“Here,” said Shiu. “Let me fill your glass. This is good champagne and it’ll just lose its bubbles if we don’t drink it.”
“I shouldn’t, Shiggy. The boys don’t like it if I’ve been drinking before a show.”
“Oh, come on, lovely lady. I bet you go on stoned plenty of the time. It’ll relax you.”
I stood there for a few moments and suddenly started feeling like a Peeping Tom. I grabbed the lens from the back seat of my car and walked toward a wooden snow fence that surrounded the stage. One of Turg’s homemade cops looked at my tag and waved me through an opening.
There was a narrow metal staircase going up the back of th a stage. Next to it, half a dozen of what appeared to be young men were lounging on folding aluminum chairs, drinking Coors and eating franchise fried chicken.
I say young men because several had their upper clothing open to the navel and there were no signs of feminine appurtenances. Otherwise, they were dressed in a variety of multihued costumes that could have been either male or female. One chap had the remains of a full-dress tails suit with a formal bow tie around his neck but no shirt. Another wore glittering, sequined running shorts and a coat with epaulets that must once have been the proud property of a circus ringmaster. All had exceedingly long hair, but no beards or mustaches, and enough theatrical paint on their faces to cover a good-sized barn. One’s face was painted black above the nose, white below. Another was all silver with a blue Crosshatch overlaid. I have been in better-looking bad dreams.
“Hey, man, what you doin’ back here? This’s for performers.”
“Press,” I muttered, waving the lens and walking by rapidly.
The snow fence around the stage left walkways on each side and an open space of about twenty feet deep in front to keep the audience back. Diana and Kirk were seated at a plank table set up a few feet out from the lip of the stage. Diana had a portable typewriter in front of her. A couple of local TV crews were also on hand, set up near the fence separating the press area from the audience. Standing with one of the crews was Lew Fraser, my National Press friend from the statehouse.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” I asked Fraser. “Don’t tell me NP pays overtime to cover rock concerts.”
“NP pays overtime for the Second Coming or anything better. No, I’m here to listen to the music, Bob. The wire doesn’t take concerts smaller than Woodstock these days, but the promoters sent us press passes anyway. On my salary, it’s a welcome freebee. But you’re the one I wouldn’t have taken for a punker.”
“Just came out to give a friend a lift,” I said, looking around for Liz.
The crowd on the rolling field in front of the stage was packed tight and almost out of sight in the deepening darkness. From somewhere in the crowd, spotlights were aimed at the stage, and their beams cut through swirls of rising gray smoke. It could have been from cigarettes, but you didn’t have to be a Drug Enforcement Administration pot-sniffing German shepherd to come to the conclusion that something besides your basic Winstons and Kools were being consumed.
“Christ, you could get stoned just sitting here,” I said.
“Hey, man,” Fraser said with a grin. “You getting the munchies, too?”
Liz appeared at my side. “What a sideshow,” she said. “Am I glad you’re here. Come with me to the light tower so I can take some stage shots. I need someone to cover my rear. I went out there a while ago and some creep grabbed the back of my pants when I tried to climb up to get above the crowd.”
“What, one of Turgs guys?”
“Hell, no. He has his clowns at the gates and along the fences to keep out crashers. I mean one of the paying guests. They’re getting a little playful.”
We went out the back, circled the stage area, and worked along the snow fence to the spectator area until we found a opening guarded by a ticket-taker and a Turg trooper.
I’ve always believed that when you give someone a uniform and a badge it alters personality quicker than LSD, and the newer or more temporary the authority that goes with them, the more arbitrary is the wearer thereof. It was no different here. After no more than five minutes of arguing, we were permitted inside.
The audience in the area we traversed was what we newspaper types call “a youthful crowd"—mostly teenagers and the early twenties, some in their thirties, and a few men and women who got their social security numbers before me.
There also were some folks who, if you found them drinking at a bar you were entering for the first time, you would be well advised to take your custom elsewhere. The kid punkers who made up the majority of the crowd were trying to look tough; these older types didn’t have to try.
The intermission between bands was still on as we worked our way to the nearest light tower about one hundred feet into the crowd. With two cameras around her neck and a canvas accessory bag dangling off her hip, Liz grabbed the steel framework and pulled herself up to a position about ten feet off the ground.
“Hey, momma, come on down and have a brew,” a hairy gentleman tastefully attired in a Nazi helmet, chrome-studded leather vest, and denim cutoffs yelled. “Or, hey, I’ll bring you one. Don’t go ’way.”
As the man approached the tower and got ready to climb, I spoke into his ear. “If you go up there, you won’t be in the picture.”
“What pitcher?” he said, turning toward me.
“The one she’s taking for Rolling Stone. She’s getting crowd shots for the next edition, and she told me she wanted a shot from above with you and your group in the foreground.”
“No shit? In Stone?” The lunk let go of the tower and started back toward his pals. After about two steps, he turned and came back.
“Hey, what kind of bullshit are you trying to feed me, you old fart? How’s she gonna take pictures of us and the crowd in the dark? I ain’t stupid.”
I smiled. “Infrared, hyperstrobe, laser-augmented flash bulbs,” I said. “New development.”
King Kong scurried off just as the next band, Baraboo, arrived on stage. The crowd applause swelled as they launched into what appeared to be more an attempt to destroy their instruments, with desperate pounding of drumheads and keys and snatching at strings, than make music. Liz got several shots and climbed down.
“I suppose I better come back when Post Partum comes on,” she said. “I imagine our publisher has promised them nothing less than a front page picture.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll bring a camera too, and we’ll have some good shots of you being gang-banged to go with them. Meanwhile, lets get the hell out of here.”
We worked our way back to the press area as Baraboo’s first so-called song ended. Next came what I recognized as music—a medley of familiar circus themes, and I leaned over to Diana to ask guidance—when the band suddenly changed the beat and the melody into a rock-and-roll rendition so crashing that I thought the boards of the stage above us would shortly start popping their knots.
Diana could see I was puzzled. “It’s their signature,” she shouted into my ear. “’Bozo’s March,’ they call it. It was their first big hit.”
I stepped into the open space in front of the stage scaffolding and took a good look at the band. It was the group I had seen when I arrived and all had added cheery red clown noses to their previous getups.
“Clowns?” I asked after sitting down again.
“That’s the Baraboo connection,” Diana said. “That’s where the Ringling Brothers started out in Wisconsin. It’s their shtick—they have a whole album of circus songs. Wait till they play ‘Do It to Me on the Flying Trapeze.’”
I shook my head which made it hurt even more. “Boy, I sure must have missed -something.”