It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [82]
For about ten minutes, we waited in the wings, unsure what to do. Since we all had our own dressing rooms and staff and Axl had hurried off to his, we didn’t know whether or not he was planning to return. We thought he probably would. The crowd seemed to think so, too.
Unlike a lot of venues, this one had a huge set of sliding doors at the back of the stage that could be closed and locked with chains. Most of the equipment not visible from the audience was already in a position to be locked backstage. After that first ten minutes, the tone of the crowd changed and people began to throw stuff at the stage. The crew started to shift some of the items in front of our set out of harm’s way—guitars, amp racks.
Every time crew members went out now to grab something, all sorts of shit rained down. It was coming steadily. Most dangerous of all were the venue’s plastic chairs with pieces of their metal frames still attached. Those were heavy. I could hear the thuds as they landed on the stage and bounced off the walls.
We had been in a riot once before, when we played the Street Scene festival in L.A. in 1986, opening for Fear. That day cops had come through on horseback and cleared the audience as we were about to go on. But we didn’t lose any equipment, and nobody got hurt. We were shuttled over to a different stage at the festival and opened for Social Distortion instead. Just a fun story for a band like ours, another notch on the bedpost in a way. Now, scanning the scene from the backstage area in Missouri, we began to worry about the scale of what we were witnessing. Much of the venue was already in ruins. Were people getting hurt?
Axl re-emerged from his dressing room and we offered to go back out and play to calm things down. It was too late.
Security tried to push the crowd back from the stage with a fire hose. But the crowd got the hose and backed our entire crew, the house security, and all the local cops behind the sliding doors. The crowd now had total control of everything in front of the stage. Kids were climbing our hanging speaker towers, destroying our monitors, smashing lights.
We hunkered down backstage. We were lucky. In a lot of venues there is no chained door and the crowd would have taken over the entire venue. Once the gates were closed and the kids had the stage, the crew did not go back out—there was no reason for anyone to risk opening a door and poking their head out to see what was going on.
But we could hear it all. Screams, crashes, the thunder of thousands of feet. Boom, boom, boom, WHOOSH. Rumble, rumble, boom, AAAAAAAAAH! Shouts, more thunder, the scraping groan of large objects being pushed around.
Another twenty minutes went by before forty or fifty police cars came screaming in and backup police stormed and retook the venue.
The band was shoved into a small van and told to get on the floor so we weren’t visible. Slash’s hat was sticking up. The driver asked him to take it off. When the van drove out of the enclosed part of the venue and into the parking lot, I could hear that the mayhem had spread outside. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I peeked out the back window—I could see speaker cabinets and pieces of our pianos. Kids had gotten tired of carrying them or dumped them when the cops showed. Clots of cops ran around with batons and pepper spray. Kids ran this way and that. Medics rushed around treating bloodied fans. Police had people in cuffs. It looked like a war zone.