I was NOT kicked out. I was politely asked to leave and never come back.
The cleaning lady kept coming in every hour, so to avoid suspicion, we shared one toilet and
switched stalls after every time she came in while also alternating who sat on the tank and who sat
on the seat with their pants down and played "20 Questions" and "Guess the Number" via notes
passed on the envelopes our concert tickets came in to pass the time....
KoRn, today, is one of the biggest bands in the world. And in 1998,
after the release of their album "Follow the Leader", they may as well
have been the only band in the world to me and my high school best
friend, Christina Wheeler.
The band's first two albums had been all but played out by our circle of
friends in anticipation for Follow the Leader's release date which kept
getting pushed back. When it finally did come out though, it blew us
away. It seemed to have some sort of addictive quality that made it
impossible to take out of the CD player. To quote Christina's
high school boyfriend, Doyle, after we pressed the repeat button a fourth
time since coming back to her house after school: "Don't you guys have
any other CD’s?" With eyebrows raised (and pierced with safety pins on
the same side as Jonathan Davis), we replied in irritated unison, "Uh,
yeah." You see, tickets to the "Rock is Dead Tour" (which featured
Videodrone, Rob Zombie, and of course, KoRn) were going on sale that
Saturday at 10 am and we HAD to know that album beginning to end or we
would surely embarrass ourselves. (I know, right?)
Now, these were the days when shopping on the internet wasn't really all
that popular. Not to mention that neither I, nor Cori (our other
partner in crime on this particular excursion) had the internet at our
parents' houses. Christina's parents did have internet, but the only
computer in her house was in her parents' room and her mom made it
pretty public that she was surfing porn on it all day. (Especially when
we brought boys over. Gross.) So our only option was to get up super
early and go to the Tacoma Mall Rite Aid which had a Ticket Master
inside.
The last time KoRn had played at the Tacoma Dome, floor seats sold out
in like a minute. We HAD to get tickets on the floor so that we could
be in the moshpit. The moshpit was the natural habitat of all of our
punk rock/metalhead friends and the KoRn moshpit was the Mecca of all
moshpits. So we all met up at the mall at 7 am to make sure that we
would be the first people in line. And we were the first people in
line.....on the wrong side of the store. We figured this out pretty
quickly though, and became the 9th, 10th and 11th people in line which
is, apparently, just close enough to the front of the line to get the best
seats in the balcony.
SEATS?! BALCONY?! We can't MOSH in SEATS in a BALCONY!!!
We were devastated to say the least, but our devastation lasted only a
short time as we formulated a plan to skip school the day of the concert
and go to the venue to beat the crowd. Surely, we would see the band
arrive…we could tell them our sob story and they would see how
sincere and awesome we were, allow us to mosh on the floor and be our
best friends for life. Or a more probable outcome would be that a radio
station had to be giving out tickets and if we were the first people
there, who better to give them to? Either way, we were sure we would
make our way to that moshpit and have ample bruises to flash to our
fellow classmates the following day at school.
Skipping school was to us like it was for many teenagers: an art form that
we had perfected. Well, maybe not quite "perfected" since Christina had
accumulated so many "unexcused absences", (She was out of purple hair
dye and grounded. The logical time to go to the mall was during school
hours.) that she had to get a note from a doctor to miss any school or
she would go to juvenile hall. We spent the night before the concert in
her room listening to Follow the Leader while she chain smoked and
chugged whole milk like it was her job, in an attempt to accumulate
phlegm. Hopefully, this would be enough to get her a doctor's note since
she couldn't list her symptoms in Spanish at the only clinic that took her health
insurance. Sure enough, it was. As we were waiting for her note on our way out,
the woman at the reception asked in broken English, "You are sexually active,
No?" and before we could stop giggling, WHOMP!!! Huge Sack O' Condoms on the counter for all to see. We tried to refuse, but the receptionist didn't seem to get it, so we
took the Sack O' Condoms and made our way to the bus.
We met up with Cori at the Tacoma Dome around 9 am (doors were at 8 pm)
and we weren't even the first people there. We were, however, the first
people there who had seats. All of the others had come that early so
they could reserve their places right up front against the grate. Fuck
that, you can't mosh against the grate. You can barely move or even
breath for that matter. When asked why we came that early we responded
with, "Free condom?" This provided our immature brains with hours of
amusement. We blew them up like balloons, dared each other to eat the
flavored lubricants and hoarded some of the more delicious water-based
ones to make into miniature popsicles later. (The oil-based ones didn't
freeze.) There also were female condoms in there, which none of us had
ever seen before, but we quickly discovered they made fashionable
bracelets after we removed the condom part from the ring and painted it
with glitter nail polish.
