Of Mosh Pits and Concerts

I was 53 years old before I found out what a ‘mosh’ pit was. And yes before you ask, if you did your maths right, that was this year. I only discovered what it was after reading an article on the BBC News website.

Not being a devotee of concerts (I have only been to two in my almost 54 years on this earth) I didn’t have a clue. It’s not that I don’t like ‘live’ music. On the contrary, I’ve seen enough live performances at clubs and the like for years. I can see you shaking your head in disgust now, “Only two concerts? Only…two? What a boring life you’ve had.”

In my defence I can only say the timing of concerts has, as a rule, always precluded my attendance. Only twice in my life has everything come together just right for me to attend proper ‘live’ performance.

In 1977 I went to my first concert. It was Willie Nelson and it was kind of accidental that I went at all. I had met a young blonde girl who worked as a waitress at the local Coney Island hot dog eatery. On a bet from a mate, I asked her out on a date.

Now this bet was not because she was ugly or overweight or strange looking. No, the bet was because the girl was gorgeous. My mate bet me that I could not get this heavenly creature to go on a date with me. I can only think that she was taking pity on the shy gawky teenager who tried first flirting then awkwardly asked what music she liked. This was my mate’s suggestion as he reckoned that as Fayetteville was a university town there would have to be a concert of some kind going on.

“Chicks just can’t turn down a rock gig dude.”

Amazingly she accepted, even after finding out that the concert was not of the rock variety. She was a Willie Nelson fan and was quite excited at the prospect of going. I secured two of the rapidly disappearing tickets (Nelson was and still is wildly popular) I rang her to say I had tickets in hand. We set up a time for me to collect her and that was that.

Or so I thought.

Between the phone call and the collection date, I met my first wife.

She worked in a local burger joint. One that I did not like to frequent because I’d once gotten a huge lump of soap in my milkshake there when they’d not cleaned their machines properly. I had a mate, not the same one that I’d been in Coney Island with, who was having a tough patch. He asked me go with him to the burger joint, I went along and made a note not to order a milkshake. As we were walking through the door and I was loudly telling him not to order a milkshake as they had soap in them, I looked toward the service counter and stopped dead in my tracks.

Behind one of the tills stood the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in the short time I’d been on earth.

I turned to my mate and said, “You see that girl there? I’m going to marry her.”

The first thing I did was march up to her till and ask her to attend the Willie Nelson concert with me. My mate stood at my side and his jaw dropped open. I then proceeded to talk her out of her current relationship with her boyfriend. By the time I left that night I had a different date for the concert and a new girlfriend. I ‘blew off’ the other girl (ah the cruelty of youth, although to be honest, she didn’t seem that bothered) and we went to the concert.

The moment the lights dimmed, a great cloud of pot smoke rose from the stage floor. In minutes we were engulfed in the stuff. I was so nervous that I was almost hyperventilating and was getting as high as a kite on the second hand reefer cloud. Before the music started, I noticed that my aunt and uncle were in the row in front of us. We started to chat and I went to introduce my new girl to them.

As I went to give them her name, my mind blanked completely. I would get to the bit where I’d say, “and this is…” Nothing that even remotely resembled a name appeared in my head. Everyone had a good laugh, except for my new girl, she was a bit irritated but managed to hide it fairly well.

I still blame it on the pot.

I would not attend another concert till I went to London with my daughter to see a visual Kei band a few years back. *I did write about that lovely experience in my blog, The Night My Ears Exploded.*

So it’s not surprising really that I never knew until today what a ‘mosh pit‘ was.

I wonder what I’ll learn next?

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