The Wrist Watch : Tickets for 4 Springsteen Shows Move at More Than 500 a Minute

There was camp-out craziness in Chicago. There were hours-long telephone snarl-ups in Washington. But generally there were smiling faces, cool tempers and ticket sales clicking off at a peak rate of more than 500 per minute Tuesday in Southern California for rocker Bruce Springsteen’s four September shows at the Coliseum.

What was the difference for what appeared to be an incident-free ticket sales event unequaled in scope in Los Angeles?

Not Los Angeles’ patented “laid-back mellow.” Not vegetarian cuisine. None of those stereotypes.

The difference, in a word: wristbands--the kind they normally use in hospitals--that identified a person’s place in line.

“The wristband idea was (Coliseum Commission assistant manager) Glenn Mon’s, but it was a joint effort between everybody involved, and with everybody’s cooperation, it’s working great,” enthused Ticketmaster chairman Fred Rosen, whose company handled sales for two of Springsteen’s four shows.

Rosen also credited advance planning with keeping Bossmania to a minimum: “The fact is, we knew what kind of vast demand we were facing, and we planned heavily for it. But the L.A. people are the most entertainment-savvy crowd around, and they knew the show was the thing, not the selling of the show, so they generally waited patiently.”

Ticketron’s Al DeJardin--whose firm sold tickets for the other two Springsteen shows--concurred.

“I’m not sure we pleased everybody, but then you can’t do that,” he said. “And from what I’ve heard, we made about 90% happy with the way things were handled today. People were behaving very well at all the places I stopped in.”

In one instance, the fans waited perhaps a bit too patiently. At a Sears store in Northridge, more than 200 Springsteen loyalists refused to abandon their places in line, even though a major fire broke out within a drumstick’s throw of the Ticketron outlet.

Flames erupted in a trash compactor, sending noxious black smoke towards the queue. But although 11 Los Angeles city fire units and four paramedic ambulances arrived at the scene and 19 store employees were taken to the hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation, Springsteen’s legions remained firmly in place--until fire authorities forced them to move.

“We weren’t going to give up our place in line, no matter what,” said Terry Fugazzi, 17, of Canoga Park. “We didn’t care what was burning, as long as it wasn’t the Ticketron computer.”

Meanwhile, at the rest of the more than 150 ticket outlets throughout Southern California, and also via more than 100 telephone lines, the approximately 340,000 reserved seats at $17.50 each to witness the second coming within a year of America’s hottest rock act were being sold--fast. Rosen and DeJardin both said they felt sure all four shows would sell out by the end of the day.

There were few reports of attempted wristband-counterfeiting, wristband-snatching or unruly crowds. And Pacific Bell’s John Donner noted that the telephone company was handling the influx of ticket orders “without a hitch, believe it or not.” He said 463,800 calls were handled from 10 to 11 a.m. in Los Angeles and Orange counties Tuesday, a 45% increase over normal phone usage. And the company experienced no overloads or snafus such as occurred in the nation’s capital when Springsteen played there last month.

Indeed, the long lines of people waiting their turn to purchase tickets--almost all of whom sported wristbands, most of them obtained Monday night--resembled nothing so much as a Sunday beach outing: dogs, lawn furniture, portable radios and even portable grills were very much in evidence.

At 9:45 a.m. outside the Tower Records store on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, the 400 or so wristbanded people waiting with hands full of cash to buy their Springsteen tickets were not too happy about the 100-degree heat but seemed tranquil otherwise.

Sprawled in a lawn chair alongside the store, Mark Kennedy, lucky bearer of the outlet’s No. 1 spot in line, claimed that he had not known about the priority number wristband system, or even that seats were on sale Tuesday, until a friend called him.

“So I got here about 11 last night,” Kennedy said with a big smile, “and totally lucked out.” He said he had bought tickets (for $200 each) for one of Springsteen’s 1984 shows and added, “I swore I wasn’t gonna wait around this time.”

When asked whether he would sell his front-row seats for the opening night show Sept. 26, Kennedy laughed, saying: “There’s not a chance in the world. I’m going to see the Bossman, up close and personal .”

Times staff writer Bob Pool also contributed to this story.