Astronomers speak of the random, destructive, chaotic existence of the universe. Planets and black holes, stars and asteroids, all recklessly hurtling in space, alternately freezing and boiling each other in and out of existence. And every so often, they smash together, accidentally creating the perfect environment for light, life and perhaps...love? Well, at least some semi-serious groping.
With infinite tenure and unrestricted endowments, those same scientists would not be able to create as perfect a model of those concepts as is spread out in the grassy field before me. In place of their celestial counterparts, a galaxy of human stand-ins spin, crash, stagger and smash about wildly. Like the heavens above, they are a glorious collection of all shapes, sizes, and colors. From white to brown to yellow to black to “get that guy some aloe” red. From the merely dusty to the downright muddy, some grinning and smoking, some crying and limping, all rocking and rolling, this is The Radio Station Music Festival.
Officially, it is called "Raging in the New World," the annual Columbus Day festival rock show for radio station WXBZ the XBuzz ("Ninety seven seven the 'ZzzBuzz,' cutting the edge so hard we're 'X-ing' and 'Buzzing' at the SAME TIME!!" as they so eloquently put it).
Unofficially, I'd call it a crime scene, and then I'd call in an airstrike.
The XBuzz is the #1 radio station in the #60 market, which is located about an hour and a half outside Gotham City, the #1 market in the country. All the good holidays are claimed by the big stations in Gotham, your Bloody Christmas, your Full Force Fourth of Jam-ly, your Wasted Away Labor Day. Which leaves poor little XBuzz with Columbus Day, after failing to claim Cinco de Mayo, Summer Solstice, and Victoria Day (Canada) from the other local radio outfits.
I'm here with my rock band to play a set on the side stage. The show is being held in a field in the middle of a racetrack, and the two stages are on opposite ends of the great lawn.
Second stage, side stage, shit stage: it has many different names, and it's usually a crapshoot what it will be like. Depending on the layout, you can have a much better set on a side stage than on the main stage. If you get one of the first slots on the main stage, that means you go on at one o’clock in the afternoon, with the sun shining directly in your eyes, and the only people watching are the kids who have committed to parking it all day up against the barricade, waiting for the Big Headliner to come on at eleven that night. In the meantime they entertain themselves by trying to hit your guitar with pocket change and bottles of dip spit.
Sure, you might be on the mythical "Main Stage," and the band name might get a bump in the newspaper ads, but the show is going to suck. However, if you hit a slot on the side stage before a so-so band takes the main stage, you can steal the crowd, and maybe the whole day. It’s intimate, it’s energetic, and it’s immediate. The people are right up in your face, hands grabbing the microphone stands. They are either superfans, at the festival just to see you, or they are passersby who think they've happened on some secret surprise show. Plus, with the smaller scale and production, it has a very spontaneous, traveling circus kind of vibe. As if you said, "Hey, let's just find a field and put up a fucking stage! We'll get a bunch of people out there, and a P.A. too. Fuck it dude, it'll rule!"
So we're playing the shit stage at this racetrack, and the catering is just behind the main stage, and our backstage trailer is empty, just a warm case of water and towels, and there’s no coolers, and the point is there's no beer anywhere! So I recruit Luke to walk with me out into the crowd to find some, with our tentative destination being the main stage catering tent, a quarter mile across the field.
We push down the plastic orange fence, and step into the madness. A kid sees us do this, and walks over. He's wearing an extra large white Slipknot T-shirt that looks like he slid through the mud, then cut his leg on a rock while sliding through the mud, then used the muddy wet T-shirt to dress the wound, then put the shirt back on and allowed the blood and mud dry together. His hair is the same muddy color as his shirt, as is his fledgling mustache. His eyes break the continuous drab brown with a shock of red. He's about 18. Or maybe 35. It's difficult to tell, he's been partying pretty hard.
"Hey," he asks us in a drawl. "Did y'all just come from back there?"
"Yeah," I reply.
"Can I go back there?" he asks.
"I don't see why not," I say. It’s funny that out of the thousands of people at this show he has picked me, in shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt, as the authority figure controlling access to the back of the shit stage.
"Fuck yeah?" he grins. "For reals?"
"Fuck yeah," I say.
He takes a long moment, peering at me, stroking his mustache and trying to figure out just how hard I’m shitting him.
"Just hop over the fence like that?" he asks.
"That's what we did," I say as we walk away.
I look back to see him conferring with another guy and a girl, pointing at the orange fencing, then at me and Luke, then at the fence, then at us, pantomiming pushing the fence down, a lit cigarette between his fingers.
Little known fact: Backstages are extremely easy to walk into. All you have to do is look like you don't really want to go where you're going.
