D36 No. 7: Kentucky Bluegrass, Ozzy Osbourne, & The Cleveland Orchestra
James O'Flanagan, MS, FRSA
Engineer, Educator, & Conservationist Dedicated To Inspiring Future Innovators | MS | FRSA | Top 100 Innovators 2024 | Marquis Who’s Who | ??♂???♀???????????♂???
*My Entrée in The Music Biz*
By: Jim O'Flanagan
Author's Note: This article is not strictly about engineering, but it goes a long way to explaining why I have the musical preferences that I do.
In this article there are some lessons I learned about management, and dealing with people. Believe it or not, some techniques learned to keep safe a 20,000 person crowd at a Metallica concert also apply to the engineering/business world.
That, plus the fact that this is one of the best stories I've got. I had to tell it to someone! I am actually very excited to finally tell it. It's been in my head for a while.
Thanks, as always, for choosing to spend your time reading my stuff. I am amazed every time I think about the fact that you choose to spend your time on my stuff.
Thank you.
Cheers, Dear Reader!
-Jim
Introduction
What does Kentucky Bluegrass, Ozzy Osbourne, and The Cleveland Orchestra have in common?
Ozzfest 2000, that's what.
Blossom Music Center, that's where.
The Kentucky Bluegrass? That ended up being the cause of a riot AT Blossom Music Center, which is owned by the Cleveland Orchestra, during Ozzfest 2000.
And that's what this article is about. Music at Blossom Music Center. And people throwing around Kentucky Bluegrass.
Please let me explain!
The Cleveland Orchestra is among the top handful of musical organizations in the entire world. Without qualification.
(It's so prestigious I probably don't need to introduce them. Along with New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra is considered to be among the "Big 5" symphony orchestras.)
Their home concert hall is Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio.
I used to walk by it every day on the way to class, along with the Kelvin-Smith Library and the Thwing Center at Case Western Reserve University.
During the summer, the Orchestra likes to play outdoors. Makes sense. So back in the early 70's, they built one of the most acoustically sound concert venues that's ever been constructed, in a place that would make them sound #Awesome.
They placed this GEM right in our back yard. I grew up on Chart Road in the old Northampton Township (part of the old Connecticut Western Reserve), which is only about 2 miles from Blossom. Woodridge High School, where I graduated from, is only a mile or two away. It is about 35 miles from Severance Hall.
(Btw, "Boston-Northampton" might have been a nice name for Woodridge Local Schools. "B-N High" has a nice ring to it. If you ever wondered why all the towns in Woodridge got thrown together, it was basically a merger between Boston Schools in Peninsula, Boston Heights, and Boston Township, and Northampton Schools in Northampton Township.)
And for some reason, The Cleveland Orchestra really, really likes to host rock n' roll concerts at Blossom. I am not totally sure of the reason, but I always assumed it was financial. Green is green, and orchestras cost $$$. Especially world class ones.
When I got a little older, and learned to appreciate classical music, I certainly began to see what a gift it was to have this amazing musical organization in our back yard.
But I wasn't so sure about that back then. Back then, I knew I like Rock N' Roll music. And Ozzfest was coming to town
And it was coming to OUR concert spot. Because that's what we considered Blossom, at least back then.
We played our middle school and high school band concerts on this stage. We graduated from high school on this stage. We knew all the great routes to sneak in to the place. A few of us have even come back around as main rock and roll acts (DEVO, Lollapalooza, saw it, and it rocked!).
Our parents all had stories about their favorite concerts there. Friends who lived in Northampton used to get complimentary season passes because the traffic on Steels Corners Road and Route 8 is so bad for concerts. I heard they don't do this any longer. Bummer.
(One time, before a concert, my friends ran into The Steve Miller Band playing softball on the old Boston High field. Apparently, this was their pre-concert ritual. My friends joined in on the game. I once saw C.C. DeVille from Poison jogging down Steels Corners Road. This was his pre-concert ritual.)
Ozzfest 2000 was held at Blossom, but prior to this, they held it at The Akron Rubber Bowl. They just finally demolished that last bits of that place, but back then, there was a 30,000 seat football stadium right next to the Akron Airdock, and close to Goodyear (It used to be Goodyear!)
My friend Mike went to that concert, and he told me it was a hundred degrees that day, there was no shade, and the depression era plumbing at the Rubber Bowl was not up to the challenge.
So they came to Blossom the next year.
Ozzfest 2000 was the first concert where I worked security and crowd control. But it was far from the last.
