Rock & Roll, Machineguns and Batcopters, Oh My!

My week-old sunburn glad for the setting sun

TAMPA FAIRGROUNDS- Dispatch from the Funshine Music Festival: Rick Nielsen hates guitar picks. At least while Cheap Trick's head shredder bounced and dipped all over the stage he was doing his damnedest to get rid of the things. Hundreds and hundreds of picks. Handfuls. Armfuls. Rick shops at the Guitar Pick Warehouse. It's down route 60, in the pick district. 

He seems like the kind of fun grandpa that pulls a quarter from your kid's ear, then pinches your wife's ass and you thank him for it.

The un-photographable bouncing Nielsen (part vampire)

Before the show I had ridden the Matterhorn, it not dawning on me I was on the kiddie version until already strapped in. Ah well, there were no other riders so it was a matter between myself and the operator, and he appeared to be passing no judgment. Cheap Trick proved a loud, fun reboot to correct my path. Kudos to Nielsen for still being a human windup toy. Possible inspiration came from a tiny strip of duct tape on an amp inscribed with sharpie 'Must Not Tire'. Yeah I saw it Rick, thank the miracle of my space-age contact lenses. It was sound advice I chose to follow that night. And still am.

This being my second concert since the Clinton administration with a BAC level of 0.0 (the other being the Wailers last Friday), and being heavily supplanted with cuban coffees, I was full of spring and needing a quick adventure. There was ample time between shows to take a round-trip on the sky ride and down yet another hot brew. I nearly bought another sweet tiki totem from a vendor until realizing no one was going to carry it around all night but me.

Despite the sky ride having its customary emergency stops I managed to slip back just in time, front and center to rejoin my dear companions for the Smashing Pumpkins. It should be said their bassist is clearly more entertaining to look at, being a petite brunette in stockings. Apologies to Tom Petersson and his twelve string bass. Their light and screen show was fiery and magnificent! It was the first I had seen them live and the third for Cheap Trick, that alone bumps them a letter grade. But art is not competition, or so say the Balinese.

I'm not going to lay out a song list here, if you want that read the damn TBT. I will single out a single track though and it was the Pumpkin's rendition of 'A Space Oddity'. It was a mind-bending interpretation that Ziggy himself would nod to with a grin. It was at that moment my next plan was indelibly sealed in synaptic ink.

I should first say that while leaving work Thursday I saw a helicopter circling my office that evening. The same one was back Friday morning when I arrived, once again (or still) circling. This must be how Henry Hill felt squinting up through his Cadillac's windshield. Naturally followed the obligatory listening of 'Monkeyman' over lunch. Now this digression has a point and that is, despite setting neither foot, ass, or elbow in one, I have always loved the WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP of a chopper overhead. There is something viscerally exciting about the booming thud of heavy blades. Like something important, or dangerous, or criminal is about to happen. I imagine myself climbing aboard bearing an aluminum ZERO Halliburton, contents unknown, and just nodding to the pilot as we climb in our matching aviators. Off to Mexico City or the yacht or a clandestine meeting at the wharf.

Na na na na na na na na....

Once the finale wrapped and the roadies descended I hightailed it to the other end of the fairgrounds as a man on a mission: Ride the Batcopter. The thing is there each year at the fair, and each year slips by with me grounded, like a chump. One swipe of a credit card and the bucket list shrank a line.

She was an old Bell 47, done up with true caped crusader's camp. Even the instrument panel, a beautifully concise collection of antique analog, bore the mark of the bat. I was asked to kindly not rest my feet on the pedals. I obliged, as this writing proves. Here was raw machinery about to perform a miracle!

Glen mixing up shows and giving his best Fonzie

The pilot Glen and I swapped stories as the Bell's powerplant reached temperature, and I learned he was a fellow former Pittsburgher. He smiled, in retrospect politely, as I told him of meeting Terry Bradshaw on a field trip in the tunnels beneath Three Rivers Stadium, circa 1982. Glen had not only met, but once worked out with he and Mean Joe Green in the Steelers gym. This was enough to assure me I was in able hands despite the windsock pointing at us like Pinocchio's sniffer. An old pilot's trick.

Not that any assurance was needed for this passenger. The rotor could have torn off mid-flight and I would have hooted and laughed like Slim Pickens the whole way down. This was the Batcopter, dammit! The night air was cool and wild, the fairgrounds below boiling with life and noise. I was glad to have paid for the extra lap. What sane person wouldn't, really?

Like a taunting button you just NEED to push but can't

Then as our craft slowed her 250 horses to bank for return, there came that familiar deep, heavy WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP. Like an approaching Huey. And this time the delicious blade slap was all mine. Invented flashbacks from 'Nam, we were coming into a hot LZ. Check the tree-line! Poetry to the ears as much as Corrigan's wail.

I bid Glen safe travels and began the oft-rehearsed ducked walk from the blades, then eyeballed it and saw there was no real need. I stood at attention to salute my pilot. What a rush to feel chopping blades pulling at your hair's roots. It left me with a deep hankering to watch M*A*S*H. Souvenir photo carefully in hand, and swimming in buckets of adrenaline and dopamine, I was forced to spend a final three bucks at the BB machine-gun booth on the way out. If this was to be a great American blowout, it had to be. Die red star, die! As a wise man once said, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right.

The night yielded another first, myself in the role of designated driver. I learned that when you are asked to do this it is perfectly acceptable, nay required, to tell your passengers to politely fuck off when requested to close windows, lower the stereo, or make any type of deviation really. Kind of see the allure now. If the driver wants to listen to surf music the whole way across the bay, well them's the breaks.

As I pulled our crew into the Derby Lane parking lot to fetch my pickup, the caffeine kept coursing and the harebrained schemes kept coming. Why not put a fiver on a race, just one? The idea predictably had no other subscribers, and I was left to my own devices once more. Despite the central location making it an ideal carpool drop-off, I've never been as fan of the place. But they were gonna run these poor dogs with or without me, and who was I not to follow every half-assed whim that came my way this evening? Sure I had to take the wife to the airport in a handful of hours, but I wasn't going to sleep either way- go see some humanity. Or something resembling an echo of it.

Evening ends with a whimper- the track, she is dead

Yet as I stepped into the stands it proved just in time to hear the last crackle of the announcer thanking us all for attending before snuffing the track lights. The only beast circling the track was a massive John Deere smoothing tomorrow's track. 

Not to be discouraged I visited the poker room out of further curiosity, absorbing the free show of every imaginable visage battling it out on the green felt as Kentucky Derby replays ran in the background. Thompson would have described the desperate scene much better than I, but he's on extended sabbatical. Besides it's off to hour 30 now and this thing is too long already.

And Travis if you're reading this, Baker Street hit on shuffle just before I got home. 'Merica!