I’ve written before about the first open-air festival I ever went to; Led Zeppelin; Knebworth but not about the last which was in 2004 at Konocti Harbour resort in Northern California. Now, this was a gig, typical of many summer gigs in America, I imagine. As such unremarkable. Except not for us.
Imagine, you’ve grown up going to gigs in the northeast of England, usually on cold, dark nights. That is rock n roll to me. We’d camped out on the frosty streets for tickets, for God’s sake. So summer in California was an exotic place to see the Steve Miller Band and Big Head Todd And The Monsters.
We’d arrived in nearby Clearlake a day before. The motel room had a jacuzzi-bath thing in the room! Very odd and unsurprisingly damp. The woman in Subway thought I was mad for wanting a sandwich consisting of no meat or cheese. It took 10 minutes to explain the concept.
So it was all a bit odd. The lake was anything but clear, being covered in a bloom of green algae and dead fish. It was roasting hot too.
The gig was at a resort in a venue with seats and bars and food outlets. A sort of giant Butlins. It was the first but not the last gig I’ve been to where people were more concerned with eating than with the bands. It was the antithesis of everything I’d grown up with. We watched in amazement as a constant stream of well proportioned people making their way to the food stalls, coming back with great fat arms full of buckets of fried chicken and huge burritos and massive cups of, not beer, but coke. I honestly have never seen anyone eat so much food as the crowd pushed deep fried comestibles into their meat holes. Had they not eaten for days? How could anyone be that hungry? But it was en masse and entirely normal, the food was part of the entertainment, we were the odd ones out to be not craving a hundredweight of fries and a 72 oz coke.
Anyway, as any true Brit would, we eschewed the food for the bar, having quickly learned to spot a fellow Brit as the one who went straight to the bar and didn’t wait to be seated. We want to be in control of getting drinks, not farm it out.
The support group was a good R&B band (in the true meaning of the term). Steve Miller came on and played all the hits from Fly Like An Eagle and Book Of Dreams. Then he dropped into a half hour blues set saying it’d be back to the hits soon enough. This was what I wanted to hear, loving the blues on the second side of the debut album. But it was a cue for about 50% of the audience to go and buy more food and drink. I felt sorry for him. They wanted hits or nothing. Food was a better option than blues. It seemed so rude and uncouth, apart from anything else but, these people didn’t care, driven on by their capacious stomachs, talking loudly as they got up, like Steve Miller was almost incidental. This was 2004 but it's common now in the UK too. It happened at Newcastle Arena for Joe Bonamassa. But I’m there to see the band, not to eat half a roast chicken and talk in a loud voice about what Frank is doing with the garage. Where America goes the UK follows.
It was a total cultural shock. We'd been to gigs in LA at the Wiltern and it wasn’t like this. It seemed specific to the outdoor summer gig. Nor was it unique, as we went later to see Counting Crows at the same place and it was, if anything, even more extreme with great swathes of empty seats at a sold out gig, all away eating food. The singer even commented on it. What must it be like to sell out the show, only to discover the dirty tortilla chips are more attractive?
It really spoiled what should have been a highlight of my gig life, being a Miller fan since 1976. We subsequently went to gigs and even stumbled across Eddie Money playing a free show by San Francisco Bay Bridge, but we swore never to go to an open air show again. At least not unless we were hungry.
