Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [108]
I’d heard tales of Black Sabbath concerts that would make a fragile soul blanch; Sandy Pearlman told me that at the last one he attended, nobody in the audience could even stand up, barely managed to applaud, and bodies were sprawled everywhere. But the Black Sabbath show I attended not long after the interview with Ozzy was, contrary to legend, pretty much like any other rock concert, no excess of ODs or obnoxious incidents obtaining from too many people at one time in one place being so fucked-up they hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing or why.
On the other hand, Sabbath's opening act on the current tour is Yes. This double bill sold out Cobo Hall, the biggest pleasure palace in these parts, where they have hockey games and Big Time Wrestling on weeknights, and which only the very biggest draws in rock can fill. Even aside from the general draftiness of such a place, where any amount of volume can get lost in the moldy corridors and spacious obscurities, the audience was at least 60 percent a Yes turnout. Yes has just begun to come into their own superstardom via “Roundabout” and their Fragile album, and, as you might expect when the act puts titles like that on its creations, the fans tend to be a slightly different breed of mutt. Pushing the mean age up toward college level, I would think.
In fact, I was amazed at how well-behaved and in what good condition the crowd seemed to be. Wandering among them, you just noticed faces and bodies and clothes in the most normal way that you sometimes all but forget, this being one time you couldn’t routinely read somebody's psychic centigrade on their face like some strange barometer. If more than a minority were flying blind, they were putting up an awfully good front.
Since this story was originally going to be a graphic tragic survey of the littered battlefield of the contemporary concert, with pitiful panoramas of passed-out pubes and other alliterative gimmicks, most of us from Creem prepared ourselves for the harrowing experience by consuming a down or two ourselves. Now there we were, practically (or so it seemed to me) the only barbiturate reprobates in sight for miles. Ever alert for lurid detail, Creemer Jaan Uhelszki reported to me that someone tried to sell her a pill called Carbotrol in the bathroom, and that at one point she saw a girl puking. One miserable fucking puke!
Also, marijuana was legal in Michigan now and for about the next three weeks, due to a high state court ruling that since the possession law was about to convert to a misdemeanor the old one would be unenforceable in the meantime, so everybody can smoke themselves silly wherever they want with no fears greater than emphysema. Jour-nalistic dynamite! I expected people to be walking around casual as dons puffing languidly on joints just like they was cigarettes, never even removing the things from their mouths, or maybe indulging in mass orgiastic smoke-frenzies such as prophesied by John Sinclair and Jerry Rubin, but damned if I didn’t see nary a public toke all evening. Everybody just sitting there in their seats with their hands folded listening to the music. It was positively spooky.
Yes played a slick, flashy set of Formica art-rock that wowed ‘em to the rafters. They got an incredible standing ovation encore, where Sabbath, the headliners, didn’t even come back or get asked to; at the exact instant that “Paranoid,” the last song of their set, died away and they started off, the audience began to flow down into the aisles as if cued. And I thought encores had become an unbreakable social custom!
Of course, they didn’t play a particularly mind-bending set that night; the chemistry between an audience and an act is always a more delicate thing than some people realize. On top of that Sabbath, to my utter amazement and again