Fisticuffs, Errant Knights and Projectile Vomit

Memories of an unexpectedly eventful 1990 Tom Petty/Lenny Kravitz concert

First of all, let me holler a resounding thank you to everyone who has subscribed to Jagged Time Lapse — we’re already up to over 200 subscribers! The more the merrier, obviously, so please feel free to share any specific JTL posts that you find particularly enjoyable with folks that you think might dig it. Or just share the whole damn thing!

Second, my piece the other day on how Billy Joel was my first official rock concert triggered an outpouring of “first concert” memories from folks on social media, including my friend Jessica’s revelation that her first concert had also been Billy Joel — but that she and the friend she’d gone with had been pelted with ice by fellow concertgoers for committing the egregious offense of standing up during the show. That story, plus the recent ascension of the “Hunters Moon,” inspired me to write the following…

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“Sit down! Sit down!”

If you’ve ever been to a concert with assigned seating — especially at an arena where the floor seating is all on the same flat plane — you have undoubtedly heard this annoying chant. Unless the show itself is fairly low in energy, there are almost always some concertgoers near the front who want to stand up and shake their groove things along to the music, which then creates a reverse-domino effect where row after row of the people behind them have to stand up in order to be able to see what’s happening onstage.

Though I have been to a handful of arena concerts where everyone on the floor was up and rocking for most or all of the performance (the first leg of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA tour immediately comes to mind), usually there’s a definite tension between those who want to actively exult in the energy that the performers are putting out, and those who want to passively absorb the experience from the relative comfort of their seats — and want to do so with an unobstructed view. And it’s not at all uncommon for that tension to boil over into something uglier…

By the time the 80s were drawing to a close, I’d pretty much sworn off arena shows altogether. I was now old enough to get into Chicago clubs, where the tickets were cheaper, the sound was usually better (not to mention louder), the connection to the bands felt far more palpable, there was no hassle about assigned seats — if you wanted to be close to the stage, you either showed up early enough to stake out a spot or you worked your way up to it during the show — and most of the artists I really wanted to see were playing.

So when my sister asked me in February 1990 if I wanted to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with her at the Rosemont Horizon, I was frankly torn. I had zero desire to ever set foot in that 17,000-seat behemoth again, plus it was a hassle to get there from our part of town without a car. And while I’d dearly loved Petty’s first five albums with The Heartbreakers, he’d kinda lost me with 1985’s disjointed Southern Accents and even more so with 1987’s dull-ass Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), and his recent Jeff Lynne-produced solo album Full Moon Fever was a record I respected more than actively enjoyed. (Having to hear FMF at least once a day at my record store job had also done plenty to diminish whatever enthusiasm I might have initially felt for the it.)

But Petty was one of the few artists that my sister and I had bonded over when we were in our teens, and I still had fond memories of us dancing together to “Change of Heart” and “One Story Town” at our high school dances back when 1982’s Long After Dark was on the charts. Plus, Lenny Kravitz — whose recently-released debut album Let Love Rule I kinda dug — was the opening act on the tour, and we had a couple of friends who would probably give us a lift, so I eventually agreed to go.

We made good time in traffic that night, and wound up getting to the Horizon not long after the doors had opened. After stopping at the merch stand to buy a couple of t-shirts, my sister and I leisurely made our way to our seats. They were good, not great, located in a lower section of the upper deck about halfway down the venue from the stage. We’d have a good view of the action, so long as we didn’t mind keeping our heads slightly turned to the right all night.

As luck would have it, the first explosive action of the evening occurred right in front of us well before Lenny Kravitz even took the stage. Two women and two men, all looking to be in their suburban late-30s, gingerly made their way down the steps to their seats about ten rows ahead of us; the women moved into the aisle first, followed by the men. Then, just seconds after they were all seated, one of the men turned towards the women and proceeded to projectile vomit all over them — and all down the rest of their row. His “sudden outburst” traveled a good 10-15 feet, at least.

