When it comes to the well-being of kids at rock concerts, you’d think that reasonable people would work together to ensure the safest possible conditions. But Jam Productions and its security force, Star Security, don’t have many nice things to say about concert-safety watchdog Paul Wertheimer. That’s their right–but it’s possible that Jam and Star stepped over the line last Tuesday at the Pearl Jam show at Soldier Field.
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Wertheimer’s version of last Tuesday’s events is that he was in the pit surveying conditions when guards accused him of pushing. He was taken out and surrounded by security people at the side of the field. Wertheimer says he was then startled by a newcomer brandishing a camera: “I turned away and moved my left arm up over my eyes. My arm touched his camera. I didn’t hit the camera, didn’t knock it to the ground. All of a sudden he’s saying, ‘Oh, my eye, my eye.’ That was it.” The photographer pressed charges, and Wertheimer was bundled off to police.
Jam’s version of events, vociferously articulated by owners Arny Granat and Jerry Mickelson, is rather different: they insist that Wertheimer, whom they despise as a self-promoting irritant, was just another fan taken out of the crowd for hostile behavior. They claim he was seen pushing one person “so hard his head snapped back.” They say the guards didn’t know who Wertheimer was, but that he was “abusive and aggressive” to their personnel. Photographing troublemakers, Granat says, is standard operating procedure; he also says he has four witnesses who saw Wertheimer push the camera into the photographer’s face, bruising his eye.
Wertheimer, ironically enough, says the Pearl Jam show was relatively safe. He noted padded barricades and cooling water sprinkled on dehydrated fans. But he also saw a hard plastic cover over the turf. “It’s great to protect the grass,” he says. “But there was nothing for the falling bodysurfers. Why wasn’t that padded?”
