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by Seth Rogovoy
POWNAL, Vt., June 28, 1996 --The potential for traffic jams, drug and alcohol abuse, undue noise, dangerous and outrageous behavior on the part of concertgoers and the negative impact on the town's dairy herd were just some of the concerns over Lollapalooza '96 voiced by about 25 townspeople at a meeting of the Board of Selectmen on Thursday night at Town Hall.
For nearly two hours, Vt. State Police Lt. Thomas Fields, who is heading up the traffic and law enforcement detail surrounding the event at Green Mountain Racetrack, did his best to assuage people's darkest fears about the alternative-rock circus that is coming to town on July 9. At the same time, Fields admitted, "There is going to be a lot of inconvenience happening on this one day."
Based on information provided to him by All Points Booking in Burlington, Vt., the concert promoters with whom he said he is in touch daily, Fields predicted festival attendance between 25,000 and 30,000.
"It's very doubtful there will be forty-thousand, and possibly not even thirty-thousand," he said, adding that as of Wednesday approximately 16,000 tickets had been sold. Based on these estimates, Fields said that there will be probably be fewer than 13,000 carloads coming to the show.
Fields said he will have about 80 state troopers at the site, including 60 uniformed officers, 10 detectives and 10 plainclothes officers. All of these are "off-shift officers" working on their days off or vacation days, and all are being paid by the promoter.Four troopers will be stationed at each of the two entrances to the track from 6 am on July 9 until 4 am the next day. In addition, the entire Vermont state police force will be put on "special alert status," in case more aid is needed in town.
Fields said the main challenge facing his crew is to keep traffic from Route 7 flowing into the parking lots. By avoiding logjams of cars waiting to get in, he hopes to prevent what many residents voiced as their greatest fear: people leaving their cars along back roads and walking to the track. The bulk of his officers will be patrolling the parking lots, insuring that cars get in and out safely and that drugs and alcohol are not dispensed outside the concert.Troopers will be backed up by K-9 units.
"We are going to make a lot of mistakes," said Fields. "This is a learning experience." As part of his education, Fields plans to attend a Lollapalooza concert sometime in the next few weeks before the Pownal show. "It's not that I want to go to the concert," he said. "I just want to get a sense of what it's going to be like."
Fields described the on-site command post he is setting up at the track as a "mini-substation" which will be in operation with dispatchers and a computer hook-up to the state police barracks in Shaftsbury for 36 hours before, during and after the show. The post will be equipped to process arrested persons and to transport them to the state prison in Rutland.
Once gaining entry inside the track concertgoers will be frisked for alcohol and weapons. There will be no alcohol for sale at the festival. Security inside the site will mostly be handled by a private force of 200-250 hired by the promoters. This force will work in cooperation with the state troopers, handing over to them anyone they deem in need of eviction from the grounds.
There will be a medical facility set up on the concert grounds which Fields described as a "M.A.S.H.-type unit." Part of its goal is not to let the concert become a burden to area hospitals by treating most emergencies on-site.
Fields said the gates to the parking lots officially open at 10 am, but that if there is a need to do so he will open them earlier to ease any traffic crush.Concertgoers will be allowed into the facility at noon, and the music portion of the festival -- which will also include jugglers, open-mikes, poetry readings, body-piercing and tatoos -- will begin at 2.
Fields said that although he anticipates cars trickling in throughout the day, experience shows that the peak traffic hours will be from 2 to 6. The main draws for this year's festival are the bands Soundgarden and Metallica; the former will not perfrom until 8, the latter until 9:30.
As for the noise, "It's not a quiet concert," said Fields. "It's not the Vermont Symphony." The concert is scheduled to end at 11. Fields anticipates that getting people out of the parking lots -- "the disaster," as he calls it -- will take at least three hours.
Fields said that Northwest Hill Road, a dirt road which runs parallel to Route 7 behind the track from Williamstown to Pownal, will be closed off to all but readily identifiable local traffic.
Fields described in detail the intensive "intelligence gathering" effort the state police has undertaken in preparation for this event, the largest of its kind ever in the region. Amassing information from concert promoters and police departments across the country, he has tried to put together a detailed profile of the event in advance, in order to plan for every possible eventuality.
A study of where tickets are being bought will help predict traffic patterns, he said. As of now, it seems that about half the concertgoers will be coming from the Boston and New Hampshire area, one-quarter from northern Vermont and one-quarter from the Capital District in New York. This could particularly impact roads in Williamstown, Mass., he said. In order to spare Williamstown as much traffic as possible, Fields has asked the promoters to include in all Boston-area advertisements directions to Pownal that bring drivers over Interstate 91 and across Route 9 into Bennington.Fields noted that he was coordinating with the Williamstown police and the Massachusetts State Police, whom he said would have 30 officers in the area from Pittsfield, Mass., and Florida, Mass., to Williamstown.
Fields said that the ticket buy in Albany was weaker than expected, perhaps because potential concertgoers in that area had purchased tickets for the Lollapalooza date in Syracuse, N.Y., which went on sale before the Pownal date was announced.
Fields said that many local businesses, motels and campgrounds have hired county sheriffs to guard their properties for the day. Joseph Tornabene, who owns Next Door Beer and Wine, which is right next to the track, said he has hired four sheriffs and two patrol cars. At the beginning of the meeting, the selectmen gave Tornabene permission to set up a tent outside his store from which to sell beer and wine from July 4 to July 10.
The rumor that concertgoers would not be allowed to walk onto the grounds was of particular concern to some local youths who are hoping to avoid the traffic snarls by walking to the show. Fields said that he has no plans to prohibit people from walking into the show. Earlier in the day, Jay Strausser, president of All Points Booking, said by phone that he wasn't aware of any such prohibition either. Fields said he would clarify the matter with Strausser.
Fields tried to allay concerns over concertgoers camping out on private property before and after the show, or just hanging around town getting into mischief. "This isn't a Grateful Dead concert," he said, in a reference to the now-defunct band whose loyal following was noted for making themselves at home wherever the band touched down. "It's a concert where the crowd goes and leaves."
The state in which the crowd would leave was uppermost on the mind of resident Lois Meistrell.After reading some rather salacious quotes from rock musicians and Lollapalooza officials from a Rolling Stone magazine article which seemed to link sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll -- including one in which punk-rocker Iggy Pop referred to the enjoyment he derives from licking women's hairy armpits -- Meistrell predicted that "once the concert is over and they're intoxicated and indulging in their erotic sports and wandering around, there are a lot of cows and livestock in this town, and they might spill over into a dairy pasture and affect how the milk will come out of the cows."
Fields revealed that at one point in negotiations, the promoters wanted to change the date of the Pownal show to the following weekend in order to allow for a show on July 9 in a different location in the Northeast. Fields lobbied against that plan for fear that a weekend show would attract a larger crowd and one more inclined to stay in town before or after the concert.
Towards the end of Fields' presentation, which was conducted with military-like bearing with frequent references to a blueprint of the racetrack grounds and surrounding highways, local business owner James Winchester asked, "Why do I get the feeling I've been to a combat briefing in the name of entertainment?"
[A similar version of this article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on June 29, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
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