The Bar Fight

 I was playing in a punk/ thrash metal band that got booked into a dive bar on campus. The first couple of sets went well, until a bunch of frat boys, a couple of football players, and their dates came in. They were drunk, obnoxious, and kept yelling out requests for limp, pasty-faced British synth pop songs, but it wasn’t until one of the squat, fat football players stood at the side of the stage and was literally SCREAMING for “Freebird”…

Suddenly, something snapped; the bass player, all 6’5” and 280lbs. of him, took off his bass and swung it at the rude jocks head: a gorgeous shot to the side of the head that knocked him over and onto the table and into the laps of two cute girls that the singer and I had our eyes on.

I saw the males of the “populars” stand up in unison and start pushing their way through the crowd and I took off my guitar and threw it across the stage to my guitar tech and then…and I can’t explain how this happened, but the next thing I knew, our drummer had launched himself over my head and right on top of the group of frat boys just as they made their way to the stage.

From here, I remember picking up the discarded wooden neck of the destroyed bass guitar, giving the orders for our three man crew to get our equipment out of the door that was handily directly in back of the stage, and then one of the frat boys hit me on the side of my head as I was turning back around.

Now, I have been in a few fights, and been hit many times, and every time it never fails to send me into a white-hot rage.

I can’t describe the sound of a bar fight adequately; that particular combination of feminine screams, breaking glass, splintering furniture, males cussing at the top of their lungs…It’s like being stuffed in a huge trash bag with a bunch of drunken jungle cats, fine china, and tree limbs being blown down a huge set of stairs by a hurricane.

I’m swinging the neck of the bass guitar, cracking heads until the thing splinters, and then swinging with my fists at anything I can connect with. I look over quickly; our singer is doing serious damage with the mic stand, the bass player has two guys in each hand, slamming their heads into the bar, and the drummer…(I swear this is true) the drummer was on the floor with one of the football players, not more than three feet from me, biting the player’s leg.

The next thing I know, I hear someone yelling into a megaphone and the sound of whistles: the police are there.

People scramble, I get pushed to the floor as people are tripping on me…the drummer still is trying to bite the football player, and then two pairs of hands jerk me to my feet. I am now in the hands of the campus police. I look back at the stage: it is empty. I taught the roadies well. No matter what happens, the equipment is safe.

ALWAYS important.

We were separated from the frat boys and thrown into the drunk tank where, by virtue of having a bass player who hailed from the British Isles and who happened to be studying in the United States, we were taught some rather interesting soccer chants which we sang at the top of our lungs for five hours, much to the chagrin of the police, until the bar owner bailed us out.

Those who know a little of my story can appreciate this postscript: the incident was put into my “folder”, my little collection of outrages that had been perpetrated by me against the staid and proper University I was attending, and two weeks later, for a vast host of reasons, I was booted from the college and banned for life from the campus.

Go team!