Tags: rolling stones mayhem sixties
Published : 3 months, 2 weeks ago (Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:29:29 PDT)
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My mother lives in the city where I spent most of my childhood. (I used to say "where I grew up" but Mrs. Blevins points out that I haven't grown up and a damn good thing it is, too.) It holds the distinction (?) of having been the birthplace of Mary Baker Eddy and the headquarters of Lydia Pinkham well known for Medicinal Compound. Since my father died she has moved to Florida and back four times and each time she returns she returns to this city. In my childhood it was a medium sized city that was resting uneasily on the shoulders of one employer. Since that employer closed two plants and "right-sized" the third it has become a case study for every social ill gripping the nation. I had a route to her apartment that neatly avoided anyplace I had strong memories of. There is no such route to the hospice so memories tend to flood in at every stop light. There's just no pushing them off. One of these follows.
Driving up one day I was listening to the Rolling Stones. I don't usually do that. After listening to them for a number of years trying to decide whether I liked them or not I decided I didn't but I'm writing on a topic that required me to re-familiarize myself with their early work so I was listening. A detour sent me past Manning Bowl. Manning Bowl was built by the WPA during the depression. It's a 20,000 seat stadium meant for High School football. It was also, for several years, the first stop on Rolling Stones US tours.
In 1966 they were going to play Manning Bowl on June 24th. Tickets were three, four or five dollars. I'd recently had a birthday and had some cash rumbling around in my pocket so I bought a ticket, lied about where I was going, and went to the concert.
Like most events in the sixties for every ten people who were there, there are fifteen versions of what happened. Most people agree about what happened but disagree about the sequence. My own memory is of overwhelming flight response. So here's what happened, in no particular order:
It began to rain.
Kids jumped down on the field and started to dance.
The Stones ran to waiting cars and boogied the hell out of there with their bad-ass image temporarily in tatters.
Kids rushed the stage and threw chairs.
Cops lobbed tear gas.
Mature reflection leaves me with this; throwing tear gas into a crowd estimated at 8,000 gathered in a stadium with exits designed for orderly foot traffic was pretty stupid and it's only pure luck that nobody was stomped to death.
I think the measure of the place can be found in the city's description of the event as follows "1966 -- ROLLING STONES CONCERT A GASSER!" when anyone with half a brain could have told them it was a "GAS, GAS, GAS!" |
