you met them? man i woulda sticked around to meet them but i felt sooo sick and had to drive home 5 hours. hopefully they come to detroit! i'd die if i met thurston.

hey max! (this is lauren, we were up front together @ pitchfork)......
we are filing a formal complaint with pitchfork security "s3". i had asked several times starting during silver rocket and leading up to eric's trip that the guy who got punched be either removed or restrained. nothing. it should not have gone as far as it did.

it bothers me that guy was not removed. everyone was getting pushed around and shoved- (and that is normal), but no one else was violent or angry- or trying to hurt anyone, except for him.

sonic youth was still amazing- i hope you had a good time. (it's so cool that you met thurston)

dan, jen, and amy were super nice. it's too bad that a few bad people had to cause so much BS.

ohhhhh please tell me you didn't yell that shit too many times

Lauren!!! Damn, damn. I am glad to see you here. I hope you can go thru with what happened yesterday, and get a refund or something. That guy, damn. You can believe me, that thing pissed me off very much. I tried to focus on the music but the asshole was really pissing me off.

But I am really glad to see ya. How about the man with you (I remember his name, I just don't know if it's cool for you to put it out)? Is he doing ok?

I actually met the whole band but Lee, who was somewhere else. They are supersweet. I mean it. Dan, Amy and Jen rock my world. I wish everybody could have a good time. It's a shame. I feel grateful for having had the chance of living this all.

I cannot post stuff from here since this is my uncle's pc and I can't tweak pics and movies, but I have two videos done and some photos.

This is all I can put online for now...






good times rolling...





the best staff you could get





people

uhm, yeah (that is what you get when you shoot pics randomly) and he is apparently a poster here!



gear

Look at that sweet picture of me.

ahahahah dude, priceless!

Max!!!

This is Matt. How's it going? It was good to meet you at the festival. Sorry things got so...crazy. I hope you had a blast and I'm so jealous that you got to meet Thurston. Did you give him your tape?

Remember right before SY started and you asked us 'Will they be moshing? I hope not'? Remember that I said I didn't think they would, since it is a Sonic Youth show. Well, I was wrong, really really wrong, unfortunately.

Anyway, I was the one who punched the guy in the face. He kept messing with my girlfriend and pushed the line. And then he kept pushing the line. After we asked him to stop like 10 times and he didn't, and asked security to remove him specifically several times, I took action into my own hands.

Anyway, I guess I broke his nose? I'd be lying if I said that it didn't feel great. Because well, really, it did. I got to break some obnoxious, drunken indie rocker's nose during "Eric's Trip".

Any guy who was in my position would have done the same. Max, you can testify to that. I'm calling S3 and I am filing many complaints with them, I want compensation, they did a HORRIBLE job. Can you be a witness for me?

I won't go any further into details in public about this, send me a PM, Max.

Even though this was undoubtedly the wost concert experience of my life, SY (atleast what I saw of them) were brilliant.

Oh, and to anyway to I may have tried to push off behind me...I know a lot of you guys were in the tidal wave too and it was no more your fault than mine. For those of you that I tried to get off of me, I apologize. But, you have to understand that rather than getting pushed into more soft flesh, I was being pushed into a steel guard rail, very hard and at points couldn't breathe. I am fairly sure I cracked a rib or two, my chest is still swollen very badly and I am making a doctor's appointment on Monday.

Anyway, I'm looking at the pictures Max posted of the crowd. The guy I hit wasn't even in the photo. The obnoxious son of a bitch pushed his way up front. I thought that was against the rules? We'd been waiting in line for like 10 hours to get front and center.

Also - whoever the morons that tried to push the camera man off of the railing are complete idiots. They were a couple of mo-hawked and pierced kids (how punk rock, spending an hour every morning making triangles in your dyed bright red mohawk) That guy was just doing his job and if any of the assholes that pushed their way up front had actually been up front at the beginning, they would have met him when he came up to us, introduced himself and apologized for having to be in our way. He was a nice guy who was just doing his job and those morons who tried to push him off should be lobotimized. Save it for your Rancid shows, moronic posers.

That's enough of my rant. PM me, Max.

you got me right there, Matt. I will testify through, whatever it takes. I do not know if, being myself not from around here, I could be of any help. But get it for granted, I am going through with it. I hope you can quickly heal and forget the shit that has happened. And gentleman, as I wrote already, I would've done the very same thing being in that situation.

I wish you two all the best.

I was met with similar stupidity from idiotic moshing.
My girlfriend and I waited outside the gates sicne 230 in the afternoon, making us the first people through the gate at 5.
We got up right in not quite front row, but close enough to touch the railing.
there, we waited for 4 hours to see SY play, only to have it ruined by idiotic behavior in under 20 minutes.
IT got so bad that some nice woman from the crowd had to help us out because doing it on our own would have been near impossible.
DDN has been my girlfriend's favorite album since she heard it on a tape she got from the library 3 years ago. It is also probably my favorite, but I try not to rank music.
We were both crushed (physically and emotionally) by the way this concert ended up.
Sonic Youth played an awesome show, but we couldn't enjoy it.
The only time we will ever get a chance to see somehting like this was ruined by an immature crowd of people. (The saddest thing is I think we were the youngest people there at 16, yet we had showed more common sense and maturity than the rest of the crowd)


I know this will sound stupid coming from someone as young as I am, but young people ruined this concert for me. When went to a concert in milwaukee last year at the pabst theater, we were met with a very calm crowd of people in which WE were the rowdiest people there.
The crowd there was all older people.

