February 11, 2016

WHO ASKED ABOUT MY FIRST ROCK CONCERT?

1971.  The Beach Boys.

But wait…there’s MORE! 

This really happened to me:

My very first concert was just a few weeks into my freshman year at the University of Rhode Island.  I was 17, and way behind my peers in concert-going; most had been attending concerts since they were in junior high.   This particular night I happened to go with a gang of girls from my dorm, all homecoming queens.  One of them had actually been to a Beatles concert.  Gorgeous, sweet girls, way prettier and better dressed and cooler than I could ever be.  I was just glad they included me. 

On the packed floor at Keaney Gym we scored a great spot near the stage.  Standing room only – no one would have wanted to sit anyway.  It was a fantastic concert, but how could the Beach Boys not be?  I will never forget hearing them perform what they called a “new one”.  It was from the revolutionary album “Pet Sounds”, and it was called “Disney Girls;” a moving tune and so different from anything else they had done.

The boys with the Boys (the crew and the backups) took notice of gangs of cuties and during the intermission they wandered through the crowd, tagging about 20 girls to invite back to their hotel for a party after the concert.  Our group was among them.  How naïve we all were, not realizing they were predators; we thought they were being nice! 

After the concert we piled into a car and drove to the hotel, a Holiday Inn a few miles from campus and the only hotel for miles around (URI being out in a rural area).  In the parking lot were a thousand girls from campus begging to be let in to the after-party and being turned away.  Not us – we were invited!  Two guys from the backup band pulled our group from the crowd and took us to where the entourage had commandeered the entire upper floor of the hotel.  My girlfriends all disappeared into various rooms, while I sat in the first room that was open and sat down with Mike Love and Dennis Wilson and smoked a bit of grass and just rapped (that’s what we called “chatting” then) At some point Carl walked in and said hello.  I sat there and tried to act like this was a typical evening for me.

Later I learned that wrestling matches were taking place in all the other rooms.  To this day I don’t know if any of the rape attempts were successful, but I doubt any of the girls would have known it was rape, because at that time we thought that happened only when  a masked stranger jumped out of the bushes and held a gun to your head.  Sadly, in those days some girls might have considered being forced to have sex by a rock band member as an accomplishment. 

I was lucky and nobody hit on me.  To this day I remember that night it as one of the coolest things that I ever experienced, and the only time I was grateful not to be a homecoming queen.