Thanks to a dear friend from my previous life in the concert industry, I scored two comps for Queens of the Stone Age last night. I hadn’t been to a live show in ages and have a major soft spot for QOTSA- thats a whole other long story. My impromptu date and I had some tasty Vietnamese food and then headed over to the Keller just as QOTSA hit the stage.
And here’s where it gets weird for me.
I got my first job in rock and roll (security at LaLuna) at 18 and worked in concert and festival production for over a decade. I literally grew up in that club, but my penchant for live music actually started much earlier.
I became obsessed with Duran Duran when I was 8 or 9 years old. No joke. I papered the wall of my bedroom with their faces, saved my allowance to buy all their records, and humped my pillow while imagining John Taylor doing…something to me. (My fantasies weren’t quite as developed as my sexual curiosity at that age.)
I had moved on to really bad hair metal by the time I was 12, but my first concert ever was Duran Duran opening for David Bowie on the Glass Spider tour. My older sister’s friend had an extra ticket, and I begged her to take me my favorite band in the entire world. We smoked cigarettes in the bleachers of Civic Stadium and sang along to all the songs, and I felt so grown up. The rush of the crowd’s energy, being a part of something alive…It was a thrill I’d never experienced.
Fast forward a couple years to the days of blowjobs-for-backstage-passes. I was a cute teenage girl into dirty rock bands, and by the time I was going to shows regularly at 16, I got plenty of indecent proposals. Even though I had an active erotic imagination and masturbated daily, I was pretty inexperienced. I think I was also still buying into the slut-shaming programming I picked up in the “Just Say No” era.
My cute girlfriend and I managed to toe a very fine line between the autograph-seeking super fans and the shameless groupies who took delight in flaunting their rock star conquests. We’d end up backstage or on a tour bus, flirt a little, make-out with one of the crew (They appreciate your attention more and come back to town more often.) or band (Score! Bragging rights and better alcohol.) members, maybe even let them feel us up a little. But when push came to shove, our undies stayed on and so did theirs. There’s probably some derogatory tour lingo for girls like us…Baby groupies? Halfway ho’s? Or maybe just fucking teases. Heh.
I liked being backstage. I loved getting to breeze past the line of people waiting for autographs and flash my pass at the gatekeeper. I liked being on the other side of the fence. But I didn’t like how I got treated like a piece of meat. I could seriously write an I’m With the Band style book of our exploits. We were jailbait Lolitas with fake ID’s- I’m sure you can imagine our popularity. Certain friends, security guards, and club personnel even nicknamed me “Tour Bus Tonya” (or TBT), though it was actually more tongue-in-cheek than derogatory, since I was known not to put out.
By the time I was 18 and actually of legal consenting age, I was over it. I started paying attention, and the only women backstage who were treated at all better (and in those days, it wasn’t much better, believe me) were working. So when a friend offered me a security guard job at LaLuna, I jumped at the opportunity. I was checking ID’s to get into the bar before I was of drinking age myself.
I worked my way up through the ranks, and over the next ten years, I did pretty much every non-tech, non-stage job there is in the concert industry, from box office to catering to runner to production assistant to site manager to promoter rep.
By 21, I was one of a handful of females in the country doing what I did, and probably the youngest by at least a decade. I loved my job as promoter rep, and I was good at it. The buses would arrive at load-in, and the same “oh great, they sent me an incompetent little girl” look would greet me on the production/tour manager’s face. By the end of the night, they’d be telling me I was their favorite rep on the whole tour.
Before I continue, please let me disabuse you of the notion that being either local or touring crew is anything other than really hard work. Oh sure there are some cool perks, but it’s a redundant cycle of long days, crappy food, and little glory. But I fucking loved it. I thrived on the constantly changing venues and personalities and solving the inevitable challenges. Kind of like touring the fringe festival circuit as a solo artist- a lot of people have no idea what they’re getting into and can’t hack it in the long run.
It wears on you. At 28, I was stuck in a miserable marriage and a job that regularly caused me to break down sobbing. I weighed over 200 pounds, and my hair was literally falling out in giant clumps. I felt like I was 50. So I walked away from all of it. I burnt my life down and started over. I returned to an old love- theatre- and went to acting school, which led me to doing professional phone sex, which led me to the world of kink and bdsm.
I’d do a one-off show every year or two, when one of the companies I’d produced for needed someone to fill in during the busy summer months, but the offers came less and less frequently and eventually stopped altogether. There are always eager, fresh-eyed, local FNG’s (that’s Fucking New Guy to the uninitiated) chomping at the bit to break into the biz, and I was more expensive. It has been three or four years since I’ve produced a show, and while I haven’t missed it that much, occasionally I’ll remember something from that life and realize how far removed from it I am.
Last night was a sucker punch to the gut. I was not expecting it at all. Standing there in the crowd, band killing it onstage, hot date by my side, and…how do I explain? I didn’t like it. Oh, I enjoyed myself, and I’m very grateful I got to see the show. But I realized I don’t like being a civilian at a concert. Apparently even after a decade out of the industry, I can’t cross back over the line. Where are my credentials? Who has my parking pass? Why didn’t the guy from catering bring me the bottle of wine he knows I like? How come I’m not watching this from monitor world onstage?
It’s not like I was expecting any of that last night. I certainly didn’t really feel entitled to it, but that’s what I got used to. That’s what I know. That’s what being at a concert is to me. Standing there, I realized I wanted the special treatment and unrestricted access, and that I don’t think I like going to shows without it. I don’t mind working for it, but I don’t want to just be a “normal” person. While that sentence is hardly surprising (haha), in this context it makes me kind of sad. Because that ship has sailed for me. I chose another path, another life.
I can’t go back. I can’t go back to that life, and I can’t go back to attending a show as just an audience member. I mean, technically, I could. I could probably milk what few contacts I still have and find work, but that would mean considerable adjustment to my lifestyle and require me to put theatre on hold for a while. Or I could smack the entitlement out of myself and learn to love going to a concert for the pure joy of the experience again.
But a long time ago, I crossed a line. I went from concert lover to concert worker. And for me, there is no crossing back to the other side. I’m not sure why, but the parallels between this and my discovery of polyamory and kink struck me last night. Once those doors are open, once those worlds have been willingly entered and pleasurably explored, you cannot just close them and pretend they don’t exist. They become a part of you, of your frame of reference, and trying to ignore them is futile.
So I’m not going to beat myself up over feeling unjustifiably deserving of treatment I haven’t really earned. I’ll simply avoid putting myself in situations very often where I don’t get what I want. If that means I skip a show or two, so be it. That’s the price I pay for my sense of entitlement. If I miss live music too much, perhaps it will motivate me to learn to enjoy it without the trappings I became accustomed to.
Whew, that was a mouthful. Somebody asked me via Twitter how the show was. I knew I couldn’t explain in 140 characters.