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Aerosmith/Gorge Review
Review: My favorite band of all time at the last place I wanted to go to a concert. There has never before been a show at The Gorge to tempt me. It's a three hour drive one way, they only have shows in the summer and it's not cheap. All I knew about the place before this was from friends who had gone, my mother in particular. She tells me that it is always unbearably hot. If you have general admission tickets you have to sit on the hillside and hope that you can see anything. Be sure to bring your binoculars. One time she decided to pay double the general admission ticket cost for actual seats. They were hard, small, and impossible to get in and out of if you needed anything. Nothing here inspires a desire in me to go. Aerosmith is the only band who could possibly woo me to such a place. And they did it this time, but they never will again. My day started out far too early, and that has nothing to do with the concert directly, it just means I started the day out tired. I met up with my partner for this adventure, Andrea, at about noon. I should mention that my ticket for this concert was a belated birthday present from her. I love her more for enduring this day with me, than for the gift of the ticket. It shows the lengths to which we will go for each other. Anyway, we hit I-90 about noon for the long drive out there. Mind you the show is scheduled to start at 7:30 PM. It's a good thing we like each others company and had enough to talk about for the three hour drive out to The Gorge. The drive was uneventful, and we arrived at about 3 PM. We grabbed the cooler and other things we had packed for the day. You're allowed to bring in food and unopened bottled drinks, no alcohol. (yeah, right, that was an entirely sober crowd. whatever) I had a book, a deck of cards, a change of clothes because I was warned that it gets chilly after the sun goes down (which it did not do), and of course a blanket to sit on. Next was a line to sit in and wait for them to start letting people in for the show. It was over 90 degrees and the sun was blazing, I hated it. I despise being out in the heat of a summer day, I prefer not to get any sun at all. To try and keep from getting a sunburn I had slathered on 50 spf sunbock, wore clothes that were light and loose but covered me to wrist and ankle, and brought my parasol along to hide under. So we pick some space next to the fence and spread out to wait. I lay down with as much of me under the parasol as possible to try and nap. Unfortunately there were some irritating teenage boys nearby chattering innanely the whole time. The best example of this is that they argued about what time it was. I was also hugely impressed with their talk of girls. Note that there were six of them and not a single girl. I put this down to the caveman-like attitudes they were voicing. I keep sane by cracking jokes at the expense of such people. Only maybe an hour and a half of rest and people start jumping up to rush forward to the gate. We grabbed our stuff and dashed forward with the crowd to wait in an overheating press of bodies. Brilliant! It was half an hour, 5 PM, before they actually opened the gate. I thought I was gonna be sick from the heat. Next we had to make it through a half-assed search to make sure we hadn't brought anything we're not suppose to. Then a trek down a long path to the actual amphitheater and try to grab as good a seat in the grass as we could. In the end, ours was not a good choice. It seemed good to be next to the path that led out instead of half a hill away from it, but this meant there were people walking through our view of the stage constantly. There were 'crowd control' guys who had to constantly walk by and tell people they couldn't stand there to watch the show. Two and a half hours on the sloped hillside and my ass was killing me, and I was beginning to realize that because I had to brace myself so as not to slide down it, my knees were already starting to hurt, this was not good. This was the point when the opening act appeared. We could hardly see them, but the crowd was fairly responsive to them (Fuel). One of there songs sounded vaguely familiar, but that was it. They were okay. During all the waiting we had to fight to keep people from encrouching to much and to keep them from stepping on us and our stuff as they climbed up and down the hill behind us. We also did lots of people watching. The most astounding trend I saw was girls with the fly of the shorts left open so you could see the top of their underwear or bikini. I found this strange. There were worse things, but I won't waste anymore words on it. The sun set about 8:45 PM and Aerosmith hit the stage at 9 PM. Everything seemed very prompt. The huge stage appeared to have little stick men running around on it. There was lots of chrome. To compensate for the huge venue they had a movie screen behind them and cameras all over the stage. Most of the time there were live shots of the performance on this huge screen. That was nice. Sometimes there were clips from their videos mixed in. I also appreciated the clarity of sound and the tightness of the music. It wasn't like listening to a cd at all, there were variations in the songs, but it was clear and tight. These guys are professionals. I haven't mentioned the second stage yet. There was a mini stage built out in the general admission area. The backside of it faced the path we were near and it was ten feet from us. We thought this meant we might get some view of them there, even if from behind. When 45 minutes into the show Steven Tyler says 'Mind if we take a walk out there?' the crowd went nuts. There was a sudden swarm of people trying to get at that stage from any side, and we had to jump up and pull our things together and hold our ground, then try not to get trampled and not lose any of our possessions. My knees, already strained from sitting/standing on the steep hill started to tremble from fatigue during the second of three songs they performed here. We were constantly fighting to keep people from knocking us down or tramping between us. Hard to appreciate the complete lack of view while elbowing people back. Andrea is a fighter and possibly more stubborn then myself. She went so far as to punch someone in the ankle who was standing on me and some of our stuff. (This did not hurt the person, it merely got them to move.) Luckily for us a group of four had pulled up next to us and were helping keep us safe. They even locked arms against a bullying middle-aged asshole who didn't want to take no for an answer when we told him he couldn't come through. I was very thankful to them. The most vocal and stubborn of them was a girl with one hand in a brace trying to protect her little brother as well as us. She was wonderful. After the third song was over and the band was being escorted back to the main stage I told Andrea I couldn't take any more of this. We waited for the crowd to disperse a little and started packing up. She didn't mind. Unfortunately we had one more wait in a press of bodies because someone had been hurt and the way was temporarily blocked. We were able to find a nitch where we watched a few more minutes of the show, but I was so shaken by then that I just couldn't appreciate it. Finally we were moving, and a few minutes later we were back at the car. We loaded everything up and figured out how to get out of the parking lot. The thing I knew I couldn't handle was the chaos that would ensue once the show ended. From the press of people trying to get to their cars to the chaos of those cars all trying to leave at once. I knew I had hit my limit and I needed to leave before it got worse. So I guess it was about 10 PM when we started the three hour drive home. We reviewed events. We had enjoyed the first half of the show, that was important. We had both hated the crowds. Neither of us seemed to be sunburned or dehydrated, we had done a good job of taking care of ourselves. We hadn't needed to buy anything at the show. ($3.25 for a 12oz water is nuts.) We hadn't eaten much because of the heat, but neither were we hungry. We agreed that The Gorge was an experience to have once so that you don't wonder about it, but we were glad it was behind us now. I must have had enough rest because I had no trouble staying awake for the return drive. My last hope is that I do not remember the worst moments of this experience, fighting off a bully in the crowd, everytime I hear my favorite Aerosmith song, Toys in the Attic. You see, that's the song they were performing while it was happening. ~Snow Dragonwyck, Aug. 11, 2001
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