" is really "festival standing" -
general admission access to the arena floor, where
seats have been removed. It's first come, first
served; those who wait in line longest and move
fastest get closest.

U.S. Bank Arena manager Jim Moehring says there's no
comparing the two events. "We're doing a very modified
festival seating," he explains. "Times have changed.
It's been many years, and a lot of people have learned
how to deal with just about everything, as far as
crowd control."

For instance:

Only 1,800 festival seating tickets were sold for the
Springsteen show. The other 15,000 tickets are
reserved seating. Compare that to the 14,770 festival
and 3,578 reserved seats sold for the Who.

Heavy security outside. A detail of approximately 16
Cincinnati Police (one per 1,000 concertgoers) will
patrol the plaza, with greater authority than they had
in 1979.

Heavy security inside. Multiple checkpoints will keep
gatecrashers off the arena floor, which will be
patrolled by T-shirt security.

Festival ticket holders will have their own entrance.

The first 300 will be given wristbands gaining
admission to "the pit," or the area closest to the
stage that will be separated from the rest of the
floor by barriers. The remaining 1,500 will receive
different wristbands. 

At least 14 doors will open at 6 p.m., 90 minutes
before showtime. The night of the Who concert, no more
than four doors opened 30 minutes before the show.

In 1979, an "us vs. them" attitude existed as the
"generation gap" was in full force. Authorities saw
Who fans as "the kids," most of them uncontrollable
juvenile delinquents. A Springsteen audience is
largely middle-aged and mellow, many of them older
than the police patrolling the arena. Some will be the
"kids" who went to the Who show, now 23 years older. 

Nevertheless, festival seating remains a hotly
emotional issue for dozens of surviving family
members, hundreds of friends and thousands of
concertgoers affected by the 11 deaths on that cold
December night.

"It's an accident waiting to happen," says Ben Bowes,
50, who attended the 1979 concert. His younger brother
Peter, 18, died that night. "Those festival seats
(ticket holders) will still be arriving way before the
show; 1,800 people can still compress the air out of
somebody."

Paul Wertheimer, Cincinnati's public information
officer back then, was part of the task force that
later created guidelines for crowd control. Today he
heads Crowd Management Strategies, a Chicago-based
firm that consults on crowd safety. He says festival
seating played a major role in the Who deaths. "It's
what created the anxiety, what forced people to
compete against each other, which is the worst thing
that can happen in a crowd."

Yet even the most ardent festival-seating opponents
admit there were other factors in play the night those
11 young people, ranging in age from 15 to 27, died.

Crowd control

The promoter, Philadelphia-based Electric Factory
Concerts, put the 18,348 tickets on sale Sept. 28,
1979. The show sold out in 90 minutes, near-record
speed in the days before the Internet, cell phones and
speed-dialing.

It was the first American tour for the Who - Peter
Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwhistle and new
drummer Kenney Jones - since the 1978 death of
original drummer Keith Moon. The 11-show Midwest tour
was to promote the band's new feature film,
Quadrophenia, based on the 1973 album of the same
name. As a first-generation British Invasion band that
had maintained credibility in the punk era, the Who
had a massive, multigenerational following.

By Dec. 3, those fans had been waiting more than two
months. It was a cold day, with a low of 18 degrees
and a high barely above freezing, but the sun was out.
Enquirer columnist Cliff Radel, then the pop music
critic, recalls going early to chat with fans.

"Between noon and 2, there was a good-sized group of
people already up there, and it was very calm, a very
nice atmosphere. I remember people leaning against the
wall, really sunning themselves."

It was a Monday and the first day of school in three
weeks for many, because Cincinnati Public Schools had
been closed because of budget problems. By 1:30, the
crowd had grown to the point that Coliseum officials
had called Cincinnati Police Lt. Dale Menkhaus,
commander of Special Operations, to ask him to bring
his 24-man detail down early.

There wasn't much he could do when he got there. His
authority was limited by Riverfront Coliseum, which
controlled everything, including when doors opened.

"All we could do was just monitor the crowd and try to
keep hijinks down to a minimum, try to keep people
from doing stupid things," he explains.

Officer Menkhaus, now a colonel in the Hamilton County
Sheriff's Office, was an old hand at concert security:
He had worked every show at the Coliseum since it had
opened in 1975.

But the Who, he says, was different.

"The group was so hot. At that point in time I don't
recall, except for the Beatles, that there was that
much hype and that much popularity. Just to get a
ticket was a feat in itself."

CONCERTS BYPASS CINCINNATI  
"When it gets to the point where the crowds are just
too out of hand, then we'll definitely go to assigned
seating. But for the fans that want to come to the
show and act responsibly, it's their chance to buy a
general admission ticket and get as close to the band
as they possibly can. We like to have that happen." 
That's how Creed's drummer, Scott Phillips, feels
about festival seating. A lot of other bands agree. 

