2006-08-21 - 10:04 p.m.
All day yesterday, I was conflicted about going to the concert. At the very beginning of the summer when I bought this ticket, I was excited about the idea of going to the Hollywood Bowl, sitting outside under the stars in a huge ampitheater and listening to music, it sounded like the perfect summer activity. However, the only offering that really appealed to me was this one, the JVC Jazz Festival, which happened to be on a Sunday night. When I bought my ticket, that didn't seem so bad, but when it ends up that that Sunday night was the last night of my vacation, I didn't like the idea so much after all. "A perfect summer activity" is more appealing early or mid-summer when the window is infinitely open, not at the very end when the window is closing, or, in this case, completely closed. Am I making too big of a deal about the vacation coming to an end? Well, it IS a big deal, and that last evening maybe could have been better spent in other ways.
But, I went.
I walked there. The Bowl is only a half-hour walk from where I live and parking at the Bowl is a bear. This made perfect sense; free, no hassle, exercise, except for the fact that I have detected a worsening of the surrounding neighborhood, an increase in unsavory characters out and about. I wasn't feeling perfectly safe being out walking alone, and this was in broad daylight, at 5:00 PM for a concert that was to begin at 6:00 PM. How was I going to feel during the back-home trip late at night?
But I did it anyway, and after walking only half the distance, I came up to make-shift Bowl parking areas that people were piling into (in other words, people who DROVE ended up walking almost as far as I did). The first parking lots cost $10, but then as I got closer to the Bowl, the prices went up from there. Another five minutes of walking, and the parking was $25, yet people kept driving into those lots. Suddenly, walking there seemed very smart, at least financially.
Here, though, was something that I thought was strange. There were black men out on the sidewalk holding up signs that said, "I NEED CONCERT TICKETS", and as cars went by, the guys would ask the drivers, "Do you have any concert tickets you can sell?" Everybody was shaking their head, "No". I knew the concert was sold out, but this seemed like a lot of effort that was not bound to be fruitful. I mean, the concert's sold out, just don't go. There'll be other concerts, other times. But all the rest of the way from there on up the street to the Bowl, there were many, many groups of guys, all of them black, begging for tickets. Now, this may be typical with any concert, but I thought it was strange. This wasn't a concert featuring any big names as far as I could tell, names big enough to make one desperate for a ticket to go see them. In my estimation, the biggest name was Michael Franks, whom I like a lot, but I wouldn't think many black people would be out in the street trying to snag a ticket to see Michael Franks. Perhaps the other groups were bigger names than I knew (I had never heard of them, myself): Fourplay, Najee, and Norman Brown's Summer Storm. Don't shoot me if these are very big names in some circles. All I knew was that the sound clips on the Bowl website were beautiful, so I bought myself a ticket.
Other than the peculiarity of so many guys desperate to snag a ticket, this phalanx of black guys had another meaning to me. I hadn't particularly expected this to be a "black" concert. I suppose I should have thought of that, but I hadn't. It didn't help that I already felt scared and vulnerable being out there walking alone. It also hadn't helped that I had recently read about national violent crime statistics (which revealed that L.A. has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation). Although there are seven times more white people than black people in the United States, black people commit seven times more violent crime than white people, which means that a random black person is 49 times more likely to commit a violent crime than a random white person. As racist as this sounds...well, that IS "racist", in that we are talking about the tendency of race, here, based on cold, unemotional statistics, not prejudice, and there I was out on the street with a potential of close to 18,000 black people who had come in there from somewhere else--18,000 is the capacity of the Hollywood Bowl and the majority of this audience was black. The truth is, of course, that most of them were very nice, just out to have a good time just like I was, but all I needed were, say, three guys up to no good, and....
I really hated it that that's where my mind was, but that's honestly where it was.
The crowd became more and more dense as I approached the drive that led up to the Bowl, and then it got packed solid as we all had to filter through turnstiles and those who were bringing picnic baskets and backpacks (practically everybody) had to go through a security inspection. I had eaten earlier and didn't want to fool with carrying food to the Bowl. I bought a bottle of water at one of the refreshment stands, that was all.
