Mosh Pit Hero

For much of the weekend it felt that I’d been beaten with a cricket bat. Cricket bat? Yes, cricket bats are funnier than baseball bats. Beaten with baseball bats implies extreme violence; cricket bats say it was jolly good fun.

At Mountain Park in Holyoke, there is a gently sloping hill where you can spread out a blanket or open up your folding chair and enjoy a pretty good view of concerts. But it’s soooo far away up there. These days, I prefer to be as close to the stage as possible. This is fine if you’re seeing The Decemberists, whose fans are mostly thoughtful hipstery artistic folks, but much more hazardous at a Dropkick Murphys concert like last Friday night.

Naturally, the area right in front of the stage opened up into a mosh pit, and I  must admit that I couldn’t resist jumping into the middle of things. Here’s what it looked like:

mosh

To say I got what I deserved would be an understatement. I was knocked on my ass several times, had my sunglasses broken, and I woke up the next morning with bruised ribs and a bump on my head. When in Rome, right?

So, the big question is something I’m asking with greater frequency lately: am I getting too old for this sh*t?

3 thoughts on “Mosh Pit Hero

  1. Having seen a young man half my age get knocked unconscious in the pit at the recent Mayhem fest at SPAC (and my first thought was — “OH! That is going to require some emergency orthodonics!”), I have come to the conclusion — at least where jumping in the pit is concerned — that I am indeed too old for that sh*t.

  2. I have too much post-lacrosse orthodonture for braving the ‘pit’, so I salute you on your bravery. Bring the cricket bat with you next time!

  3. I stayed in the pit for WAY longer than most folks, since I spent much of the ’90s and early ’00s reviewing hardcore shows for Metroland, including the Murphys a couple of times at QE2 before they became big, big, big. My final appearance in the pit was at Valentine’s, and it involved briefly turning my head away from the stage, at which point a diver came down on top of me, and I heard something go “crunch” in my neck. That was it, I got lucky I wasn’t injured direly, and I got the message and got out for good . . . except for a brief period of research in 2009 as part of PhD work where I wrote an ethnography of hardcore culture (including an analysis of what the pit is all about, anyway) called “Rulebound Rebellion:” http://indiemoines.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/hcethpdf.pdf

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