Never again. Not even for Bonnie Raitt.
No more concerts.
On Friday night, I was at the Maine State Pier in Portland for the latest Bonnie Raitt concert. I have been in love with her for 30 years or more. Her smooth voice, sexy attitude and bluesy bottleneck guitar playing made her my all-time favorite years ago.
We are both getting older (she has sung about it), and I could not afford to miss this Portland appearance.
Never again.
The tickets sold so fast that I could only get standing room tickets. Standing. On a cement pier. For hours. Not a good thing. I got there as early as I could to be as close to the stage as possible in the standing room only section.
That put me behind a group of six women. They were catching up on recipes, kid stories and other important issues. I assumed this palaver would stop when the warmup act, classy Richard Thompson, started playing. Nope. Three of the women kept their backs to the stage, talking during his entire performance.
Thompson might have been great. I couldn’t tell you. Their chirping drowned out the songs. One of them was “bombed” by a seagull. Good. I prayed for a re-enactment of Alfred Hitchcock’s “ The Birds” to drive them away but it never happened.
Why do these people go to concerts? You can sit in a Commercial Street restaurant, save ticket money and talk until you fall on the floor.
I relocated, naturally.
I got in front of a man who felt obligated to run down the entire Olympics, at the top of his lungs for his unfortunate neighbor … while Thompson was singing. He had to raise his voice when the music interfered with his vital report.
I moved again, my feet and back were starting to go numb. A Corona would have been nice but the crowd around the beer tent was five deep.
A Bonnie Raitt concert was the perfect place to get an update on the ferry schedule and the “meetings” of another loudmouth. He didn’t even stop when Raitt performed. He did raise his beer and yell “wooo” when the song ended. Then he went back to his vital transportation report.
Why, I repeat, do these people go to concerts?
I have seen Raitt in Boston, Portland, Fort Myers, Florida, Concord, New Hampshire, and some muddy field in western Massachusetts. This was the worst concert ever. First of all, the pier “stage” is at floor level and unless you are at least 6-foot-1 (I am), you will never see the stage. Petite Donna Weber of Bangor stood through the event, and I would guess she never saw Raitt once. Her strapping husband could see the stage, even if the music was drowned out by chatter.
With all those vitally important conversations around me, it was difficult to identify Raitt’s songs, let alone her traditional between-songs-discussions of sex and the environment.
Couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear.
I lasted until 9 p.m., when my back, legs and spine could take no more. On the mile walk back to the car, the music got louder and louder. When I was five blocks away, I heard the best sound of the night. I couldn’t sit on the sidewalk and listen, could I?
Meara 3, also known as daughter Bridget, took a ferry trip and landed at the pier weeks earlier. She said she was closer to the stage than most of the people inside the concert. I should have taken a ferry ride.
That is the end of my concert life, which started in a tiny Boylston Street basement in Boston around 1964 with the Lovin’ Spoonful. I almost left that concert, too. It was so torturously loud that the door looked inviting. Of course, I stayed, got used to it and loved it.
A few years later, I ended up in San Francisco and saw them all, Janis, Jimi and Gracie, from about 12 feet away. I even once sang into the microphone held by Otis Redding. True story.
Enough is enough. No more. I shall spend no more time with the concert blowhards, not even for Raitt.
Unless she decides to play on the Cobb Manor deck.
Sorry, Bonnie.
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the Bangor Daily News in Rockland for 30 years.