You have to think like the record label promotion guy, covering the show on day 6 of a 10-day business trip. Or the owner of the sound company's son/brother/lover who hates alternative/rock/pop and would rather be at the Snoop Dogg show. Or, be the guy in the band who has crippling diarrhea, and just walked over from the hotel, and the last thing you want to do is jump around on stage in 90 degree heat. Be that guy, hang a laminate out of your back pocket, and walk in. That's usually all it takes for me. If you do get stopped, try to fake an honest attempt. Guys in bands will do some astoundingly stupid things, like call information for the number of the venue, then ask the ticket seller to patch you through to the dressing room, or the stage phone, or the sound-board. Or show him a receipt from a restaurant in a different town, to prove you don’t live there. The more bizarre the better. By that time, the minimum wage at the gate will be sick of you, and will want to pass you on to the next level of security. Repeat until you achieve the desired level of penetration.
Luke and I walk away from the fence into the melee. It's a wonderful day, still warm in the early evening, the stars just beginning to show themselves through the dissipating rain clouds. And like the celestial ballet above, bodies on our earth continue to careen into each other. Only here they briefly stick together when the Vaseline slathered on all the fresh arm tattoos form temporary bonds.
The twilight gives the scene an ethereal, hazy feel, the press of bodies and roar of the crowd causing tunnel vision. We find ourselves in an unusually dense concentration of shirtless, sweaty male torsos, all facing a common direction. We turn with the tide to see a blond girl sitting above the throng on a set of shoulders, firmly grasping the bottom hem of her baby-doll T.
She's having a conversation with some dude in the front row.
"No, no, no way. Fuck you," she yells down in front of her.
"Do it!" yells the guy next to me, then sips his beer. Wait, where'd he get that beer?
"What? Do what?" she yells down. Her antagonist has changed the proposal, but we are unable to hear his side of the negotiation. "Should I? Oh My God, should I?" She silently mouths these words to an unseen girlfriend.
"Do it!" the guy next to me yells again. He does have a convincing argument.
She finally works up the nerve to execute a bizarre display of reluctant courage mixed with hesitant sexual pride, a quick up-and-down of cotton, giving the assembled audience a brief, stolen glimpse of her… bra.
I sympathize with the disappointment of the crowd, robbed of seeing that most precious concentration of pigment, but can't endorse their unwavering verbal assassination of this girl's character. Luke and I skedaddle as the girl tumbles down off the shoulders into the boos of the assembled bros.
Luke leads, because he's somewhere near 7 feet tall and much easier to follow. Plus he's more recognized in crowds, so if I lead, he'll stop and talk to someone, and I won't realize he's not behind me for like 5 minutes. Then it'll take another 5 minutes to not find each other, 20 minutes to get back to the shit stage to regroup, and then we have to start the whole process over.
The area between the two stages is a maze of food booths, tattoo and piercing tables, midget-wrestling rings, rock-climbing walls, and, ah yes, there they are! The beer tents.
I line up for beer. A few fans come up to Luke with CD covers for signing. I had seen them as we walked through the crowd. In that jumble of colors, all the different t-shirts and posters and cups and millions of bits of visual information, our CD cover jump out at me like a turd in a urinal. I've stared at the cover so many times, as we went through that dim-witted dance comparing font sizes and shades of red, or had the brilliant idea of autographing 3000 copies for fan club members.
I feel a sense of pride that our fans are pretty easy to spot at one of these shows. Being for the most part moderately clean and sober enough to function, they stand out in stark contrast to the other attendees. They've adapted to the situation, able to slog through the muck to the front of the stage, tolerant of the people landing on their head in the pit, adept at spending 8 hours in the boiling sun and then reeling as the temperature drops 40 degrees into night. They’re not hating the festival but certainly not loving it, and all in all they'd rather be seeing us in a proper venue. And so would we, but these shows are a necessary evil. The XBuzz will bang the shit out of our single for the month leading up to the show, then file it on the shelf as our plane takes off tomorrow. And the guy who added the record to the station’s playlist will go on the vacation to Hawaii that our label gave him, and everyone will be happy. It works for both of us. Like those little fish that swim around the shark's mouth.
Right as I reach the front of the line and and am about to say "2 beers," a young brunette girl wearing our tour shirt walks from Luke to me with a copy of our first album, and hands me a Sharpie. There's no one else in line behind me, so I take the pen and scribble my name on the inside cover before ordering.
"Thanks," she blushes.
"No problem," I reply.
"Excuse me, are you in one of the bands?" asks the lady behind the counter. She seems like a nice lady, and I feel bad that she has to be subject to this festival madness. But maybe she just likes getting kids drunk. Who knows?
"Oh, yeah, we both are." I gesture towards Luke.
"Which one, if you don't mind me asking?" she says.
"I don't mind at all."
"Stroke 9," the girl with the pen interrupts.
"Which one?" she asks. "Strychnine? I'm pretty out of the music scene, I don't know any of the bands y'all got out here today. Hold on... Hey, Mike!" She calls over to the guy drawing cups of beer out of the side of the truck. "Do you know which one is strychnine?"
"Which ones? Stroke 9?" he thinks for a second. "That's the Little Black Backpack ones, huh? Yeah, they're alright."
Right on, Beer Guy think we’re alright.
"Oh great, that's great," she says. "I don't know it, but I'm sure my son has heard of you. He's in a band, they're really good." People love to tell you about their teenage sons and brothers and cousins in bands.
