The mercury topped 90 Sunday, blistering hot for a mid-October day.
In the middle of the crowd of hundreds pushing toward the stage at KFMA Fall Ball 2016, it felt more like 120 degrees. Sweaty bodies stacked side-by-side, back-to-front, hundreds deep and hundreds wide. It was sweltering.
But to get the true feel of a rock festival, you have to be in the middle of that sweaty action. You want to be in the middle.
Until midway through Brit rockers The Struts 45-minute show when a guy who had to be 6-foot-tall, all legs and flailing arms, came surfing overhead.
We weren't expecting that, which is kind of naive on our part; this is a rock show. Crowd surfing is a rite of passage. Fans sail overhead on the arms and hands of fellow fans until they arrive at the stage and are promptly hoisted down and taken out by yellow-shirted, big-chested security.
The lanky fan didn't make it that far. A few rows before the stage he was plopped down, left to stumble to his feet and, quite politely, apologized to the few people whose heads got in the way of his size 12 sneakers.
A few minutes later, as the glam rockers' frontman Luke Spiller lit into their 2014 hit "Could Have Been Me," another body surfer was making the stagefront journey. The crowd had caught on and delivered the man, who was far smaller than the first and seemed to be in better control of his arms and legs, to the waiting hands of the stage-front security crew.
Sunday's afternoon Fall Ball lineup kind of begged for that sort of crowd response from the 8,000-plus filling the sprawling Pima County Fairgrounds concert field. This wasn't hard-core head-banging rock; this was radio-friendly, pop rock, the kind that drives and blasts but doesn't scream. It was the reggae-rock outfit Iration getting the crowd riled up with a cover of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers "Mary Jane's Last Dance" and their original rockers "Time Bomb" and "Automatic." Bass player Adam Taylor coaxed the crowd that stretched the length of the sprawling lawn to wave their hands in the air, and when they did the folks squeezed together close to the stage got a priceless and fleeting cool breeze.Β
The Struts lead singer was a bundle of unbridled energy, fairly sprinting the length of the main stage as the crowd pushed in tighter. A fight nearly broke out at one point and people started pushing and shoving, moving the crowd even closer together. It felt like being on the front line of a Wildcats football game with the opponents' defense of 300-pound linemen bearing down as Spiller blasted out the chorus of "Kiss This."Β
And then Spiller made a seemingly impossible request. He asked the crowd to take a step back; when you're stacked body-to-body, that's not an easy thing to do. But everyone did and if you were looking at the audience from a few stories above it must have looked like a twisted game of "Simon Says." They took a step back, crushing the toes of those behind them.
Then Spiller told the audience to crouch down. Where? There was not an inch of crouch-down space to be found. So most of them bent down and the lower they got, all tangled in the humidity created by a knot of sweaty people clumped together, the more inhumane Spiller's request seemed.Β
But it was a quick crouch; Spiller immediately urged the crowd to leap to its feet and to jump in place while he sang the band's latest single "Put Your Money On Me."
By the time Panic! At the Disco frontmanΒ Brendon Urie took the stage, some of us had had enough of the shoulder-to-shoulder relationships we had developed over the past few hours, and the stench of marijuana coming from a few folks who must have thought they were in Pueblo, Colorado, not Pima County, Arizona. We moved back to the sound board, a couple football fields from the stage. The view wasn't nearly as good β the perks of being that close to the stage is the thrill of seeing the sweat drop off the artist's brow.
From our new perch, we had to strain to see Urie jerk his head back and do his totally slick little dance moves.Β But we could hear him just fine as he told the audience that Panic! got its first big break in Tucson, at the downtown teen club Skrappy's as an opening act about a year after the band formed in 2004. His set list didn't go back quite that far, but Urie did visit a few years back, performing "The Ballad of Mona Lisa," "This is Gospel" and "Miss Jackson." He also performed a number of songs off Panic!'s latest album "Death of A Bachelor" including "Golden Days," LA Devotee" and "Victorious."
Urie also covered Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," in a performance that included him playing the piano and hitting some pretty impressive Freddie Mercury-esque high notes. Don't be surprised if some of the folks who were knotted up in that mass of humanity near the stage Sunday night tell their friends Monday that that was one of the biggestΒ highlights of Fall Ball 2016.
Or for those further back, they might recall the young girl in the back near the sound board who tried to surf her way to the front. Crowd surfing only works if the crowd is packed tight enough to sustain you overhead and onto your destination.
The crowd near the soundboard was spread out with two, three people between a body; there was no shoulder rubbing. So this girl was barely three people into her journey when she ran out of bodies to assist her. When she came to the end of the short line, she was plopped into the dirt. She was only a few feet from where she started.