Cori disappeared to make out with some random dude as she often did. He
had a short ponytail, a long goatee and oversized pants held up by a belt
made of hemp…we all agreed he was pretty hot. Christina and I both had to shit and
didn't want to use a Honey Bucket, so we took a walk around the building
to try to find somewhere with running water to drop our respective
deuces. In our quest for a suitable facility, some security guard
flagged us down to bum a cigarette. He agreed to turn a blind eye while
we snuck backstage and said the bathroom was to the right when we walked
in. "You girls might even be able to just hide out in there until the
show starts and sneak in if you want to." We both looked at each other
in agreement and the plan was set. We walked with our heads up and chests
sticking out in an embarrassing attempt to appear as confident and
inconspicuous (yeah right) as possible through the backstage entrance
and headed straight toward the bathroom. We heard someone
behind us saying, "Um. Excuse me ladies!" We pretended not to hear
them and rushed to the backstage ladies bathroom without ever breaking
our awkward posture. We did our business, of course, and then......and
then.....what now?
Doors weren't for about another 7 hours and if we left that bathroom
someone was sure to kick us out. We stayed in the stalls playing "guess
the number" and "20 questions" via notes passed and written on the
envelopes our concert tickets came in. The cleaning lady kept coming in
every hour, so to avoid suspicion, we shared one toilet and switched
stalls after every time she came in while also alternating who sat on
the tank and who sat on the seat with their pants down. I think she
started to catch on after a while. She knocked on the door at one point
asking how much longer I was going to be in there. "Ummmmm. I'm having
some stomach problems today." I replied while we both tried not to
laugh. "It might be a while."
Hours had passed and we could hear the roar of the crowd as people entered
The Tacoma Dome. The doors were finally open. Now seemed like a safe time to
leave the bathroom and walk from backstage to the floor. Plus, we were starving. We started to make our way to where we thought the entrance to the floor might be
which lead us through a small catering area. No one stopped us from
walking through so we figured no one would notice/care if we had a small
plate of cheese and crackers. We figured wrong. We were thrown out of
there within seconds, but not before Christina managed to devour an
entire block of Rob Zombie's cheese. (Rob, if you're reading this,
we're sorry. And it was delicious.) They even confiscated Christina's
ticket, but they didn't get mine because I lied and said I didn't have
one. After getting the boot, we walked around to the front entrance to
where the scalpers were and pooled our money to buy an even shittier seat
than she had before.
We did manage to sneak Christina down to sit with me and Cori. Our
friend from school, Paul, was there, too. Down on the floor, blown up
condoms were flying everywhere as Videodrone began their set. Less than
a third of the crowd was moshing, though. Christina and I heckled the
non-moshing floor-seaters while Cori and Paul disappeared to go make out
somewhere. Others around us joined in (with the heckling, not the making
out). By the time Rob Zombie's set began, we had had inspired a full-on riot
in section 11A which later turned into its own moshpit. FUCK
YEAH! We started our own moshpit! In all the excitement we started
daring people to jump from the seats down to the floor. "It's not that
high! Just do it! Pussy!" We even prepared ourselves to jump with
them. Before his set ended, though, there were security guards in
orange shirts shoulder to shoulder in front of our section. No more
plotting. We would spend the rest of the show in section 11A moshing
between the seats that were banging painfully against our calves as we were
shoved into them repeatedly.
KoRn played an unbelievably amazing set which included "Faggot" and "Kill
You" (my two favorite songs by them) back to back. To this day, they
remain one of my favorite bands to watch live.
The following day at school, the hot topic (not the store) at the lunch
table was, of course, the concert the night before. Everyone who was
there went on and on about what they felt were the highlights of the show
while others whined about how much they hated us for going when they
didn't. We all swapped moshpit injury stories. When seeing the bruises
on our calves, Doyle commented, "Your legs look like chocolate-chip cookie
dough."
"Yeah, we got them from moshing between the seats."
"You were in that moshpit in the seats?! That shit looked crazy!"
"In it? We started it! We tried everything to get to the moshpit on the
floor and when we couldn't we started our own."
"You girls are crazy."
"You think that's crazy? We snuck backstage and hid there for hours, but
we got kicked out for eating Rob Zombie's cheese."
"Oh my God!!! You went backstage? And you ate Rob Zombie's cheese? You guys
are the shit."
And we were.