Viewed from the safe distance of our seats, this was actually quite the impressive display — to this day, I’ve never seen that kind of distance on an upchuck, not even in a Monty Python film — though to say that the women were unimpressed would be a seismic understatement. Muttering “We can’t take him anywhere,” they angrily trudged back up the steps towards the nearest women’s room, hoping to clean themselves up in time for the show. Miraculously, no one else had gotten hit by the spew, since it was still early enough in the evening that most of the ticket-holders hadn’t even arrived. A maintenance worker was alerted to the situation, and he threw a bunch of sawdust down on the mess before sponging off the seats; it was just like how the janitors in our elementary school would handle it whenever one of my classmates puked.

Finally, the seats began to fill and some of the house lights went down, and Lenny Kravitz appeared onstage with a band of about five or six musicians. I had been a little concerned about how Kravitz would be received by Petty fans; Petty’s audience was exceedingly white, and it had just been a few years since TP and the HBs had flown rebel flags onstage during their “Pack Up the Plantation” tour. How would these people deal with a Black opening act, even one who was playing rock music?

I needn’t have worried. Kravitz had more than enough energy and charisma to get their attention, and a note-perfect cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “If Six Was Nine” pandered effectively to the classic-rock demographic that made up the bulk of the audience. (To be fair, he also played a raucous cover of Love’s “My Flash On You,” which absolutely no one around me seemed to recognize.) While not everyone was digging what he was doing, nobody seemed to hate it either, and around the arena you could see the occasional fan get up to rock out with the music.

One of those fans was about three rows directly in front of us, and his view-blocking dancing greatly annoyed the woman who was sitting directly behind him. “Sit down!” she yelled at him. “I can’t see!” He paid no attention to her, so she reached out and tugged his sleeve to try and get his attention. “Sit down!” she repeated. The guy whirled around and angrily lit into her.

“Fuck YOU, bitch!” he yelled. “I paid my money for this seat, and I’ll dance if I want to!”

This line of reasoning did not go over particularly well with the woman — or with her boyfriend, who happened to be sitting next to her.

“You calling my girl a BITCH?!?” he shouted, standing up and delivering a right to the guy’s jaw in one fluid motion.

It was a solid punch, but the dancing guy didn’t go down; he briefly staggered backward, then lunged forward with a punch of his own that connected with the boyfriend’s mouth. And then it was on — easily the most vicious fistfight I’ve ever witnessed. Neither combatant gave an inch, eschewing the usual grapple-and-takedown bar-fight strategy in favor of full-on flailing. Teeth and chunks of flesh were visibly dislodged from their original positions, but the two men kept pounding away at each other’s faces until a scrum of security guards appeared and dragged them both off. All of this while Lenny Kravitz was onstage singing “Let Love Rule,” his message clearly not reaching the upper deck of the venue.

It was going to be hard to follow an undercard like that, though I was looking forward to seeing Petty play for the first time . Still, I remembered how my friend Jim Saft had seen him at the same venue seven years earlier and hadn’t entirely bought what TP was selling. “Eh, he’s a showman,” he’d shrugged when I pumped him for a review of the show. “Does a lot of rock poses, gives the people what they want, that kinda stuff. The band is really good, and the songs sound pretty much like they do on the records, but I wasn’t blown away.”

At the time, the height of my Petty fandom, I’d found it legitimately hard to believe that a TP and the HBs show wasn’t a totally fucking awesome experience — but after they took the stage and played a few songs, I began to understand Saft’s perspective. The Heartbreakers had long enjoyed the reputation of being one of the great rock n’ roll backing bands, but during the first five songs of the night they offered little more than high-level professionalism; they did indeed sound exactly like the recordings, but there wasn’t much happening in the way of unexpected licks or fiery interplay. I was especially puzzled by drummer Stan Lynch, who kept the beat flawlessly yet seemed either unwilling or unable to throw in even the most rudimentary fill.

Maybe the problem was that four of those first five songs were from Full Moon Fever, which wasn’t a Heartbreakers album. There had been some well-publicized unhappiness in the Heartbreakers camp over Petty recording the album without them (though his invaluable right-hand man Mike Campbell was of course on board for all of it), and even the official name of the tour (“Strange Behavior”) seemed like an uncomfortable compromise, a way of acknowledging the fact that the Heartbreakers were helping Petty promote an album that most of them had made little or no contribution to without totally rubbing their noses in it. Perhaps the lingering bad feelings were spilling over into their performance — not that the musicians’ innate professionalism would ever allow them to flat-out tank the show, but it seemed like they just weren’t going to give the Full Moon Fever songs anything more than they required.

