2005_12_01_archive

DECEMBER 3, 1979

Last Saturday was the 26th anniversary of the Who concert tragedy at

Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. I was a ticket holder and witness.

We got our tickets about a month before, and I drove two hours from

college (I was a freshman) to meet my friends. It was a cold Monday

evening. We arrived about an hour before the doors were to open. The

tickets were not reserved but "festival seating"... the sooner you got

in, the better location you could get to see the show. Despite the

cold, we were psyched... it was our first time seeing the legendary

Who. I was personally enamored at the time with Quadrophenia. Who Are

You was their most recent release, but I had been listening non-stop

to Quadrophenia at that time. I was 18, and that album spoke to me in

many ways. I'll admit that I was dissappointed that I would be seeing

the Who sans Keith Moon, but I was still very excited.

When we arrived, there were maybe 1000 people already there. We stood

in line in front of four glass doors, but the pushing and shoving got

really annoying, so we dropped back and stood on some light pole

fixtures to wait for the doors to open. Up there, we had a view of

what was going on in the front of the line, and none of it was good.

We observed people clearly panicing, falling and crying out. A man

emerged from the fray, sweating, wide-eyed, missing shoes and most of

his clothing. He found a uniformed Cincinnati police officer, and told

him "Man... you GOTTA get up there and put a stop to this... people

are really getting hurt!" The cops' response was "What in the hell do

you want ME to do about it?" It was a pretty scary show of

indifference, and - in light of what was about to transpire - not very

suprising.

The best we could tell, there were 4 doors open... 4 doors for a crowd

of well over - I'd say - 2,000 people by now. We saw fists flying, and

a sort of vapor rise up over the crowd in the cold December night.

Just about then, we noticed that another bank of doors north of us had

opened. We jumped down and went in without much pushing at all. As I

looked over to my right - where all the pushing was taking place - I

saw people still pressed up against the doors, and a pile of shoes at

the entrance. It was a crazy scene.

The show was outstanding. The band lived up to their reputation as one

of the world's most incredible live performers. Kenny Jones - the late

Keith Moon's replacement on drums - was more than servicable. After

the show, as we walked out of the coliseum, we observed all of these

news trucks - NBC News, CBS, etc - and all kinds of other assorted

media ALL OVER the pavillion outside. We knew then that SOMETHING had

went down. Did somebody O.D.? We turned the radio to WEBN (Cincy's

long-standing rock station) when we got to the car, and heard the

terrible news. We were all sick to our stomachs... we had actually

seen some of this going down. Even though we did not understand at the

time the enormity of the tragedy we were witnessing, we still all felt

a sense of - I don't know - maybe guilt over not doing something. I

still have that feeling to this day every time I think back on this

event.

We all got to a bank of pay telephones as soon as we could and called

our parents. My dad had heard Howard Cosell interrupt Monday Night

Football to report the tragedy.

This was an accident waiting to happen. I had seen Led Zeppelin at the

Coliseum two years before (again with the dreaded "festival seating")

and had commented to a buddy that night that "somewbody was gonna get

killed here some day." The shows at the Coliseum were always crazy...

it was anything goes at the doors. Who's fault was this? Clearly, the

city of Cincinnati (owners of the Coliseum) were at fault. They had

neither the personnel available nor the inclination BY those personnel

to treat the concert-goers as anything more that long-haired cattle to