You know, the dudes who strut around with their chests puffed out, and are very proud of the 'Staff' on the back of their shirts? Yup, that was me, for like 12 years, and a few hundred concerts.
And I worked 'em all. Metallica. Snoop. Santana. Chicago. Wu-Tang. U2. Lollapalooza. Dave Matthews. Tobey Keith. The Nautica Stage. Ohio Stadium. Cleveland Browns Stadium. Progressive Field. The Odeon. The Gund. Tower City. The Warped Tour.
The tragedy on May 4, 1970 at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio is remembered with a moment of silence every year. Kent State has a curriculum based on it, too. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young released a song called "Ohio" about this tragedy. I made a slideshow out of some photos from back then, and set it to that song.
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To name a few. For a few nights, I even worked security at the door at Screwy Louie's in Kent, Ohio, on Depeyster Street. The most notorious dance club around back then.
But Ozzfest 2000 was my first security gig ever.
Because the event had been held elsewhere, this was the first time anyone on Blossom’s security staff had to deal with these folks. Ozzy and Black Sabbath had both come to Blossom recently, but it was not a festival concert. Different crowd.
The security at Blossom was less-than-ready that year. But I don't think anyone could have been ready. Because what happened next hadn't ever happened before. Not on this scale.
For security and ticketing purposes, they had bicycle gates for fences, to separate the lawn from the pavilion. There were definitely no procedures in place to deal with people throwing grass.
What do Kentucky Bluegrass, Ozzy Osbourne, and The Cleveland Orchestra have in common?
They damn near put me in the hospital.
Right near the end of the Godsmack set, it started. First, a few bits of grass. The some sod. Then hunks of sod.
It was on!
This video was a highlight/promo reel for Ozzfest 2000. You can see it was probably done on videotape!
The most EPIC grass war I have ever seen, before or since.
But “Grass” was one thing.
This was more like: “Any object that could be launched by a human.”
People got creative with this.
And violent. Full cans of beer. Trees. Vending machine equipment.
It continued for more than three hours, until the sun went down.
I was near the stage left pavilion pole when this was happening, looking back up the lawn bowl at Blossom.
I was scared s**t-less. The sky went dark. No lie. That's how much grass and dirt was flying thru the air. And it was the whole lawn, too. Pole to pole, pavilion to top of the hill.
Everyone was throwing grass. But that wasn't all. A few intrepid fans decided that they wanted a seat upgrade to the pavilion.
There wasn't much heft to the bicycle fence, and the lawn-crowd simply picked it up. And as more people went under, the higher fence kept going the air.
Until it reached about halfway up to the TOP of the pavilion. Out of the corner of my eye, I see three guys do it.
They pried up a piece of sod, about a yard on one side, and a few inches thick, and threw it at my head. And it hit me in the head. I caught all of this out of the corner of my eye; it happened in a split second, and I wasn't able to get out of the way.
This piece of sod knocked me the F- out.
So there I was, working my first concert ever, KTFO'd, out cold, in the middle of a full scale riot.
Yeah, I was lucky I wasn't hurt worse than I was. But try telling THAT to the 21-year-old me. I thought it was a grand time. I came back for more, a few hundred times.
One thing I learned about security at this show: don't mess with the cops. The Summit County Sheriff has always provided security at the Blossom shows, but there are usually just a handful of them there. Less than us, certainly. So we could only tap them to help when really needed. But I saw a few of them take care of some serious business at this show. And we needed them, real bad. I learned then that if I ever got into a pickle at a concert like this again, it was always good to be near a Deputy Sheriff or two.
They have guns. And hand-cuffs. And they know how to use all that crowd control stuff.
And they have the authority to do stuff like that. That was the most important lesson. So my approach from then on out was to be a messenger; if things got out of hand, grab a Deputy Sheriff, and let him do the physical stuff.
If you can't find one, wait. Or walk away. I know that approach saved me a few times over the years.
They told us after the show that the new Kentucky Bluegrass sod was already on a truck, on its way to Cuyahoga Falls, with enough sod to replace the entire lawn.
They ordered it before the show. So perhaps they did know what they were doing?
Why did they have this Kentucky Bluegrass special order? Because The Cleveland Orchestra had a show there two days hence.
The grass was totally replaced two days later. You could still see the seems in the sod, and the brown splotches here and there, but it was kinda hard to tell there had been a riot there 2 days prior.
The Cleveland Orchestra needed the place back for a concert of their own. And they made that happen. Perhaps this was the plan the entire time.
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#BlossomMusicCenter #Ozzfest2000
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