‘Not a Great Summer’ : Rock Concerts Trying to Find Way to Cool It

Some recent figures from the battlefield of rock music:

Heavy metal concert, Long Beach Arena, June 13: One death, 2 serious injuries.

Rap music concert, Long Beach Arena, Aug. 17: About 40 injuries.

Los Angeles Street Scene, Civic Center, Sept. 20-21: One shooting death, about 40 injuries, including 4 stabbings.

It wasn’t “a great summer,” acknowledges Dick White, managing director of the Hollywood Palladium, itself the site of a bottle-throwing melee last month that was put down by about 70 police officers after a punk rock concert.

In response have come calls for investigations from the Los Angeles and Long Beach city councils, a ban of the rap music group Run-D.M.C. in Long Beach and searches for new strategies in staging rock shows.

At the same time, Los Angeles Police Capt. Robert Taylor points out that when you “think about all the shows (in Los Angeles County), it’s really only a small percentage that have had problems.”

5,000 Events a Year

In fact, The Times’ Calendar section lists more than 30 rock clubs in Greater Los Angeles, meaning there may be as many as 5,000 events a year. (One dropout is the Olympic Auditorium, which gave up holding punk music shows six months ago after a series of skirmishes and now confines itself to more peaceful attractions.)

Nor are violence and music strangers historically--as far back as 1705 German composer Johann Sebastian Bach nearly was fired from one job as an organist after getting into a fist fight with a rival musician.

Rather than seeing any clear trend in the recent local troubles, law enforcement authorities and others believe that better planning could have lessened, if not eliminated, the violence in each case.

One recent success story at keeping the peace is the Los Angeles Sports Arena, an irony given that the arena holds the all-time arrest record for concerts in Los Angeles, 511 during a five-day Pink Floyd engagement in 1975.

For years afterward, the arena virtually shunned rock acts. But now the facility’s active again and, in fact, held a problem-free Run-D.M.C. concert in May.

Sports Arena General Manager Glenn Mon attributes the success to close coordination with the Police Department, private security and representatives of Run-D.M.C.

“We had a high degree of security on both the outside and the inside for the concert,” Mon said. “You have to let the bad kids know that if they’re looking for trouble, they’re going to lose.”

Police Sgt. Wayne Hofer says that each time a pop music group is scheduled to play at the Sports Arena or Coliseum, “I do the legwork. I phone other cities and find out what the potential problems are.”

Used Horseback Officers

Aware of violence accompanying some other Run-D.M.C. concerts, the department deployed officers on horseback as well as on foot.

“We’ve had situations where one horse was successful in moving several thousand people,” Hofer said. “With horses we don’t have to deploy as many officers. Plus the riders can look over the crowd to watch what’s going on.”

Pete Kranske, vice president of Contemporary Services, which provided security for that concert, said: “Another thing we discovered was that, at other Run-D.M.C. concerts, people had gotten a little unruly outside the entrance because it took so long to search everyone. What the Sports Arena agreed to do was open all the doors so the people got in there quickly.”

Not all the people, however.

Officers from the department’s CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit also showed up at the Run concert to point out individuals wearing gang identifications, such as scarfs or shoelaces. Management turned them away.

Street Scene, a two-day open-air event downtown, had special problems not faced by arenas. The festival was hit by violence that occurred mostly during night rock music acts. One fracas occurred when a band listed on the program did not show up.

Complaints About Police

Some spectators and bystanders complained that police employed unnecessary force in dispersing them.

But Taylor, commander of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, believes that the festival’s problems would be reduced if it closed down before nightfall--”cockroaches aren’t the only animals that come out at night,” he says--and if the number of outlets dispensing alcohol was reduced. (Two beer companies and a wine cooler firm were among the corporate sponsors for Street Scene, contributing more than $122,000 of the event’s $700,000 budget.)

Another suggestion: Establishing a perimeter fence that would restrict entry.

Taylor has also been working with the Palladium to prevent a recurrence of the riot at a concert by the Ramones, a punk rock group. He and manager White agree that much of the violence appeared to involve non-concertgoers who were loitering outside.

“We’ve recommended that their (the Palladium’s) security be more aggressive on the perimeter to keep people from hanging around in the parking lot and blocking access on the sidewalk area,” Taylor said.

‘Never Had Any Problems’

The Palladium canceled a Run-D.M.C. show it had scheduled for the night after the show that was ended by violence in Long Beach on Aug. 17. But manager White said that “everything being normal, I’d not hesitate booking them. They’ve played here twice and we’ve never had any problems.”

The investigation into the two Long Beach riots is expected to focus on security.

“I think FMI (Facilities Management Inc.) has been cutting corners as far as security goes,” says Long Beach City Councilman Warren Harwood, referring to the company that leases the arena from the city.

Harwood said he was shocked to learn from FMI that “lawbreakers (at the Run-D.M.C concert) that were apprehended inside, instead of being turned over to police, were just escorted outdoors, where they could just continue (the brawling).”

The council has told FMI that future rioting could lead to termination of the lease.

One spectator at the Run concert, Denise Jackson, recalls: “It was amazing. Their (security) people weren’t doing anything. They were like spectators. The funny thing is later I attended a Whitney Houston concert at the Pacific Amphitheater, and there was security all over the place to watch over the crowd, which was most 35-year-old preppies.”

Information Was ‘Soft’

Michael McSweeney, an FMI spokesman, admits that “our intelligence was soft” in anticipating the large number of gang members, but he blames Run-D.M.C. for “not being truthful about the situations in other cities where they’ve played.”

McSweeney admits that in Long Beach, no one who was behaving themselves was denied admission because of suspected gang membership. “Just because someone’s wearing the alleged colors of a gang, you can’t tell him he can’t go in,” he said.

FMI says it won’t book Run-D.M.C. again, though there is some question whether such a prohibition by a city-owned facility is constitutional. In 1983, the courts held that a similar attempt by the City of Burbank to ban such acts as singer Jackson Browne was a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of free expression.

The Long Beach case would be fuzzier, Harwood and other officials say, since the city has leased the arena to FMI.

In any event, Run-D.M.C. says it wouldn’t want to play there anyway unless “authorities take sterner measures” to keep away gang members.