Читать книгу LZ-’75: Across America with Led Zeppelin - Stephen Davis - Страница 5

The trouble started, as it often does in Boston, on a freezing winter night. This was in January 1975. The city’s radio stations and street papers had announced that tickets for Led Zeppelin’s first North American tour in two years would go on sale at the city’s main arena, Boston Garden, at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

The kids started lining up on Causeway Street, outside the arena, at six o’clock on Monday night, January 6. They were a young crowd of suburban teenagers—Zeppelin’s hard-core audience—and by nine o’clock they numbered around 500. A few had tape players, and songs from Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, III, and IV, and Houses of the Holy blared in the cold night air.

By ten o’clock, it was ten degrees outside, and someone made the decision to let the kids on line spend the night in Boston Garden so they wouldn’t freeze to death before the box office opened the next morning. A cheer went up as the kids, most of them wearing blue denim, were let into the building.

Soon they were passing joints and swigging from bottles of cheap Ripple and Boone’s Farm apple wine. When that ran out, some kids broke into the beer concessions during a shift change of the security guards. Someone opened an exit door and let in a few hundred more kids who had arrived to line up for tickets. The kids turned on the fire hoses and flooded the arena’s hockey rink. The police arrived as Led Zeppelin’s fans were looting merchandise stands and lighting bonfires composed of the Garden’s old wooden seats. Drunken kids then turned the high-pressure fire hoses on the cops and their dogs. It took the riot squad three hours to chase the kids out of the building. The Zeppelin fans then fought the police in the streets until they were dispersed sometime after midnight.

The box office failed to open on Tuesday morning. Damage was estimated at $50,000. A Boston Bruins hockey game was canceled because the rink was fucked up. Then the mayor of Boston, after visiting the sacked and still-smoking arena, declared the city would refuse to grant the local promoter a permit to hold the February 4 concert. Led Zeppelin would be forced to bypass Boston on their 1975 American tour.

When things get out of control, everyone loses money. So promoters in other cities took note. An official from the Ticket-ron agency, the nation’s biggest ticket-seller, contacted Jerry Weintraub, the concert promoter Zeppelin shared with Elvis Presley, and asked him to postpone announcement of ticket sales, but Weintraub refused to go along. In New York, Madison Square Garden managed to avoid a riot by not announcing when Zeppelin tickets would go on sale.

“If we had,” a spokesman told The New York Times, “the youngsters would have stayed there all week.” But demand for Zeppelin’s three February shows in New York was so intense that lines began to form in substantial numbers anyway as word leaked out that the box office would open at one A.M. on Sunday morning. Sixty thousand seats for the three shows sold out in three hours. It was reported that 45,000 were sold through the box office and 15,000 sold through Ticketron.

It was different out on Long Island, one of the most passionate of Zeppelin’s suburban strongholds. Kids began to line up at the Nassau Coliseum, in Uniondale, three days before the box office opened. To prevent disorder, numbers were assigned to 2,000 people, who were then locked in the hockey arena’s exhibition hall and allowed to remain overnight, under guard. In the morning, only the first 900 buyers were able to buy all 20,000 tickets, leading to complaints about scalping and corruption in the ticket industry. When the cops told disappointed fans to go home, there was some shoving and cursing though no arrests.

But two miles away, six fans were arrested when an estimated 2,000 fans jammed into a Macy’s department store at the Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City. The line was orderly until twenty-five Nassau County policemen attempted to “reorganize” the waiting line. Some kids at the front of the line were evicted by the cops, and their places immediately filled by others, who seemed to be friendly with the police. Bryan Brett, nineteen, of Glen Cove, told the Times: “The cops pushed some of us out of the line, and other kids stepped in front, and they got the tickets while we got nothing after waiting for hours.”

Some of the kids told the cops they were crooks and assholes. There was shoving and threats. Six Zeppelin fans were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and harassment. The Times reported that “the extent of any ticket scalping for the rock shows could not be determined yesterday. The Department of Consumer Affairs said it had not received any complaints.”

Led Zeppelin’s entire 1975 North American tour sold out within a few hours after its tickets went on sale. According to Jerry Weintraub, even Evis Presley was impressed.

“Well, I may not be … Led Zeppelin” the king of rock & roll would drawl. “But I can still pack ‘em in.”

Sure, Elvis. Anything you say. Viva Las Vegas.