In the last few years, more rock acts are insisting on
limited festival seating at their shows. And they've
been bypassing Cincinnati. 

U2 skipped a local date last year. Smashing Pumpkins
canceled a 1996 show when it couldn't get festival
seating. That same year, a Bush/Goo Goo Dolls/No Doubt
package opted for a show at Rupp Arena in Lexington,
which allows festival seating. 

Pearl Jam, the band that helped revive festival
seating in the early '90s, also passed Cincinnati by.
So did a Green Day/Blink 182 package. Had he not been
granted a one-time variance, Bruce Springsteen would
have done the same. Every venue on his 46-city world
tour is offering festival seating. 

There's no way to tell how many shows have been lost
to other cities. Along with Rupp, about every other
major venue in the region - Conseco Fieldhouse
(Indianapolis), Schottenstein and Nationwide arenas
(Columbus), Nutter Center (Dayton) - offers festival
seating. 

"Agents never even consider us for those tours. They
would pass us by and we wouldn't even know about it,"
says U.S. Bank Arena director of marketing Morrella
Raleigh. - Larry Nager 
 
Once school let out, the crowd started arriving in
earnest. At 5 p.m., as the sun set, a full moon rose.
Three hours before showtime, thousands of people
fanned out from the Coliseum entrance, spilling across
the plaza toward Riverfront Stadium.

"It was a cold night, there was a wind whipping off
the river and that plaza level is wide open," recalls
Jeff Waddle, 44, who had general admission tickets. He
and his girlfriend arrived shortly after dark.
"Everybody was bundled up. We got there and started
standing in front of the doors and the crowd started
to grow pretty quickly. It was pretty calm at that
point. You could tell there was a lot of energy in the
crowd."

Doors were supposed to open at 7 p.m., an hour before
the show. But that was hardly set in stone, recalls
Mr. Waddle, who had been to several Riverfront shows.

"You didn't really know when the doors were going to
be open from concert to concert. It wasn't like at 7
sharp they were going to open those doors."

By 6:30, the crowd had swelled to more than 10,000.
All were ticket holders who had passed police
checkpoints outside the plaza.

"It was a good-sized crowd when we got there, but we
got pretty close, 30, 40 feet from the front doors,"
recalls Mr. Waddle.

"What happens in a crowd like that is it tends to
collect around you," Mr. Waddle said. "You're in the
back of the crowd and pretty soon you're in the middle
of the crowd. The closer to the doors opening, people
start to get closer and closer together. Your personal
space disappears. It was hot. There was steam coming
off the crowd. Everybody had their heavy coats on and
that made it even worse, and there was no way to take
off your coat unless it gets ripped off of you,
literally, which happened."

At 6:30, Officer Menkhaus saw the increasingly
dangerous situation. 

"I asked them to open all the doors," he recalls. The
answer, he says grimly, was no. "Their concern
initially was that they didn't have adequate ticket
takers to man all the doors. The suggestion was made
to use ushers. They said that violates the union
contracts. The final request was, `Look, it's a
sold-out concert, just open all the doors and let
people come in.' "

But the Who, scheduled for a 6 p.m. soundcheck, was
running late. The band got there at 6:20 and was
starting its soundcheck about the time Officer
Menkhaus called. Roger Daltrey had the flu and stayed
at the hotel until nearer showtime.

Dick Wymann, Riverfront Coliseum director of publicity
in the late '70s, said at the time that the decision
to open doors rested with arena management, the
concert promoter and the headliner.

Pushing and shoving

The crowd continued to build as 7 p.m. neared.

Renie Budai, 47, and her husband, Bill, had reserved
seats, but they still got stuck in the crowd.

"When they turned the sound on for check, you could
hear it outside the building and the crowd just went
crazy and started shoving and pushing. It was just
unbelievable. I was standing on my husband's work
boots because there was nowhere for my feet."

That music was the trigger for the crowd surge, as the
uncomfortable situation turned deadly.

"I stood up on a concrete bench just to get a look at
the crowd," says Mr. Waddle, a University of
Cincinnati student at the time who had written about
the coliseum's concert safety problems for Clifton
magazine.

Sitting at a Mount Lookout coffeehouse recently, he
still winced at the memory. "You could really see the
jostling, pushing; people getting knocked way over.
Your feet are actually picked up off the ground and
set back down several feet away. The energy is like a
human wave. But if you were looking at the crowd on
the ground, it seemed much calmer."

Ben Bowes was 27, a friend of Cal Levy, the local
promoter for Electric Factory Concerts, and so was
able to get three reserved tickets. He took a couple
of married friends, a gift for the husband's birthday.
They arrived between 5 and 5:30.