Then again, Petty didn’t exactly seem to be going the extra mile, either. He sounded and looked great, and threw a few shapes here and there to get the crowd going, but everything about his performance seemed almost too controlled. It wasn’t that he was “phoning it in”; it was more like he’d learned hundreds of shows ago exactly how much of himself to give in front of a crowd this size — and while he would never give you any less, he wasn’t going to give you one iota more, either. If you came to hear his vast array hits played impeccably, great; but if you were looking for anything in the way of actual transcendence, well, sit back and enjoy the songs.

Even Petty’s between-song stage banter was weirdly economical, like he knew damn well that any words with more than two syllables would be wasted in a cavernous arena such as this. “Thank YEW,” he addressed us at one point, in what was probably his lengthiest spiel of the night. “Yer makin’ us feel… RE-AL GOOD.” The crowd, of course, went completely nuts.

There were a few curveballs thrown into the set, perhaps in keeping with the “Strange Behavior” concept. Lynch took lead vocals on a cover of the old R&B chestnut “Down the Road Apiece,” followed by a boogie-woogie instrumental led by keyboardist Benmont Tench. The stage itself was decorated like someone’s dusty, cluttered attic, with antique trunks, overstuffed armchairs, a taxidermied bear and a knight’s suit of armor among the oddball items placed at various conspicuous points around the amps and drum riser. During Campbell’s psychedelic guitar solo on “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” the stage lights were suddenly pre-empted by a single, massive strobe — whereupon the aforementioned suit of armor sprang to life and strode awkwardly across the stage to “menace” Petty, who fended it off by stabbing and parrying with his Rickenbacker.

What the hell? For years, I’d been mocking metal bands for pulling quasi-Spinal Tap stage stunts — the giant mechanical spider that “attacked” Ronnie James Dio on the Dream Evil tour was the stuff of guffaw-inducing legend among my friends and I at this point — and this was so weirdly, hilariously off-brand for Petty that I didn’t know whether to applaud, laugh or cringe. I mean, imagine Bob Dylan borrowing David Lee Roth’s rocket-boosted giant surfboard from the Skyscraper tour and hopping a ride on it for “Tangled Up in Blue”… and yet, this would ultimately become one of my most vivid lasting memories of the concert.

The only times during the show that Petty seemed consistently locked-in were on the various acoustic numbers sprinkled throughout the set. Though I was initially disappointed about not getting to hear the band in full jangle mode on “Listen to Her Heart,” his solo acoustic version of the song was actually pretty great, making me think about how cool it must have been to hear him play the song to his bandmates right after he finished writing it. “Alright for Now” (one of the only songs from Full Moon Fever that ever really moved me) and “Rebels” were also extremely effective, bringing an impressive and unexpected sense of intimacy to a thoroughly non-intimate setting. And when the Heartbreakers kicked back in for the blazing 1-2-3 set-closing punch of “I Need to Know,” “Refugee” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream” — my other favorite from FMF, though mostly because of Campbell’s blacktop-searing guitar riffs — they finally found the fire that their reputation was based upon.

“The Waiting,” probably my favorite Petty song (though “Here Comes My Girl” runs a very close second), led off the show’s encore segment. I’ll admit right now that I’ve always found Petty’s live rearrangement of the song — where he plays most of it solo before the Heartbreakers “dramatically” join in at the solo break — gimmicky and annoying, and in-person exposure to it during the encore did nothing to change my mind. (When you’ve written and recorded a song that perfect, why mess with it?) But the second number of the encore, a faithful version of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” totally hit the mark — especially when Petty implored the crowd to “sing it loud for Del Shannon,” who had taken his own life only a week earlier.

It was during the last song of the night, an ecstatically ringing “American Girl,” that my sister nudged me with her elbow. “There he is!” she laughed, directing my attention towards the front of our section. There he was, indeed — Mr. Projectile Vomit himself, who was now standing on his seat, raising his last beer of the show high above his head, and looking remarkably hale and hardy for someone who had just splashed his guts down the row a few hours earlier. He was surely blocking somebody’s sightline, but nobody yelled at him to sit down. By then, everyone was simply too caught up in the music to mind.

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