Worst ever festival line up?

Cowsill has been full-time in the Beach Boys for 21 years.

Nez and Dolenz are sometimes both in the Monkees these days, but I doubt Nesmith would play a pandemic cruise.

(It was the combination of modernity and obscurity that made me caveat the Surfrajettes!)

ahh got it! final nez mickey show is at the greek in nov, then mickey goin solo as "the monkees." ty!

nez is on the covid cruise!

https://i.imgur.com/yeDhm04.jpg

Wow

Holy shit:

https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/injuries-reported-near-nrg/285-19d48d85-2564-4242-bdcc-084677f6d6d8

Astroworld Festival update: 8 confirmed deaths, many others injured during Travis Scott concert

About two dozen people were rushed to Houston hospitals and at least 11 were in cardiac arrest, HFD Chief Pena said. The victims were as young as 10 years old.

God it's like a much worse version of the Pearl Jam show incident. Horrifying.

Not good news to wake up to.

I literally live 5 minutes from the concert site, close enough that last I could hear the fest and the music from inside my place. I was watching the news when this was happening, so I didn't hear said music stopping, and whatever initial local news coverage was a little after the fact.

My heart breaks for everybody. It'd been a treat this week watching the news leading up to the show, seeing coverage of all the charity stuff Scott's been doing around town, and then finally the reports from earlier yesterday from the opening of the festival, all these excited concert-goers getting interviewed and such.

This is hard time for Hip Hop fans in Houston. Just a couple weeks ago there was another show--forget the act, one of those new guys--that was being put on at an indoor arena in the same complex as this fest. People were in line for hours on a hot day when a sudden rain storm came up and eventually the gates were opened early to get everyone out of that, only to be left waiting for couple more hours inside before an announcement that the show had been cancelled. A minor riot ensued with skirmishes w/the police/security, and tramplings (although iirc no fatalities).

The details reported here are even more horrifying and infuritating:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/at-least-8-dead-after-panic-at-astroworld-festival-in-texas-during-travis-scott-opening-night-set-with-drake?ref=home

First thing this morning, I turned on CNN during an interview with a woman who had barely escaped the crush: she said a countdown began on the screen, 30 minutes before "he" (presumably Scott) appeared---as it got to 0, she told her boyfriend she couldn't breathe, passed out, woke up sitting in a relatively secure area. He'd had the crowd pass her overhead, and somehow they were able to do this, despite the surges: true crowdsurfing, 'til finally a security guard got her. She's a nurse, and observed that the "medics" (quotes audible) couldn't seem to do anything but apply icepacks to victims; "he didn't know how to find or take a pulse" etc. She said she's okay, just still trying to absorb all this (neither she not interviewer seemed to know about any deaths yet, though was mention of somebody in critical condition)

this is from TMZ so, y'know... but wtf

7:30 AM PT -- A source connected to Astroworld tells TMZ, someone in the crowd went crazy and began injecting people with some sort of drug, which caused panic and then a surge. The source says authorities are trying to determine if those who went into cardiac arrest were the ones injected. We're told one of those who died is a 10-year-old. The source says it appears to be a targeted attack. We have not confirmed this report, but the source is a key person involved in the festival.

xpost Think she said they'd tried to leave during the countdown, were too hemmed in.

Yeah the one in critical condition was a child, they knew that much during the interview (which was like 9:45 Central).

Looking at those videos in the Daily Beast piece, somebody really needed to relay to Scott why the ambulance was there and that they needed to halt the show for at least a little bit to get things sorted out.

Playing Devil's Advocate for the audience for a minute, if you didn't know better, you may have the ambulance had more performers in it, being led to the stage as part of some immersive concert experience or something.

I wasn't watching the clock too closely, but it felt like there was music going 'til at least 10:00 PM or so.

'may have thought'

The video of the cameraman being approached by two distraught attendees screaming and gesturing to stop the show and him angrily shooing them away was infuriating.

Sure, I doubt he could hear what they're saying, but their body language and mannerisms were pretty hard to mistake and he kept telling them to essentially fuck off

If you’re wondering how seriously Scott or his team took the gravity of that incident or their role in it….STARGAZING premiered the next year in 2018, while the lawsuits related to the case were ongoing. pic.twitter.com/gL6P06sI4u

— Cupcake Posting Their Ws (@lorenacupcake) November 6, 2021

what a nightmare

Earlier in the day at around 2 p.m. local time, hundreds of eager and rowdy concertgoers had stampeded the entrance of the festival, just outside of NRG Park, knocking over fences and metal detectors, and appearing to overwhelm understaffed security teams guarding the perimeter. No major injuries were reported from the rush.

So they basically had warning 7 hours earlier that the crowd control in place wasn't adequate?

Video of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W_njKnR6Q0

Sorry, I didn't think that would embed.

Not only that, but there was major crowd incident AT THE SAME VENUE two weeks ago that should have been used as a teachable moment, but wasn't.

Apparently, that’s from the guy who was dancing on top of the ambulance, and just… *sigh* Let’s try to be less sociopathic. https://t.co/vgeRvIOAyo

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) November 6, 2021

The incident a couple weeks ago was a cancelled Playboy Carti show. This venue is in the same complex as the AstroWorld fest, probably used the same security ops and cops, and was attended by a lot of the same people.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/10/24/concertgoers-create-chaotic-scene-at-nrg-arena-after-rapper-playboi-carti-cancels-houston-show/

It's been a long time since I worked around/near performance contracts, but if the show was stopped early would they still have been paid?

I have to think it was a financial decision to try going just 35 more minutes and then deal with it. I'm sure we'll hear more about who was making the call. The idea of having the conditions that were going on at 9:30, pushing toward the stage already, and then sending Drake out into that as a surprise guest...