I enjoyed riding up the several layers of escalators that take you up and around the side of the Bowl, and then walking on the connecting skyways. There were various appealing picnic areas the whole way up. I had to go up to the very extreme top of the Bowl to section W1. I knew my ticket was way up there, but I hadn't known that it would end up I was only one row down from the VERY top. You can't tell that from the website's seating chart, which only shows you the broad section of about a hundred seats, in which you have purchased a ticket for some seat within that section.
These were wooden benches, not actual seats (which cost 10, 20, 50 times more), and my particular "spot" on the bench ("seat" number 21) was right on the row of convex bolt heads holding down the end of the boards at that section of bench, an amazingly uncomfortable spot, all told (no wonder people were renting seat cushions). This was extremely far away from the stage, but I had known it was going to be like that (although I hadn't known that it would be so far as to be almost impossible to even manage to count how many people were on the stage). But the worst aspect of these far-away seats was the acoustics.
Just prior to the beginning of the concert, they made an announcement that there was no smoking "inside the theater". I laughed at that--inside the theater? We were completely outside! However, they meant it. Smoking had to be done out on the walkways or up behind the bushes that were directly behind the upper lip of the bowl. These places, particularly in the area behind me, were solidly packed with people smoking, eating, and drinking, and based on the smell, what they were smoking wasn't always cigarettes. Despite the fact of the concert being sold out, I was the only person sitting in my whole row. I surmised that others, assuming they had even shown up, were back behind smoking, or, more accurately, partying, because it seemed to me that whoever was back there stayed there the whole time. They never came into the Bowl proper.
There was a gigantic amount of drinking going on thoroughout the Bowl. I would have figured that a group of people might bring in a bottle of wine or maybe some beer, and there was that, but people also brought in whole bottles of liquor that they consumed by the glassful. When I think in terms of a "drink", I think of a jigger or two of liquor in a drink, and I'm maybe good for two of those. But these people were filling their glasses full of gin or tequila, and after using up one bottle with three or four glasses, they'd pull out yet another one. The ambient noise level from all this drinking and partying continued to increase in intensity throughout the evening.
There was a couple sitting directly in front of me, a very fat black man and woman, who were very cute and seemed to absolutely idolize each other. When they weren't actually eating, they were busy rubbing each other's backs or massaging their necks or kissing or holding hands. Everything they brought to eat or drink came in a common container that they shared. For example, they had a cup of Dannon yogurt, which the woman opened and then took a spoonful of for herself. Then she fed her husband a spoonful. Then she took another one for herself. Then fed him, again. Then she opened up a container of potato salad and they ate that together, passing a fork back and forth between them. Then they opened up a bottle of juice which first one would sip out of, than the other one would. I watched them throughout their whole dinner (they were RIGHT in front of me), and they shared every single thing. I thought it was cute, but most unusual.
Another interesting thing about them was that it was clear that the woman had made everything, but the guy was so appreciative and excited about everything. He acted like it was Christmas morning, or his birthday. She handed him something wrapped in tinfoil, and he opened it in miniscule actions, sniffing at it and looking at her with anticipation, as if to say "WHAT is in here? WHAT have you made?" Finally he got it open and it was chocolate brownies. He took a bite of one and made an "mmmmmmmm!" sound, then fed her a bite and as she chewed, he said, "Oh honey, you know that is my FAVORITE!" The cool thing about him was that he made everything seem like his favorite. I liked them.
By now the music had begun, starting with Najee. He and his group were very good, far better than the audience seemed to be giving them credit for, as (except for the couple directly in front of me) everybody in my vicinity kept yammering with each other as if they were having a barbecue back in their own backyard and this music was being played on a stereo. To my surprise, Najee played for a solid hour. I thought to myself, wait a minute, we have three other groups, how LONG is this concert going to be? I still pretty much follow the rules from back when I was a child at home with my parents, where we were never allowed to watch TV or stay up late on a school night. This was like that, it was a work night.
