No surging mobs likely when The Who comes to Largo

By Tom Basham

Next Thursday, The Who comes to the Capital Centre.

The 19,000 tickets for the December 13 show were sold months ago. This concert will be reserved seating. That removes the death threat.

General admission seating is an open invitation to chaos, a fact dramatized by the 11 deaths and scores of injuries that preceded last week's Who show in Cincinnati.

From a fan's viewpoint, the no-reserved-seats plan has only one plus: It usually allows more people into the show than a reserved seat approach.

This is because, at the usual general admission show held in a large arena, no seats are set up on the floor. More people can stand than could sit in neat rows.

The drawbacks of the plan are abundant and obvious. Fans will feel obliged to show up early, to be near the doors when they open. A rush for choice locations will naturally occur. Bad blood between seatsavers and seat-seekers is guaranteed. Crowd control is difficult. The music gets lost in the chaos. Everybody winds up paying top dollar, but not everyone gets top seats.

From a promoter's standpoint, general admission is very attractive. The larger than-average crowd pays higher-than-normal prices which produces more money. Set up and ushering expenses are reduced.

The general admission scheme is sometimes thinly disguised by the hippie love vibe title "festival style." Some very big groups, such as Wings, Fleetwood Mac, the Doobie Brothers and The Who, have appeared at the Capital Centre in the festival format.

To be in the arena when the main doors open is to witness a human tidal wave. Whooping and screaming, the most reckless members of the crowd lead the charge down the steep aisles and onto the floor. The slower members pack in behind, crushing the early birds against the front of the stage.

Rock city

The performers generally spend a portion of their stage time asking the people in the back to ease off. The crowd gets packed so tightly that a stumble by somebody on the fringes sends shock waves rippling across mass. It is frightening fun. You become part of a larger, more powerful organism at the cost of surrendering some of your ability to survive.

But the most powerful rock 'n' roll has always had overtones of death and violence. The people who make it and the people who follow it are citizens of Edge City, pushing their bodies, their minds and their music beyond established limits.

The early Who, in common with the early Stones, are excellent examples. They first gained fame for the anarchic sound and fury of their live shows. The climax came with lead singer Roger Daltrey spitting out the words to "My Generation," while brutally attacking the band's speaker cabinets.

Drummer Keith Moon mauled his drums until they submitted and exploded across the stage. Smudge pots belched thick grey smoke from the wings as guitarist Pete Townshend throttled his guitar, evoking whines of pain.

The mayor of Cincinnati, who cancelled scheduled shows by Blue Oyster Cult and Aerosmith, and the mayor of Providence, R.I., who canceled the Who's December 17 date in his city, are abusing this distinction.

A rational response would be to take steps in advance to promote the safety of the tens of thousands of fans who want to see these canceled shows. It is ignorant demagoguery to use a tragedy sparked by negligent crowd control as an excuse to suppress rock.

If these mayors were intellectually honest, they would cancel events like Memorial Day and Bengals football, where they know somebody will be killed or hurt.

What the cancellations really reveal is the continued vitality of the anti-rock attitude. These mayors can look to that noted guardian of public decency, the Ayatollah Khomeini, for spiritual guidance. In connection with his ban on music in his country, he had this to say:

"Even music dulls the mind because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs… and it destructs our youth, who become poisoned by it."

Rock and roll cannot be squelched. It is dangerous music. The Who's delivery of that music is one of the most powerful experiences in rock. The fact that 11 people lost their lives in pursuit of that experience is an emphatic acknowledgement of its strength.

Almost 15 years ago, Pete Townshend wrote a song which has become the classic statement of the essence of rock music. He was not yet 20 years old when he wrote "My Generation." Its opening words could be an epitaph for the 11 people who died in Cincinnati:

People try to put us down Just because we get around Things they do look awful cold Hope I die before I get old This is my generation, baby.