If you should ever get sick at a rock and roll concert, as I have done twice in the past two two years, here is a what they will do while you writhe in agony. They will ask if you’re on drugs and put waivers in your hands and insist you sign em. No, really, just a mark, will do.
My story’s sad to tell, I suffer from some virulent type of motion sickness and anything can and will set it off, just a sudden brake on a train and I may just about pass out. In July 2012 I nearly passed out at a U2 concert at Metlife. I wrote about it here back then and I forgot about it, till, on a pleasant ten minute trip to Radio City Music Hall last Friday it hit again.
I got off at the nearest train stop , Lexington and 53 RD and unable to go backwards back home because it was way too far away, I staggered back home and went to Radio City where I was meeting my friend Sherry Davis for a Tony Bennett concert.
Here I made a terrible mistake, instead of walking three flight of stairs to my nosebleed seats I figured I’d take the elevator. I first staggered to my seat and before a song was sung was laying in some special area throwing water over my head and gasping in pain while medics tried to stick me in a wheelchair (like I could be wheeled anywhere) and Sherry IMd with Helen Bach (“don’t try and talk to him” Helen advised. But she would say that if I was feeling well.)
Meanwhile, opening act Tony’s daughter Antoinette, rehearsing for her “Memories Of My Father” concert at Cafe Carlyle in a decade or so, might have been sucked or not. I heard some chuckling here and there and then with no pause at all out must have come Tony as the place erupted in applause as I (“don’t induce vomiting” -thanks guys) politely in a plastic bag.
Dan Aquilante wrote his best line ever about Tony Bennett: it’s like he was speaking in tune”. That’s what I thought the many times I’ve heard him. This time it was more like he was singing with a pillow over his face.
By 930pm it was over and neither me nor Sherry had heard a thing (those sturdy Radio City doors!) and I went to sit on a bench in Manhattan snapping at Helen over the cell before risking the trip hope. It killed my Ginger Baker show the next night as well.
Thank you God, thank you very very much.