Night Shift
In 1978, I went to my first rock concert. I was seventeen.I went with my friend Bobby Wranosky to the dilapidated Corpus Christi Coliseum, a giant Quonset-hut-type structure, to see Foghat.
Foghat in 1977 was basically known for two songs: Fool For the City and the rock anthem Slow Ride. I had the the album Fool for the City on 8-track, and I blasted it regularly from the Radio Shack sound system in my white Ford Fiesta.
Bad ass.
We went to the Coliseum, essentially, to hear those two songs. The album version of Slow Ride was over eight minutes long, and in concert it lasted closer to fifteen. Their entire set was played at deafening, mind-numbing volume, so loud that it was more painful than memorable, and as I stumbled out of the Coliseum that night, ears ringing, clothes saturated with the smell of cigarette smoke and pot and beer, I remember thinking that life wasn’t always as much fun as the brochure.
Twenty-seven years later, I returned to Corpus Christi, this time with Eli 4.2 and Gloria, and we stayed on Shoreline Drive, just a few minutes walk from the still-standing Coliseum. We were on the 16th floor of the Omni hotel, facing the water, and were looking forward to a quiet, relaxing vacation.
Until we found out that we came to Corpus Christi the same weekend as Bayfest.
Ah, Bayfest. Good times.
Every town, it seems, has a festival now, and this festival was familiar. I knew all about Bayfest, because during its debut in 1977, I ran a marathon. On a dare from the football coach, who claimed that tennis player’s weren’t “athletes.” So to prove him wrong, I ran a marathon on a sunny, eighty-seven degree day in Stan Smith leather tennis shoes. My time was horrendous (5:30) and I make no apologies for it, since I’d never run more than fives miles consecutively in my life. I did finish, though, proving the football coach wrong, although I inadvertently proved that while tennis players might be athletes, they were also incredibly stupid.
So a wave of nostalgia and muscle cramps came over me when I saw that we had returned on the same weekend as the festival that had stomped the life out of me when I was sixteen. I checked the festival schedule and they had all kinds of events scheduled, including a ton of live music. It seemed like fun.
And it was fun, until we got back to the room after dark, and I looked out our window and realized that the entire festival was located about two hundred yards away. With twelve hours of live music scheduled.
In minutes, I realized our room had a very, very bad case of the thumpas. You know what the “thumpas” are. It’s what you hear when someone has their subwoofer cranked up to 11—you can’t hear the music, but you can hear the thump of the base. Thumpa. Thumpa. Thumpa. Bayfest!
We did get something in exchange for the thumpas: a spectacular fireworks display at 9:30 (Eli 4.2 was sound asleep, unfortunately) that we could see in spectacular detail outside our window. Which is good, because I needed something to make me forget about sleep, which I wasn’t going to be getting.
In addition to the thumpas, I had another problem. My sinuses were running like the bulls at Pamplona, and I’d acquired a rib-cracking cough to go with it. Combined with the thumpas, my chances of getting any rest at all were in serious doubt.
Which is why I was sitting up in bed at 11:30, dead tired, listening to the thumpas, when I heard a guitar that was so loud it powered through the thick glass of the window. It was so familiar that I walked over and put my ear against the glass.
Slow Ride. There was no mistaking that guitar riff.
And that’s how, twenty-seven years later, I found myself listening to Foghat in concert. Again.
Bad ass.
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