Crush Stories (Part 2)
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What concerns Wertheimer, essentially, is additions to the list; conditions at the Chicago shows he regularly monitors, he says, are ripe for such incidents. What he’d like is for things to change before that happens. “Deaths should not be the determining factor when it comes to the safety of young people at rock concerts,” he insists. “The attitude is that everything is OK short of someone actually getting killed. People are getting hurt all the time.”
The second is poor crowd management. This happens at large venues where thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of fans are forced to fight for entry through an inadequate number of doors: this is typical at Soldier Field shows. There and at sheds like Alpine Valley, Poplar Creek, and the World, capacity crowds can sometimes overwhelm security, and huge parts of the facility are ceded to pushing fans. I’ve seen this happen many times: at the Rolling Stones concert at Alpine in 1989, at Paul McCartney’s 1990 Soldier Field show, and at the second of the three-night Dead stand at the World in 1990. Wertheimer’s point, and I think it’s a sound one, is that such conditions–along with the usual fights and arrests that occur in many large gatherings of kids–are breeding grounds for a potential disaster.
Samplings