Next up was Michael Franks. I have long liked him, but here seeing him live at the Hollywood Bowl, I could hardly hear him. His lyrics were virtually lost to me way up there at the top of the Bowl, despite amplification and immense speakers. I have some vague idea that he sang some songs from his new album, Rendezvous In Rio, and he sang my favorite song of his, Barefoot On the Beach, which has my favorite Michael Franks lyric, "No attire is required, just a toothbrush, dear, here we don't wear much". He also sang a bunch of his classics, such as The Lady Wants To Know and When The Cookie Jar Is Empty, and, of course, Popsicle Toes. But since it was hard for songs to compete with the ambient noise around me, and I couldn't see him, what was the point? I would have had a better time sitting at home on my couch with him playing on the stereo.
Michael Franks's set was another hour. Was this concert going to be four hours long? I wasn't going to want to leave there at 10:00 and walk home at that hour, on a work night.
Next up was Fourplay. I realized that I knew some of their songs, so I had heard their music before without knowing who they were. They were good, but after a half hour of them, I realized that they weren't good enough for me to stay there. By now, the audience in my vicinity (and probably throughout the whole of the Bowl) had been drinking steadily and heavily for three hours and were so loud that it was getting scary. Those several hundreds in the smoking area behind me had NEVER left that area, and were completely ignoring the fact of the concert. It was just a place to congretate. In a sudden resolute motion, I stood up and slid myself out of there.
As I walked down the walkways that took me down, down, down out of there, I was surprised at how many people were out there on those walkways, sitting on benches conversing, or getting food from the refreshment vendors, or just generally milling about. I vaguely thought that maybe I should go to the bathroom before hitting the road, but I was reluctant to use one of the urinals, and I saw that every toilet seemed to be either stopped up with diarrhea or else there was somebody standing in there using the toilet as a urinal, with the door open. What, drunken black men are as urinal-shy as I am? Who would have figured?
I skipped the bathroom idea and headed on down. Near the bottom, there was an immensely long line of people at "Tower Records" to buy CDs of tonight's groups. Hell, I thought, it would be so much quicker and easier to go on Amazon.com at home. Those people will still be waiting in line an hour from now. I'm just not tolerant of that kind of line-waiting.
Then I went on out into the street. I put on my "resolute, walking fast, not stopping for anybody" demeanor (like I learned to use when I had to walk through skid row downtown) and made it home without any trouble or molestation. I was thankful that I had had the foresight to leave before the horde.
Once I was home, I got on amazon.com to check out music clips from the groups I had just seen. Now that I could hear it, I didn't care for Michael Franks's new Rendezvous In Rio album well enough to buy it. Same with Najee and their new album, Point of View, which was straight-forward smooth jazz and didn't have any of the great scat or funk/fusion stuff that they had done at the Bowl. Fourplay's new album, X, was the best of three, but I didn't buy it, either. It was good, but I just don't want to spend the money, so I guess it wasn't that good. As to the group I skipped out on entirely, Summer Storm, there was nothing at all on amazon.com, so I don't know what I missed.
All-in-all, the only thing I really enjoyed out of the whole experience was the look of the Bowl after it got dark. I loved the multi-colored neon sign that they had up at the back of the stage behind the bands, and I loved the "Miami Beach" light colors that shone along the arched ceiling of the bowl like a fluorescent rainbow of changing colors. And the flickers of candlelights on the tables of the box seats down in the front third of the seating. Being outside on a summer's night was wonderful, but I think I will much more enjoy the whole experience at the John Anson Ford Theater this coming September 10, for which I've got a ticket to go see female jazz vocalist Carmen Lundy, accompanied by the awesome jazz violinist Regina Carter and fourteen other jazz musicians. The outdoor Ford ampitheater is much, much, much smaller than the Bowl, every seat in the house is good and you can HEAR so well that the music thrills your very soul. I've been there several times before, so I know how good it can be.
The Ford and the Bowl are in the Hollywood hills, across the 101 freeway from each other. Both of them are a half-hour walk from my apartment. However, this time, I think I will drive.
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