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 din’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.
source: www.crazydaysandnights.net