This is from when the merch line opened earlier on Friday:

Damn merch line lit astroworld 📸 @Ovrnundr @swellberry pic.twitter.com/WCIeY8GfOU

— NTWRK (@NTWRKLIVE) November 5, 2021

Man, they really needed sturdier barricades, something with some weight.

a lot of anecdotes about travis scott just not giving a shit about the well-being of others have come up. I don’t know, that probably plays into it, but it’s not as if the people running the festival had no idea that he’s known for encouraging the crowd to be chaotic, mosh, rush the stage

just such a total shitshow

Remember like three months ago when Bill Simmons released a whole HBO documentary about how a concert tragedy was caused by nu-metal bands and white male “rage” and not, say, the concert industry’s unchecked underregulated vampiric *greed*?

How’s that theory holding up?

— Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) November 8, 2021

one of the cameramen purportedly told panicked fans trying to ask him to stop the show "we're aware of the situation. we can't stop the show, it's streaming live."

the decision had zilch to do with safety.

Hey maybe they can stream their trial as well?

Cameraman also getting all kinds of death threats which is not fucking cool at all.

definitely not. you can ask questions and hold people accountable without going nuclear, esp in this era of mistaken identity.

especially when they are not the string-pullers with that decision making

I'm not even sure what people expected a cameraman to do

I'm not even sure what people expected a cameraman to do

Speak into the headset they use to communicate with the production booth and explain that there's a medical emergency, that people are being crushed?

use their radio to alert other members of staff? at this point I think people were looking for anybody that had an electronic device they could talk through that would cut through the din

xpost

Tom B weighs in https://www.stereogum.com/2166670/travis-scott-astroworld/columns/sounding-board/

I think that piece nails it.

In a 2011 New Yorker piece about the attempts to stop deadly crowd stampedes, John Seabrook mentions a column that ran in the Chicago Sun-Times after the disaster at the Who show in Cincinnati: “Barbarians… stomped 11 persons to death after having numbed their brains on weeds, chemicals, and Southern Comfort.” I’ve seen a lot of tweets in the past few days that look a lot like that.

blaming the crowd, which some are doing, seems the weirdest of all, as the people doing the crushing don't always know that they are crushing people, and a collective group of people lacks a singular autonomy. at the Who show, there were people standing atop of other people that didn't even know they weren't standing on the ground. people ran onto the field with blood on their sneakers without being the wiser.

which isn't to say there aren't individual bad actors or even clumps of them (see ambulance dancers), but blaming something as complex as a mob of people whose collective actions/reactions aren't the same as that of an individual sentient person is weird. but, kinda like Breihan said, easier to have a bogeyman

The mysterious injection attack angle fading away?

i've heard more people talking about people that are talking about it than people actually talking about it

already seeing usually friends of mine sharing these stupid "at metal shows, we pick people up in mosh pit" takes, which a) comes across as pretty racist or adjacent to it ("of course fans of HIP-HOP would be like this!", but b) completely misunderstands the mechanics of crowd crushing and how this shit happens to begin with. have had to call them out on it.

not to mention, it's not even universally true - I've seen more people than I like to count at metal shows getting thrown out for cheap shotting someone in a pit.

I dunno, as someone who was excited to see Travis at Coachella in April, I have to admit he doesn't seem to "take care" of the audience the way I've seen most punk/hardcore/metal frontpeople do.

Sure, Travis has a history of incitement. I'm referring to the fans, though. If the average metal show actually got attended with Travis numbers, which for obvious reasons is unlikely, the same crowd crush could easily happen.

I almost got trampled at a Bad Religion show in 2000 that had an overfilled floor and had to ask security to pull me out. I was screaming at the people around me after I got knocked down and stepped on and somehow managed to get to my feet.

But they didn't know what was happening. They were just dancing on an already crowded floor. This was mild compared to what happened at Travis.

I almost got trampled at a Bad Religion show in 2000 that had an overfilled floor and had to ask security to pull me out. I was screaming at the people around me after I got knocked down and stepped on and somehow managed to get to my feet.

Same thing happened to me at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in 1989. My glasses fell off while I was down there, too, and I had to reach into the mass of stomping feet and grab them before I could even start fighting to get upright again.

Neanderthal otm. The blame lies with the organizers of the festivals, not the fans.

Didn’t know all that much about Travis Scott before this but he seems like an asshole.

I went to a show on the first Def Jam tour in the mid-80's, which was at a big arena. The main floor was general admission/standing only, and was packed. I was in the middle of that crowd, and throughout the show fights would break out (not really fist-fights, but yelling/shoving altercations) which would cause the immediate crowd to back up and send a wave throughout the entire mass of bodies. It was really hard to stay upright when this happened. In retrospect, I probably never fell because we were hemmed in so tightly (at point I lifted both feet off the floor and was able to "levitate" briefly) that there was literally no room to fall unless everybody did so at once. Still, packing that many people together so tightly struck me as a seriously bad idea, but I'm sure somebody else saw only a teeming mass of dollar signs.

i have see the “at punk/metal shows we pick each other up” take on tumblr and neanderthal otm it struck me as frankly both wrong and fucking racist

i spent some time reading firsthand accounts from attendees on the travis scott subreddit, one thing that struck me was how often 'people passing out is normal at a travis scott show so i didn't think anything was wrong' came up. seems like this was an inevitability. so much trauma and survivor guilt also- sounded like an absolute nightmare. (one kid said he was 'off a tab' even)

also, one less remarked-on angle i think is covid- his fanbase skews young, and two years without being with friends/going to shows is a long time if you're now 18. so i think concert inexperience and pent-up energy could play into this, but again, that's hardly the fan's fault- just may have exacerbated the situation. the organizers should have taken this into account