Features
Tours de Farce: Rumor Has It…
Big, ferocious critters. Pale white from living a life in exile from the sun, they lurk underneath the streets of the Big Apple, waiting to snag unsuspecting concert fans as they make their way to an Elton John concert at the Garden.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the Jewel roadie in the microwave. Or maybe you’ve been saving up all those unused Diana Ross & The Supremes tickets from last year in order to buy some poor kidney disease sufferer an hour on a dialysis machine.
Sound familiar?
They’re called “concert legends,” the modern version of fairy tales and folklore. Yes, the concert industry has its own tradition of myths and campfire stories, where the person giving testimony is always a friend of a friend who lived across the street from the woman who was once married to the Supertramp road manager who met the groupie who actually saw the whole thing with her very own eyes.
Hardly a day goes by where someone doesn’t ask us about Ray Charles serving as a Green Beret sniper in Vietnam, or Clear Channel Entertainment purchasing the Vatican. Then there’s the one about Alanis Morissette being the Gerber Baby. Did you know that Ozzy Osbourne’s father was Mr. Green Jeans, or that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon CD syncs perfectly with a Roger Waters video?
Far be it for us to dispel these fun little anecdotes that are passed on by generation to generation and handed down from the mother to a trusting child. Concert goers may take pride in their intelligence, but at the same time, they secretly relish telling tall tales about the woman who emailed Britney Spears secret chocolate cookie recipe to the world or the one about the ticket scalper, the cardboard tube and the gerbils.
For these are harmless little tales, offered up as life’s morality lessons and to scare little children, as well as Deep Purple and Aerosmith, into obedience. While the truth lies closer to the realm of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, we won’t be the ones to spoil the fun.
By the way, we were just joking about the alligators in the New York sewers. They’re actually in Boston. And they talk funny.