The Who Concert Stampede, 29 Years Later

The awful news of a Wal-Mart employee dying in a stampede of holiday shoppers last Friday on Long Island brought to my mind another similar event, one that killed many more people, and stunned the nation: the December 3rd, 1979 concert by The Who in Cincinnati, where eleven people died in a crush to get inside the city’s Riverfront Coliseum. It happened 29-years-ago today, and I was there.

The Who Concert Tragedy made the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine in its January 24, 1980 issue. (Rolling Stone Magazine/January 24, 1980)

But I wasn’t part of the stampede, and I watched the entire concert not knowing anything had happened. So this is really a story, not about my witnessing first-hand rock music’s greatest tragedy, but about how there can be evidence of something unimaginable right in front of your eyes, without you being able to grasp until later what had taken place.

I was out of college about a year at the time, and was thrilled The Who was coming to my home town. My brother called and said he had two tickets for the concert, but that he wasn’t able to go. I said I’d be happy to take the tickets, and on the evening of Monday, December 3rd, my buddy, Tom, and I headed from our suburb to downtown Cincinnati. At the time, the arena in Cincinnati and many others around the country used what was called festival seating for rock concerts, which was really just another way of saying it was a free-for-all to get close to the band. The first ones inside the venue got the best seats, so people would start massing outside the arena hours before show time. But since our tickets were freebies anyway, Tom and I decided to get there late, miss traffic, and not have to wait outside the building on a cold night. A key decision, as it would turn out.

The first thing to strike us as unusual was all the ambulances outside the Coliseum. I’d say between 15 and 20 of them, maybe more, all of them with lights flashing. Now this is one of those moments, where, looking back, I should have known something really bad had just happened. Instead, Tom and I wrote it off to an especially high number of drug freak outs, a somewhat common occurrence at rock concerts of the time.

So we walk in the doors into the circular walkway just outside the seating area, and I look over and notice these enormous piles of shoes and clothes, just sitting there stacked up along the wall, two or three feet high. I think we believed at the time that it was some kind of a charity clothing drive, where folks going to the concert were dropping off old clothes to help people at Christmas. Later I found out what it really was: hundreds of pairs of shoes, pants, shirts, and everything else that had literally been ripped off of people caught in the crush. But at that moment, we didn’t see people screaming or crying or unconscious. Remember, we went late, the music had already started, so in we went to watch the show.

And we watched the entire show, not picking up one hint, not hearing a single rumor of what had taken place. The Who played a great concert (promoters and managers made the decision not to tell the band what had happened until they came off the stage). Tom and I left the arena, walked back to the car, and drove to a favorite pizza place. After sitting down, a waiter came over, and said words I’ll never forget: “We’re you guys at The Who concert?” he asked. Yeah, we shrugged. “Eleven people were crushed to death trying to get in,” he said. “You didn't know that?”

Tom and I stared at each other, maybe even laughed for a second, because obviously this was some sort of joke. Something like that could never happen. But after a few more uncomfortable minutes, I decided to get up and call home to my parents, just to make sure everything was okay. “Hi,” I said when my mother answered the phone, and when she heard my voice, she immediately burst out crying. “Are you alright, are you alright, is Tom okay?” she kept sobbing. And then my dad got on the phone and told me what had happened; eleven people were crushed to death in a mob that was trying to push into the arena for their best chance at a good seat. Eleven people were dead, because they went to a rock concert.

There was a huge investigation afterwards by a citizen commission. It turned out when the band started doing a sound check inside the Coliseum, those in line thought the show was already beginning. So they pushed and pushed and pushed. Most of those killed died of suffocation. Survivors talked of being taken off their feet by the surge of bodies, turned sideways or upside down. Security personnel and police did little to respond to the pleas of people telling them what was happening.

I think a lot about that night this time of year, around the anniversary date. I think about what could have happened if Tom and I had decided to go early, instead of late. But mostly I think about the question asked by that waiter: how could we not have known? How could so many people watching that concert not know what just happened? I’ll never forget the first sentences of the article in the “Rolling Stone” issue that covered the tragedy. They told how the first concertgoers to actually make it inside and run, thrilled, up to the front of the stage, were leaving bloody footprints on the concrete floor, the blood of the people who were trampled. On ABC’s Monday Night Football broadcast, there were newsbreaks, telling the entire nation about the dimensions of the tragedy before many people who were part of the crush knew about it.

The citizen task force eventually released a report, that to this day is a model for concert and crowd management. Here’s an excerpt, from a website that briefly tells the story of the tragedy:

“The task force's report, Crowd Management, was submitted on July 8, 1980, and remains a landmark document in the field of crowd management. Praised as being concise and balanced, the report’s recommendations won the respect of public safety professionals from around the world. Many of the task force suggestions became incorporated into legislation and public assembly planning in the United States.”

So I suppose one could argue that those eleven lives were not lost in vain, but I’m sure that’s small consolation to the family members and friends who must be thinking about them on this date, all these years later. Now, in this day and age of cell phones and texting, such a disaster could never occur without everyone knowing about it instantly. But that was then, and I’ll never forget those two hours when I was in the center of rock music’s deadliest night, and didn’t even know it.

P.S. After I wrote this, I found on YouTube a portion of the old sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” that dealt with the concert tragedy. I was struck by how the discussion among the characters about what happened (in the show, the characters had gone to the concert the night before) was so accurate – the excitement leading up to the show, the ignorance of what had taken place by the vast majority of people there, followed by the shock when they finally heard the news, and the acknowledgment of the need to change the dangerous practice of festival seating. Although it’s a fictional show, it recreates, maybe better than a news program could, the gut punch feeling that all of us in Cincinnati were left with for a long time afterwards. It’s about 10-minutes long, if you want to check it out: