I’m pretty sure I inherited my “gotta get there early” mindset from my dad. Oftentimes, it would still be dark on the USC campus when Bob showed up for a football game that wouldn’t kick off across the street at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum until sometime mid-to-late afternoon. It’s not that he needed time to get his game face on. He never took it off.
There was always an early morning water-polo match he could catch, and band practice was always cool, and there were a few iconic architectural locations where he could conjure up various ghosts-of-Trojans-pasts. By the time the pep rally had concluded at the Tommy Trojan statue and he had joined the rest of the faithful for the trek across Exposition Boulevard toward the gridiron itself, he was totally in his element.
It was the same down in Arroyo Seco Canyon at the Rose Bowl and up in the cozy confines of Chavez Ravine at Dodger Stadium not to mention Santa Anita Racetrack at the base of the San Gabriel Range where he would join other “railbirds” in the early morning mist watching the ponies work a few furlongs.
But, with Bob, it wasn’t always just about sports. His obsessions also stretched to trains. He would meet with other “rolling stock” aficionados at a friend’s Pasadena house overlooking the main rail line into L.A. to watch the Super Chief and the City of Los Angeles as they made their final approach to Union Station.
Not only would they wave at the engineers but they would come to know them, attend their retirement parties, their daughter’s weddings, and flaunt the vernacular of the rail enthusiast every chance they got. They all had railroad watches, of course, but that didn’t stop them from assembling many hours early for the 30-second event.
These memories all came flooding back the other day as I sat at my computer building a checklist for the upcoming outdoor-summer-concert season a full three weeks prior to the first show on my schedule. You can’t get started on such things too early. As they say, it’s all about the journey.
Back during the good old days, before outdoor concerts gained cachet in the wider world, one could toss a few items in a backpack and a cooler, show up at the entrance gate a couple of hours prior to showtime, and pretty much be guaranteed a front-and-center location to toss down a blanket and set up a low-rider chair.
Now that the musical event itself has taken a back seat to the social aspect of the gatherings, it’s a brand-new ball game. It would seem that preparations can’t begin early enough. At least at Red Butte Garden, if not yet Deer Valley, the days when one could show up at 6 a.m. and grab a spot close enough to the front of the line to ensure a front-and-center spot for a 7 p.m. concert seem part of a distant past, a more innocent time.
These days, the truly obsessed set up camp the night before. A friend of mine actually made it on TV news a couple of years back when she homesteaded the front of the line a full week in advance for a Willie Nelson concert. She got paranoid that “overnight” just wouldn’t cut it.
The upside to these early-bird tendencies is that you are not alone. And the quality of the mutually obsessed is high indeed. Rare inexplicable communities form at each venue, most often before daybreak. There’s a Stonehenge quality to it without goatskins, of course, but not without ritual.
Only those within the cult have a clue as to the motivations and disciplines involved. Conversations ranging from the cyberpunk scene to astronomy to the more obscure sub-genres currently making the rounds in contemporary music are not uncommon. It’s an arrogant bunch, to be sure, rather full of itself. Guilty as charged, I suppose.
Certainly various degrees of neuroses are involved in such behavior. “Normal” people wouldn’t consider spending an entire day or more waiting in line just to have a somewhat superior vantage point for a musical performance, of all things, would they especially when the sound might even be better a bit farther back?
Probably not, but they might well invest in similar timeframes if the agenda included pondering the wonders of the night sky, or the hyper-edgy text of William Gibson’s latest fiction, or the Punch Brothers’ most recent CD. That’s the thing. Engagements in these early morning community sessions are nothing short of inspiring.
Of course, my dad wouldn’t need any explanation. A knowing look and a wink would have sufficed for Bob. He understood the quiet and insightful epiphanies available in the pre-dawn hours. Personal enlightenments were afoot! And he got it! In spades!
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.