Word: coliseums
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While standing in the crowd at Riverfront Coliseum, I distinctly remember feeling that I was being punished for being a rock fan. My sister and I joked about this, unaware of the horror happening around us. Later, those jokes came back to us grimly as we watched the news. How many lives before the punitive and inhuman policy of festival seating at rock concerts is outlawed...
...early evening there were 8,000 people, most holding general admission tickets, massed in the coliseum plaza near the west gate. By 7, the doors had still not been opened. The crowd, past patience, pressed closer together. Danny and Connie Burns were among them...
Inside the coliseum, Cincinnati Fire Marshall Clifford Drury told Who manager Bill Curbishley that the show must go on as scheduled. Drury reasoned that the crowd, which did not know what had happened at the west gate, would not sit still for a cancellation. So The Who played its standard two-hour set, and were then instructed to keep the encore short. When the four came offstage, Curbishley told them the news. Kenny Jones slumped against a wall. John Entwistle tried to light a cigarette, which shredded in his shaking hands. Roger Daltrey began to cry. Pete Townshend went ashen...
...Cincinnati tickets were for reserved seats. The rest were for so-called festival seating, a sort of first-come-best-seated system that many of the country's major rock venues have long since given up as unworkable. Says Tony Tavares, director of the New Haven Coliseum where The Who will play this week: "When you sell a general admission ticket, you're challenging your crowd to get to the best seats in the house first. You're creating a system of pandemonium." New York City's Madison Square Garden, which brings its 20,000-capacity...
Still being debated, however, was the question of responsibility. Promoter Levy denied that he or his organization had anything to do with determining the number of security officers used inside or outside the coliseum. By week's end, the coliseum management had not broken the official silence it had maintained since Monday night...