P.S. If the woman that helped us out sees this, thank you so much again. You saved us from some possible serious injury.

I was nearly knocked over several times by nutballs. Plus, during "Rain King" the guy next to me just passed out and hit the ground, to my surprise, I just felt the ground shake and looked down to see a body. It took his friends a few minutes to revive him after shouting for water.

i've been to 37 SY shows...of all those crowds, i am lucky to say less than
a handful have been what you could term "idiotic." i'm sad to hear about
this behavior, and really fucking angry that it kept some folk from truly
enjoying SY. that ain't right AT ALL.

seriously making me and my boyfriend reconsider being up front (or anywhere near) for the
mccarren park show at the end of the month.

where can we send complaints to the pitchfork staff?
i guess i don't want to complain as much as just suggest that they get better security next year, because it seems that almost everyone up front had a pretty awful experience.

what can I say? I think there is so much to learn from this. It is good to hear from those who survived and you are showing some serious maturity in here by reporting what has happened that night. It felt hard for me too, and I remember trying to stay focused on music so hard, but it was almost impossible. Too many good things happened to me that day not to try and enjoy it (I had lost my credit card and a very kind man found it and gave it back to me, everyone seemed to be down to earth and willing to have fun, people cheered me up for being a random guy from Italy and man, I was seeing my fave band) but fuck that is a thing that bothers me big time.

Put out your stories.

Matt and I are preparing a formal complaint, and for anyone that wants to join in to complain about the poor security, contact:

Mary Beth Gerlach
mbgerlach@safetyservicesystems.com
773-282-4900 ext. 603

she works with s3 and we were referred to her for any problems we had with security at the festival.

i know you say you are young, but i have been to several shows in chicago, and none have had security as poor as this one. crowds are always a little rowdy- but normally, people like that get pulled out of the crowd right away so that everyone can continue to have a good time. if anyone else agrees that security this year was a failure, please call, and hopefully this sort of thing doesn't happen again.

Aside from all of the bullshit, it was the best concert I have been to. I was four rows back (or so) and could see the stage fine........until the cameraman stationed himself in the dead center. Thankfully once the show started up, the crowd moved me around to all sorts places so I could gather many different perspectives of the show. I was mostly on the left near Lee and apparently a bunch of his hardcore fans (myself and groove(y) included.) After Silver Rocket, me and about ten other people raised our hands in the silver light and yelled his name. Thurston was shaking hell with his dancing. Steve crushed me by drumming to Cross the Breeze becuz it sent the crowd into a wild wave of violence. Kim got the people moving with kissability and the space age lighted Eliminator Jr. Mark Ibold also got a few shouts for playing in the best encore to followup DDN. The xperience was just fucking amazing. Meeting Steve and Thurston afterwards was great as well. I can't say enough about that night.

if the dude that i scored a drink of water from during providence is on the threads then, i thank you...the trilogy was earthshaking in itself without the help of the crowd...the waves of momentum sucked at times but my best views of thurston and kim came from the whirlwind of jumping/falling bodies, which was all between silver rocket and erics trip...gza performing liquid swords was a preferable way to start out the main stage (slint would have sucked)...honestly i payed much more than face value for the tix i scored but it was a sold out show as of weeks and weeks ago and i now know that i was right when i anticipated it to be great...all in all i think that a little bit more chill of a crowd would have been nice but that was a once in a life time show and when it got crazy you just need to remember the noise that's generating the crowd into monsters is fucking amazing... then again some of the people would have gone nuts to anything playing on stage i suppose...for me, the best way to put the concert is to say it was well worth losing a blazer and beanie over...

hey Max, whoever that guy is to the right of you with his girl friend went fucking psycho and started punching some dude behind him in the face. security had to pull that guy out. a girl started to claw at my arm after i asked her politley to stop pushing. people were fucking savage. however it was the best show i have ever been to, despite all the physical drama.

I got right up there to the front for DDN after scuming way past quite a few angry people, I think I saw that whole punch in the face thing. Some real tall gangly guy got real close to me and started pushing me and some 19 yr old girl around next to me. I shouted at him all eyebrows and fuck you's, he looked at me confused, and then he went closer to center stage (This is all right infront of the barricade) I saw some sort of altercation brake out between him and some guy and his girlfriend. But I decided that watching Silver Rocket was way cooler than watching dumb drunk shit. Guy and his girlfriend ended up leaving looking real pissed off. I tried to make room for them. And then I continued bouncing. All in all Hey Joni melted my face.

I don't have any specific security complaints, I just had to leave because of the momentum of the shove.

I want to talk to the guys at Pitchfork and suggest that they throw bleachers up in front to at least control the shove to the front at least a little bit.
I know it probably sounds like a lame idea, because who really likes bleachers, but I know at Summerfest in Milwaukee it makes a world of difference.