By Mike Barnicle

The young get blame

Cigarette smoke that smelled pleasantly odd curled up into the mist of the late afternoon as a group of kids stood around the parked cars in the lot behind the Boston Garden where, inside, a rock concert was going to start in three hours. Two of the kids cupped their cigarettes within the palms of their hands and put their hands behind their back as I approached, feeling like Lawrence Welk.

Once a conversation was started, a couple of the kids felt bold enough to display the cigarettes. They were not Camels and appeared to be handrolled and the longer they blew smoke in my direction the more I felt like flying to San Diego while munching on a large bag of Oreos.

The concert had become a big event. This, because it featured a group named The Who, the same band involved in a tragedy in Cincinnati where 11 had been trampled to death trying to get inside a hall to hear music.

Once this happened, a lot of politicians went into heat as they rushed to get out great moral pronouncements about how The Who should be forever banned from stages. In Providence, where they are so neat that they dump the bodies of the gangland dead across the Massachusetts border, the group's performance was canceled by the city.

“I just like their music, you know,” a young girl who gave her name as Alison McBride was saying as she leaned against her boyfriend, Tommy Williams. “I'm just here for the music. That's all.”

The girl had come into town on the train. The ride from home was two joints long and, now, her eyes looked like pinholes and she was ready for some slow dancin'.

Across the street from the entrance to the Garden, another group of kids sat inside the Burger King eating hamburgers and checking their tickets. A $12.50 floor ticket could bring $50 out on the street, but no one seemed willing to listen to arguments on behalf of profit.

“I wouldn't sell this sucker for $500,” one of the boys said.

“You wouldn't?” he was asked. “If I put $500 on the table right now, you wouldn't sell me that ticket?”

“No way,” he answered with conviction.

“You're crazy," he was told.

“You don't understand man,” he said. “They're a great group. It's something just to see 'em.”

There are fewer and fewer “supergroups” around these days — bands or individual performers that are guaranteed sellouts as soon as a date and time are announced. The Who were a supergroup before Cincinnati and still are despite the voyeurism that now seems to surround them.

Many inches of print have been devoted to their impact on kids in the wake of the 11 deaths. Not half as much attention has been paid to the Cincinnati city officials who chose to funnel a wild herd of people through only two open doors. It is always easier to blame the young.

“This …,” a 17-year-old kid named George Hollings was saying over in the parking lot. “Look at all the cops they got around here, like they was expecting a riot.

“You know, like they get all these cops here 'cause they think we're all gonna get stoned and freak out and charge the place. It's not like that man.

“Things would be a lot better if like the politicians got ripped and just joined in and listened to the music. Everything would be cool, man,” Hollings said. “I'm tellin' you the truth.”

Rock has always had an element of fear to it for many older than 35. The fear usually stems from the fact that much of its appeal, its reach and its impact seems part of an alien culture to those raised on the tameness of music in the late '40s or '50s. Many men and women who are now busy making a living and raising families of their own seem to identify groups like The Who and their music with drugs, insubordination and a society that seems a bit out of whack with values drummed into heads two and three decades ago.

But for many kids, the music is the only lyric of their life and, in some cases, the only thing that reaches into their heads and even into their souls. At a time when adult examples have ranged from felons serving in the White House to their older brothers being used as cannon fodder in a war that is still unexplained, it should not surprise us that a lot of kids think more of Peter Townshend, the overrated lead guitar player of The Who, than they do of the people who have presided over the public demise of America during the last 10 years.

At 5 yesterday evening, the young kids gathered in the Garden parking lot were approaching takeoff. No one was throwing punches or measuring their shoe sizes for late night stomping. It was only rock n' roll, but they liked it.

They seemed to be having as good a time as Bruins fans. And thinking of that sport and this facility reminded one of the nights that grown men and women gathered to watch someone named Dave Schultz, then of the Philadelphia Flyers, come onto the Garden ice, hoping all the time that one of the Bruins would whack him over the head with a stick so that blood would flow enabling the sports fans to cheer and go home thrilled.