Palladium Security Reflects the Reality of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Tracey Stahl dumped the contents of her purse onto a small table, as ordered by a uniformed security guard. The 28-year-old bartender from Ventura had already been through a body pat-down and was searched with a hand-held metal detector.

Now the guard was sifting through her belongings, looking for potential weapons among the items on a key chain and checking a small pump bottle of hair spray to make sure it wasn’t Mace.

No, Stahl wasn’t about to board a jet for a world trouble spot. She was merely going to a concert--a recent Hollywood Palladium performance by the hot punk-rock band the Offspring.

Sometimes the search procedure at the Palladium is so slow that the line into the historic ballroom stretches far down Argyle Avenue. At a Hole concert last month, even some early arrivals were forced to wait so long that they missed the opening act.

This night, Stahl passed through the procedure quickly. But anyone in the capacity crowd of 3,800 who was in possession of anything deemed potentially harmful to either person or property--from knives to bottle openers--was forced to take it back to their car or toss it into a garbage can.

“It’s OK,” said Stahl after stuffing her belongings back into her purse. “I mean, I don’t want anybody with guns going inside. There are a lot of weirdos around--especially in L.A.”

That urban paranoia seemed to be carried by most fans coming to the show, who accepted the search as a necessary evil in a modern city.

The Palladium security may be the most stringent in town for rock concerts, but that’s largely because it has been the venue most associated with trouble in recent years. Indeed, the multiuse hall was closed down by the Los Angeles City Council in February, 1993, after a series of incidents.

Since reopening two months later with tighter security provisions, trouble has been relatively infrequent.

“In 20 months, not one person has been hurt by anything brought in from the outside,” said Alan Shuman, president of the historic Palladium, a onetime home to the top big bands and also the site over the years of shows by such major rock performers as the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and the Clash. “That’s the first time it’s been that way here in 10 years.”

Police and neighborhood representatives confirm the improvement.

“They’re doing what is reasonable to control the problems they had,” echoed Lt. Mark Savalla, the night watch commander for the LAPD’s Hollywood Division.

The turnaround at the Palladium is being monitored by managers of other rock venues. The Downtown Variety Arts Center has just hired Dan Sullivan, who designed the security system for the Palladium, to supervise security for its rock shows, and the Universal Amphitheatre now searches fans at selected shows.

The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which sometimes hosts alternative-rock shows, hires armed, off-duty police officers to handle crowds.

“You’re never going to see the days again when you can just go anywhere,” said Sullivan, a retired LAPD deputy chief and owner of the Investigative Services Corporation. “Those days are gone.”

Like the fans interviewed, a representative of Goldenvoice, a promotion firm that specializes in alternative-rock acts, sees the tight security as a necessity.

“This is the best place in town for the kind of acts we do, so we’re glad just to have it open,” says Paul Tollett, co-owner of Goldenvoice, which produced the Offspring concert.

For a while, the future of rock ‘n’ roll at the Palladium looked dim.

After a series of violent incidents and public disturbances at the ballroom, the Los Angeles City Council voted in February, 1993, to close the facility. Among the key problems: inadequate security.

Attention was first drawn to the Palladium’s troubles in 1986 when fans unable to get tickets to a sold-out show by the Ramones broke windows in the neighborhood and clashed with police riot squads called to quell the disturbance.

The next year, a gang fight disrupted a concert by the rap group U.T.F.O., leading Palladium management to cancel a Run-DMC show. Fights and stabbings plagued a variety of subsequent Palladium events. Neighborhood businessmen and residents also complained repeatedly of vandalism and rowdiness before and after concerts.

After the council’s action, the facility seemed doomed. There was even a possibility it would be torn down to make way for a parking garage. But Shuman, a Los Angeles lobbyist, soon stepped in. He offered to refurbish the run-down ballroom and hired Sullivan to design a new security plan.

Since then, the Palladium, under Shuman’s management, has hosted a variety of events, from Persian dances to boxing matches to punk-rock shows. The amount of security also varies, depending on the nature of the event.

Rap concerts are prohibited, as are radical punk bands whose fans are skinheads--the jack-booted contingent that has been associated with violence.

Joe Shea, president of the Ivar Hill Neighborhood Assn., cheers the changes. “The difference is like night and day,” says Shea, who credits the tighter security measure for an overall decrease of vandalism and other crimes in the area. “Today there are virtually no offenses to people and property occurring anywhere around the Palladium and very little inside.”

Even though fans at the Offspring show seemed patient moving through the search lines, they were sometimes surprised by many of the items that were confiscated--including fountain pens (they can be used as weapons) and gum.

Gum?

“We just spent a million dollars fixing up the place,” explained Shuman. “You know how hard it is to get gum out of the carpet? We have a black-tie dinner here in three days, and we couldn’t clean up the gum by then.”