Letter from Boston

Punk Rock Concert

By MASAKO YAMADA

One Tuesday my friend Matt was asking around to see if anybody wanted to go to a rock concert with him. There is a club in Cambridge called "The Middle East," and an alternative punk band called "Avail" was playing there. Although I'm not very interested in punk rock, I decided to give the concert a try.

Having enjoyed small rock concerts in Boston and Chicago before, I thought it would be interesting to see the punk scene close up. People say The Middle East is a cross between a Middle Eastern restaurant, a cafe, and an alternative rock club, so I was expecting to see a small group of fashionably dressed people sipping syrupy mint tea or strong Turkish coffee while listening to the music. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The concert was held in a stark basement, and it was packed elbow-to-elbow with people ― standing room only. There were almost no furnishings in the room besides a makeshift stage and souvenir booth. There were a few bars, but they weren't serving any alcohol because most of the concertgoers were under the legal drinking age.

At the club Matt and I met up with a couple of other physics students, a second year grad student also named Matt, and an undergraduate senior named Heather. They both seemed quite comfortable with the scene. Heather is the only female physics major in her graduating class (at a very big school!), and for that reason, she's often invited to the graduate school physics events.

My friend Matt had heard "Avail" play several times before. The other Matt had once toured the country with his own alternative band, and Heather was a big fan of one of the other bands that was playing that night. I was glad to have my friends around me, because I would have felt terribly out of place by myself.

Three bands played that night, but I remember nothing of the music. All I remember is that the crowd got progressively wilder as the bands played on. It seemed that most people in the audience were gangly, rebellious high school kids, and they had far more energy than I did. At any concert, there usually is a "mosh pit" toward the front by the stage, but since this was a relatively small room, it seemed that everybody was a part of the mosh pit.

Once the music started, I felt people pushing at me ― hard ― from all directions. They weren't merely tapping their feet to the beat of the music. People were literally running into each other at full force, and others were pushing back with equal force. The audience turned into a human tornado. Some kids jumped off the railings into the raised arms of the crowd and were carried across the room.

Matt wanted to go to the very center of the action, so he asked me to hold his book bag. I stayed by the wall and held his bag tightly, but the crowd still pushed me. One guy had his glasses flung off. He got down on his hands and knees to look for them, and I was afraid he'd be crushed. He found the glasses safely, but they were bent out of shape. I could very well imagine how people get crushed to death at rock concerts or soccer matches.

Toward the end of the concert, I noticed that the bare pipes overhead were dripping on me. One of the band members said, "It's like piss," but I didn't get his full meaning until later. I thought he was implying that the bathroom pipes were leaking, but in fact the sweat of the audience had condensed on the cold pipes and was raining on us. It was totally gross ― and utterly fascinating.

Shukan ST: Dec. 13, 1996

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