Back in the day I was working backstage at a concert to earn a couple of bucks but I don’t even remember getting paid.
I do remember having one hell of a weekend though.
This was back when every weekend seemed to produce some type of charity concert. Get a whole bunch of people together and find some cause and then play a massive show in front of a hundred thousand screaming people who have been drinking and smoking all weekend in the hot sun.
They have all this festival stuff down to a science now with first aid stations and tons of security but back then these things were thrown together pretty quickly and dehydration and overdoses were as common as women flashing for cameras.
I stumbled into the gig because I was a good gofer and this A list mostly television actress who they assigned me to was supposedly a huge pain to deal with and I was to follow her around for 48 hours.
This was an eye opening 48 hours. It was the first time I saw someone actually shooting up and was also given a 30 minute lecture by this now deceased former A list guitarist who could rock anyone anytime before he tragically was killed about the proper mixture of cocaine and heroin in a speedball.
I remember him also making me hold his drug stash while he and the actress I was following around had sex.
Everyone wanted to have sex with her.
She was A list at the time and super sexy and in between marriages.
She was iconic at the time because of something that was named after her television character.
One guy who relentlessly hit on her all weekend to the point where she threatened to walk out was the lead singer of this then A list rock group.
They might have been A+ list then and just finally recently called it quits.
Pretty much everyone in the band is a name you know.
I’m not even sure why he was trying all that hard to have sex with the actress because I have never seen someone at the height of their popularity like he was be at a concert where it seemed like every woman there wanted to sleep with him.
He was having sex with multiple women per hour and doing lines of coke in between to stay sharp.
He played two songs the entire weekend but must have had sex with 50-60 women.
One singer that was there who is also dead now I watched light himself on fire while freebasing.
He performed wearing a bandage over his arm where he had severely burned himself and had already fallen so fast in the few years since he had been on top.
He pretty much stayed with his band and the only reason I saw him burn himself is because he wanted to meet the actress I was following and was like a kid in a candy store and kept taking photo after photo to make sure he got one that turned out.
The actress really turned out to not be a pain at all.
Considering how much everyone wanted a photo or to be seen with her she just laughed at all the attention and didn’t take any of it seriously and she even told me she knew she wasn’t a great actress and that she could relate to many of the groups performing because she considered herself a one hit wonder and knew her time would end as an A lister but she also knew she could make money based off what she did with that one hit and that was all that mattered to her.
I remember at the end of the weekend she gave me a shirt (she had been throwing identical ones to the crowd all weekend) but this one she signed her name to and also she attached a note with a little gold safety pin and it was a nice card that said thanks for keeping her out of trouble and for a few other things.
It was a nice touch and somewhere along the line I lost the shirt, but still have the card with the gold safety pin.
A list television actress: Catherine Bach
Show: The Dukes of Hazzard
Deceased former A list guitarist: Stevie Ray Vaughan
Iconic television character item: Daisy Dukes
Lead singer of this then A list rock group: Motley Crue – Vince Neil
Freebasing A list singer who is also dead: Rick James
Probably Farm Aid concert