Thursday, December 03, 2009

30th Anniversary


Today marks the 30th anniversary of The Who concert tragedy, where 11 people were trampled to death getting into a festival seating show.

I was in high school at the time and had friends who drove down from Lancaster to attend the show.

These friends showed up to school the next morning totally unaware of what happened the night before; a testament to the 24/7 news cycles of today.

I will never forget the photographs of piles of clothing and shoes collected from people trampled but still managing to get into the show.

I'll also never forget that I had tickets to an Aerosmtih show at Fairgrounds Coliseum in Columbus (is that place still open) that was subsequently canceled due to concerns about festival seating.

Another interesting note is that I've subsequently met people who were at a Led Zeppelin show earlier that year who basically said the same thing happened to them.

WVXU has detail of the victims and the tragedy here.

The sad thing is that after 30 years, the dump, I referred to as the Cincinnati Mausoleum, still stands.

1 comment:

mRed said...

Wow. I haven't thought about this for a long tome. A band I played in during the late sixties was in an all day lineup at the old Crosely Field stadium in Cincinnati. It was a disaster. It rained all day and a guitar player for another band got hurt while performing. At that point the concert producer shut everything down. Later, when we got home, we found out that the guitarist had been electrocuted. In the lingo, it was a bummer.