"The crowd just kept building and building," he
recalls. "The press started when you could hear them
doing warm-up. I remember us positioning the woman we
were with between the two of us and just blocking with
our hands on each other's shoulders, holding us apart,
and we couldn't hold ourselves apart. We were just
lifted off the ground and moved all over that little
`V' area by the doors.

"We'd get moved closer to what looked like a huge pile
of people and then the crowd would shift, and we'd
move back a little ways."

`Not enough doors open'

Inside the Coliseum, it was business as usual, as the
staff, unaware of any problems outside, prepared for
another big rock show.

Larry Magid, head of Electric Factory, had come in
from Philadelphia for the concert. He was having
dinner inside the arena with Frank "Bo" Wood, a
founder and owner of WEBN, the top rock radio station
in the '70s. Mr. Wood recalls hearing "Who Are You?"
opening the soundcheck after 6:30, which was unusually
late, but he was unaware of any problems outside until
the show began. Neither the Who, Mr. Magid, Mr. Levy
nor any coliseum official at the time would comment
for this story.

The surge continued for the next half hour, swelling
back and forth, steadily getting tighter. At 7 p.m.
the doors stayed closed and wouldn't open for another
half hour, according to reports.

Then, with almost 18,000 people pushing, shoving,
screaming to get inside, no more than four of the 16
entrance doors opened. "That is still in debate," says
Officer Menkhaus. "But the general consensus was two
(doors)."

When Officer Menkhaus is asked to pick one reason why
11 people died that night, he doesn't hesitate: "Not
enough doors open."

Concertgoers agree.

"I just don't think the doors were opened in time and
there weren't enough doors open," says Everybody's
Records owner Marilyn Kirby, who had reserved seats
for the show and took her two young sons, Bryan, 4,
and Jimi, 7, a rabid Who fan.

She blames festival seating, too. "We saw the mob and
we said, `There's no reason for us to get into that
mob, because we have reserved seats.' So we backed off
until everybody got in."

Opening the doors may have been the final link in the
chain reaction because that got the crowd moving. But
the doors did not remain open, and the moving crowd
had nowhere to go, creating the final, deadly crush.

"What was even more insane (than not enough doors
being opened)," recalls Ms. Budai, "is with the crowd
that they had and the way they were pushing and
shoving, (Coliseum security guards) were trying to
stop and hand search everybody that was going through
the turnstiles, and I mean everybody."

To keep the lobby clear, security repeatedly closed
the doors until those inside were searched for
alcohol.

"When they opened one door, everything shifted, and
then that door closed and they opened a second door
and that door closed and then they opened both of them
and somewhere around there we just basically were in
the right place at the right time and got squeezed
through the doors," recalls Mr. Bowes.

By 7:54, police began finding the bodies, only 15 feet
from the doors. Those who had come late hoping to miss
the mob scene didn't have to be told that something
had gone wrong.

"I remember getting there just a little bit late and
having this really eerie feeling that something had
happened," says Janeen Coyle, a 19-year-old fledgling
disc jockey on Q102 in 1979. "I saw things on the
plaza level, things were disheveled. It just looked
messy, things thrown everywhere."

"We walked past the big pile of coats and hats and
shoes," says Mr. Waddle. "It had been pretty rough in
the crowd, but it looked like everybody got inside. It
gave me a strange, unsettling feeling. I didn't see
any bodies, but to see that pile of shoes and
everything. I knew some people had really been in a
lot of trauma."

Beyond those feelings, most in the crowd were unaware
anything had happened. Mr. Bowes repeatedly tried to
meet his brother at their agreed-upon spot, but the
scene was pretty chaotic and he wasn't too worried
when Peter didn't show up.

In bed with a cold, Mr. Wertheimer learned of the
deaths just after 8 p.m., from a news bulletin by the
Channel 9 TV news director Al Schottelkotte. Unshaven,
he threw on clothes and headed to the Coliseum.

"It was still all very disorienting, there was piles
of clothes by the entrance door of the Coliseum. I
remember there were still people being worked on or
treated outside of the Coliseum (by) emergency medical
people there. Inside, the only first aid room I saw
was totally packed, door shut. I went in there for a
second and then stuck my head into the arena, the show
was going on."

When the first few bodies showed no signs of visible
trauma, drug overdoses were assumed as the cause of
death. When more bodies were discovered, it was feared
that poisoned drugs were going around, possibly
Quaaludes, a mild depressant that was the popular pill
of the day.

"I heard the fire chief and some of the others
discussing whether they should cancel the show or not
because they thought maybe there were bad drugs," says
Mr. Wertheimer. "Officials were afraid that people in
need of help might be inside, on the floor, dying. But
they weren't sure what the reaction would be, and by
then, as I recollect, some information came in from
the emergency medical that these people had other
problems that weren't drug related, that maybe there
was a crush involved, asphyxiation."