The funny thing is, her son is probably headlining the main stage. Someone dropped that line on us once. Said, “Oh, you're in a band, my brother is in a band! They're called Cake, I think? Yeah, Cake.” Oh really.
"Do you all do your own material?" That’s one everyone asks. Like we’re Elvis, or Sinatra, with writers just throwing hit songs at us.
"Yeah, we do."
"Yes, so does my son. You have to, these days, to make the money," she says.
Money? Well, actually...
"Well look, let's see," she leans over the counter, gesturing me in with a wave of her hand. "How about you sign one of these napkins for my son, he's wandering around here somewhere, and I'll buy these here beers for y'all..."
Bingo.
20 minutes, 8 napkins, and 8 beers later, we decide to roll back to our trailer. Plus, I've now got to piss.
Thank God I only have to piss, and it's not a full sit-down situation. That is the worst thing about these festivals, and being in a touring band in general. We get primitive. Find somewhere to shit. This is a horse track, I guess one could blend in on the backstretch, but that doesn't sound too appealing. I mean, I'm no toilet snob. I don’t need a seat. I realize the rim is just like a colder, narrower seat anyway, and can work with it. I’m cool with cocktail napkins. I just draw the line at the bathroom with no stall and a door that swings open directly to the front of house. "Whoa, yuck, is that the bass player?"
Walking back towards the shit stage, we run into 2 of the dudes from Altalicious. We've done a bunch of these shows with these guys, toured for weeks at a time, spent days off with them, drunkenly professed our love, and yet none of us knows each other’s name.
"Dudes!" cries the singer with the earring things. We've stopped right in front of a booth selling 8 different t-shirts with 8 different Kurt Cobain faces on them.
"Hello lads," replies Luke. We all do that weird soul-handshake-pull-it-in-to-a-half-hug-chest-bump thing.
"Whoa, you guys are here today?" asks the drummer with black hair. I think he's the drummer. Wait, this guy was blonde the last time...or was he? Or is it another guy in that band who is blonde? Anyway, this guy’s hair is Ramones black now.
"No, we just happened to be fucking walking by outside," I say. "You guys already went, huh?"
"At around 10:30 this morning," says Ramones-hair. "We were like, rocking the guys putting out the fucking garbage bags."
"And fucking Superband strikes no equipment, leaves no room on stage, and breaks your balls about smoking, so their pyro doesn't go off," says Earrings.
"When you're spending 10 grand a night on pyro, you'll fucking shit too," says Luke. We all get wistfully quiet for a second, instantly forecasting a future where we spend $10,000 a night on fireworks.
"Just takes one song,” we all mutter, sipping beer and kicking dirt.
I'm trying to remember the last time we saw these guys. I vaguely remember remote Michigan, or maybe Minnesota, a college, and there was a club with full bar, and a less than enthused bar owner, and a live mic, karaoke perhaps. It was fuzzy, and they were a bunch of cocksuckers. Or we were the cocksuckers. Someone was smoking cock, or accused of it, and a lot, and very loudly, and demonstratively. And then we were all out in the cold. But maybe that wasn't these guys. No, it was, because John kept calling the guy with blonde hair "Blonde Basket." Who may or may not be this guy. Anyway, that was a fun night.
So we shoot the shit with these guys for a while, the usual topics: What’s up with your album, is it out, how's it doing, how's your single? What have you been up to, where were you before, how'd you get here, we flew in. Oh, yeah, what kind of bus? What color? Where is it parked? Right on, thanks, we'll come over after our set.
So we're halfway through the 'Our label is giving us all kinds of shit' part of the conversation, when we all feel some creeping going on. This "convergence of the minor rock gods" is beginning to attract the attention of the passing pedestrians. Separated, the disturbance would be minimal, limited to attentive fans only. But the concentration of two lead singers has mathematically increased the potential for being recognized to a greater level, and a bit of backwash is occurring in the flow of traffic around us. Not a jack-knifed big-rig on the Bay Bridge. But at least a mattress sticking out of the shoulder on Highway 101. Maybe near the off-ramp to Candlestick, 5 hours before a 49ers game. I mean, our videos were on MTV dammit!
And although we all love blind adoration, we say we have to hightail it back to stage, they say come by the bus for a beer, and we all move on.
As we part, I realize I could make a little speech about how funny it is to play out this scene in front the silent jury of Kurt Cobains, he who has become the De facto poster boy for "alternative rock", the guy who still gets more airplay on the XBuzz and all its sister stations in one day than we'll ever get in our entire existence. The James Dean, the Jimi Hendrix, the Bruce Lee, watching a couple of bands trying to succeed in a business he conquered and quit. But I'd be reaching for some sort of symbolism that would sound heavy-handed, laughable, and lame. And I’d definitely come off as an asshole.
Instead, Luke and I stroll back to the shit stage with the beginnings of a really good beer buzz. On the way, we grab our mustachioed friend, who is still deciding whether or not to jump the fence. We want to introduce him to the glory that is the backstage deli tray, and the wonder of its flat meats.
