Concerts are a great way to cut loose and temporarily forget about all of your problems, but it is hard to explain the feeling of seeing the Dave Matthews Band ten feet in front of me and tens of thousands of people behind me. Sure, I’m a fan of DMB, but I would much rather be at a Perpetual Groove show. However, there isn’t much that compares to the feeling that came over me when I looked at the sea of people behind me and screamed, “Hey! Ya’ll are wayyy back there, and we’re wayyy up here!”
This particular concert took place at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, GA, and I seriously doubted I would have a good time when I first arrived. The park was packed, and I never thought we would make it even remotely close to the stage. I’ve never been a fan of obnoxious drunks, but one of those actually proved to be beneficial. My group agreed to let someone tag along with us because her friends sold their tickets, and I knew going into the whole experience that we would end up having to babysit this lush. Low and behold, our obnoxious drunk is about 50 yards away from us annoying a group of hippies. 50 yards doesn’t seem that far, but when there are at least 10,000 people sitting on quilts between us and the lush, problems tend to arise.
We basically had to make a choice–leave her on her own or throw away all regard for people’s space and muscle our way towards her. Obviously we weren’t going to leave her alone, so we proceeded to walk through the crowd. If I had a nickel for every time someone said “Hey! Watch it, man,” I’d be a millionaire. Stunningly, this idiot lush continues to walk away from us as we are trying to get to her. Eventually she sits on a quilt with a group of hippies, and we finally made it to their quilt. It had become blatantly obvious that these hippies wanted this lush as far away from them as possible, so I helped her up and proceeded to walk. To my surprise, we were actually close to the front! I thanked our drunken lush of a friend for her idiocy, and proceeded to muscle my way through the crowd until I was at the front right-hand corner of the stage. Looking back at the entrance and seeing how far up we moved (considering the size of the crowd) was truly an amazing site.