Stopping the show might cause a riot, so neither the
Who nor the crowd was told, although some in the
audience wondered about the flashing lights on the
plaza.

Mr. Radel was reviewing the show from the pressroom
when he was summoned to the Enquirer's private box by
publisher Bill Keating, who told him deaths were being
reported outside. Mr. Radel stayed to see if the Who
referred to the disaster during the show. They didn't.
Mr. Radel also made his way to the plaza.

"I remember opening that door and seeing those bodies
out there, those bodies and the shoes," he says. The
full moon and the glowing lamps on the plaza gave
everything a ghostly aura. "It had a very film noir
look about it. Outside, it was black and white; inside
it was all these garish colors of the show."

For Officer Menkhaus, the memory remains. "Dead bodies
- seeing that many people in one location; between the
dead, the injured, it's something that you never
forget. Well over 30 people were transported to the
hospital. Every ambulance in the city was in one
location."

Most concertgoers didn't learn about the disaster
until they turned on car radios. Others found out from
hysterical parents when they arrived home.

Mr. Bowes thought something was strange when he left
the arena after an abbreviated encore by the Who (the
band had been told before returning to the stage).

"I remember when we were leaving, coming out the doors
and just seeing this huge pile of shoes. At that point
there were no bodies laying around. I remember all the
flashing lights but we kind of just walked through
it," he recalls.

He thought it odd that there were dozens of cars with
parents in them lining Broadway near the Coliseum, but
he never imagined the reason. "You couldn't even
consider that you'd go to a concert and not come
home," he says.

He found out when he flipped the radio on after
driving his friends back to their home in Pleasant
Ridge. That's when he began fearing the worst about
not seeing his brother that night.

The dead were a cross-section of Cincinnati rock fans.
Four of the 11 were female, six were teenagers, two
were wives and young mothers. 

Within weeks, festival seating was banned and other
concert rules put into effect, including granting
police the authority to order Coliseum doors opened.
Inundated with lawsuits, Electric Factory closed its
local offices. Victims' families and the injured filed
32 lawsuits; all were settled out of court. 

A crowd safety task force, headed by former Cincinnati
Safety Director Henry Sandman, was convened, and eight
months later issued a report that remains the industry
standard.

Outside Cincinnati, festival seating has remained a
common arena practice without a repeat of the Who
disaster.

"I think all these things came together in one very
unlucky cosmic moment - festival seating, the Who
warming up inside clearly audible from outside, a
colder night, people were sort of clustered, the doors
opened out as all doors did (to prevent a crush from
the inside in case of fire). And nobody was sensitized
to the fact that it could happen. That was the first
time that (a deadly crush from the outside) ever
happened," says WEBN's Mr. Wood, who served on the
task force.

Concert security had been focused inside the venue.
"That was the biggest revelation out of Cincinnati,
that it's possible those kind of things could happen
outside the doors. It really emphasized the fact that
you have to deal with the crowds outside the
building," says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the
concert industry trade journal PollStar.

Most agree that something similar could happen again.
But probably not in Cincinnati.

"I'm coming down for the (Springsteen) concert, but I
don't anticipate any problems," says Mr. Wertheimer.
"It's a historic event for me. It's not an issue of
safety, that I think something's going to happen. How
could it? They'd be idiots."

Cincinnati Police Lt. Gary Brown, commander of the
Event Planning Unit that will be in charge Tuesday
night, anticipates the biggest problem for the
Springsteen show will be parking, because of
construction of the Great American Ball Park a few
yards away.

To prepare for the show, he traveled to the
Springsteen concert in Chicago. He also saw a couple
of shows by hard-rock band Tool - wild, crowd-surfing,
moshing rock concerts, he says. "The Springsteen
concert is a different animal. It's an older crowd."

But Officer Brown says the biggest difference between
1979 and 2002 is that, if his detail sees a dangerous
situation in the making, he can prevent it. "Back
then, the facility was in charge. Now, the city is in
charge."

"That night not only changed the way this venue does
business, but it changed the way almost every concert
venue in America does business," says U.S. Bank Arena
manager Moehring. "Things were just completely
different back then."

Then and now  
Then: The Who at Riverfront Coliseum. Now: Bruce
Springsteen and the E Street Band at U.S. Bank Arena. 
Then: Four doors opened at 7:30 p.m. (30 minutes late)
for 8 p.m. show. Now: 14 doors to open at 6 p.m. for
7:30 show.
Then: 14,770 festival seating tickets out of 18,348
total. Now: 1,800 festival seating tickets out of
16,800 total. 
Then: Show sold out in 30 minutes. Now: Show is not a
sell-out.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos
http://launch.yahoo.com/u2