By Dorothy Storck

Heavy Metal, Vacant Minds

There are some things I will never again do, either for this column or for the "experience."

I will not ride a camel. I will not eat the raw eye of an ox.

I will not join a marathon jog, I don't care how worthy the cause. I will not, under any circumstances, hang around a hotel corridor for more than seven minutes waiting for a politician to come out and make a statement. Maybe eight minutes if it's the President.

I will not, not ever again, ask the mother of a boy who has just been killed by a drunken driver, or by a war, how she "feels" about it.

I will not interview any more promising starlets, or diet experts or authors of books about being your own best friend.

Never again

And I will never go to another rock concert.

My ears still hurt from the Who.

I'm not kidding about this. My ears really hurt and there's a small roar in them the way I remember seashells sounding when you put them up against your head.

I went down to the Spectrum Monday night for the Who for the same reason that most of the reporters and TV cameras packing the press box were there.

We were waiting for the kids to tramp each other to the ground, the way they did in Cincinnati a week ago, when 11 of them died.

This is the nature of the news business, and I'm not going to defend it or even discuss it much right now because I have a notion that you who read the newspapers and you who watch the news on TV understand what we do even better than we understand it. The ayatollah understands it. Look at all those Iranian protesters waving their hands for the 6 o'clock news.

No problem

I'm told by the people who make a study of rock concerts 6 the newspaper rock critics and the Spectrum PR guy, Larry Rubin 6 that Monday night with the Who was really calm and orderly. More so than usual.

They thought the kids were a little afraid of what happened in Cincinnati. So the fans didn't push as much as they might have. And some even stayed away from the front of the lines.

This is what the experts told me.

At the time, I was in the first-aid booth next to the press box, getting some aspirin.

There were two kids in there with me, a boy and a girl. Both of them had passed out from the pressure on the floor in front of the platform where the band was going at 115 decibels.

The Spectrum ushers 6young and expressionless and wearing red vests 6passed the fainting bodies over the barricade that separates the fans from the performers.

Nobody was fazed. Somebody threw the girl's jacket after her. It missed and landed on the stage just short of the divine middle Who's sneakers. He didn't even bother to kick it away.

The experts told me that everything with the Who was dull Monday night by comparison with the Outlaws, say, or Black Sabbath.

This is no doubt true, in context.

Looking through you

The violence I was feeling for four hours at the Spectrum had not a lot to do with physical pushing, although when the doors opened at 6:30 and the kids and the gate guard I braced against each other, I backed away.

The same way I remember backing away from the kids smashing into furniture stores in the ghettos of Detroit, and Watts, and Newark in 1967. But it wasn't the same. Bad though that was, it was purposeful.

The kids who go to rock concerts slam into you in the corridors, milling through the doors when they hear the warm-up heavy metal vibes.

But they aren't angry with you. They just want to get through you. Really, they aren't seeing you at all.

And that, to me, is the ultimate violence.

Peter Townshend, guitarist and leader of the Who, told a New York Times reporter that "the whole purpose of a rock concert is for people to forget themselves, to lose their egos in the crowd, to disappear."

You can do this after a while at a rock concert, if you batten down your senses, smoke enough grass and let the decibels take over.

You can, as Townshend said, disappear.

You will never hear a violin that way of course, or a searching alto sax in a starry night. And you may, in your rush to hand over your ego, trample on a neighbor in line and move miles to get high.

Bodies with nobody in them make me afraid.