Crush Stories
On December 3, 1979, Paul Wertheimer had just been promoted to public affairs officer for the city of Cincinnati. Sick, he had taken the day off and was lying in bed watching television when news bulletins began reporting an unfolding disaster at a local Who concert. As the enormity of the tragedy became clear–11 kids killed and more injured trying to get into an 18,000-plus-capacity venue with only a few reserved seats–Wertheimer began thinking like the PR man he was. “I told the mayor that I wasn’t sure what had to be done, but I thought that we might be able to turn the situation around.” When the mayor decided on a committee to analyze the disaster, Wertheimer volunteered to direct it.
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Wertheimer, then 29, wasn’t a big concertgoer (though he’d once been in a bad situation at a–get this–Joni Mitchell concert). But the report he wrote over the next seven months–“Crowd Management: Report of the Task Force on Crowd Control and Safety”–became a watershed exhibit in the evolving awareness of the unsafe conditions at many rock concerts. The report pointed a finger at the rock ‘n’ roll tradition of “festival seating,” which is a nice way of describing a method of crowd handling that creates waves of young and undisciplined kids all straining for the show’s best vantage points, generally right in front of the stage. The report led to changes in the laws governing concerts in Cincinnati and has influenced lawmakers across the country.
Marveling at the crushes I’ve seen at so many concerts, I ask Wertheimer why more kids aren’t killed: the question strikes a nerve. “It’s not a question of ‘Why not more?’ It’s any at all,” he says sharply. He points to 1991’s AC/DC concert in Salt Lake City, where three fans were asphyxiated and several more injured in the throng at the front of the stage. He pulls out color xeroxes of the bodies laid out behind guardrails, with a new crush of awestruck kids looking on. One of the victims, he says, was a 13-year-old at his first concert. Salt Lake City had a law on the books banning festival seating, but it was no longer being enforced. “The city said they’d forgotten about it,” Wertheimer says.
