Went to New Orleans for Jazzfest this weekend. Never again. Never.
Did I enjoy it? Yeah. I did. A lot. But it was too much chaos. Even for me.
Mainly wanted to see Elton John. On my bucket list to hear him sing Bennie and the Jets live. Check mark!
Got there when the gates opened (the few small funnel gates) as did about 110,000,000,000,000,000 people, far too many already drunk.
Battled to the Acura stage with a couple of chairs and even though we got there earlyish, the closest we could get was about 498,000 yards from the stage. Thankfully there were some large screens showing what was on stage. Unfortunately there was one enormous one right in the middle, and if you had the misfortune of being behind that? Well fuck seeing the stage.
Within minutes, all these fucking flags started going up. State flags, homemade flags, whatever the fuck. People were planting them everywhere. And those shitty stupid things blocked view of most of the video screens.
I'm not much of a people person anyway. Don't care for crowds. Despite the vastness of this one it was mostly well-behaved during the opening bands including a Fats Domino tribute band and Jerry Lee Lewis (looking 732 years old and filled with fluid, but damn he could still hammer the keys). There was lots of alcohol and a constant scent of weed wafting on the breeze. Sun was hot, but not unbearable and despite the flags and the distance, I was pretty okay with it.
Then when it was about time for Elton to hit the stage, my incompatibility with my fellow human beings started to hit a new level of disdain.
Did I mention we'd been there since before 11? That didn't seem to matter to a shitload of asshole fucks who tried to elbow past and wedge their dirty asses in front of us. That's a major faux pas in my book and I will be a contentious, shoving, 'get the fuck out', blocking the path, asshole. You don't get to show up at the last minute and overwhelm the space I've spent all day cultivating. Fuck that. So there were some moments of great tension that had the capability of escalating, but thankfully none did. It was sort of liberating, actually because once I started telling the latecoming fucks they could move their ass somewhere else I was suddenly in command of an army. Guys who'd logged the same time as we had all rose up and we created an impenetrable wall. Once it became obvious that we weren't giving ground, we watched the late coming stragglers probe for weaknesses further and further down. Then the guy at the end opened a cooler and passed beers down the line to all of us who'd banded together for a common cause. Too bad it wasn't weed. I'd have preferred that.
So we salvaged our not-so-prime position by the time Elton broke into Bennie (his second song). And then my annoyance grew even further. Not 15 feet in front of us a group of Ole Miss and Mississippi State fans (could tell because of their flags and shirts) decided the concert was boring, I guess, and flipped their chairs around to face each other and start having a fucking conversation. Since Elton was playing that damn musical annoyance made them decide to raise their voices even more so they could hear each other. It got to the point that you could barely hear the music over the collection of assholes who were steadily shouting conversation at each other. Why the blazing blue fuck would you buy a ticket, wade into that mass of humanity, hang out there all day and then NOT pay one second of attention to the main attraction? All those people should die in a fiery hole. I didn't have to do much about that because after about three or four songs a huge bearded biker dude bowled in there and told the lead Rebel black bear that if they didn't shut the fuck up so he could hear the stage he was going to start shoving them up each others asses (or something). They quieted down enough for us to barely hear, but those douches weren't the only ones having constant conversations and ignoring the show on the stage.
Too many people in too small a space. I just kept thinking that if any of those short-fuse situations had exploded (and in retrospect, it wasn't the brightest idea I ever had to elbow people and tell them the step the fuck off) .... it could have gone bad quickly. The whole time I was there I never saw any security whatsoever. If a brawl HAD started? It would have gone on for a while and probably spread into something out of a Wild West saloon before anybody could possibly have gotten there. Hell, I saw the ambulance cart trying to get an old man having a heart attack out of there and nobody would even move for it. People were like, fuck you, wait.
Had some friends there and they left before the Elton John concert started after some people started shoving and cursing them and trying to take over the spot they'd been in all day.
I mean look at this shit.
That's crazy. And half those people didn't give one fuck about Elton John, they were just there to drink, fuck and get high. Couldn't they have done it somewhere else so those of us who DID care could at least see/hear what was going on?
Yeah, it was fun, but I'm not fighting that kind of insanity again. It was just too much.
Well, it depends on who they bring back. And next time I do it as a VIP sponsor so I can avoid being trapped in that nonsense.
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