X-96's B.A.S.H. featuring Primus, Cake, Ben Folds Five, Luscious Jackson, Eve 6 and others; Saturday, Oct. 2; Utah State Fairpark; one show only.
It was unusually hot Saturday afternoon when X96 hosted this year's B.A.S.H. concert at the Utah State Fairgrounds. Maybe that's what got into the crowd.The clear draw of the six-hour event were the bands Cake and Primus, one scheduled to play immediately before the other. A half hour before Cake entered the stage -- when only the sound-check guy wandered around there -- attendees left the stage where Ben Folds Five was playing and started shoving their way through a growing crowd, in search of the perfect spot outside the east stage.
When Cake finally entered, about 10 minutes past the time they were supposed to begin, even elbow room was hard to come by as the enormous crowd started cheering. Immediately upon Cake's John McCrea singing "Sheep Go to Heaven," the pushing started. The collective pushing was so great, a chain-link fence flanking the stage started to collapse under pressure. Half-filled water bottles were thrown, as well as the occasional tennis shoe.
Cake seemed undazed, continuing into a set that included such favorites as "Is This Love?," "Frank Sinatra" and "Let Me Go." The moshing and throwing continued. At one point, a large object was thrown at McCrea. Luckily, he moved quick enough to deflect it and he backed away from the microphone to mouth some obscenities at the person who did it. With the chaotic happenings in the audience -- one girl crying who was hit by a Frisbee, another with thick spots of blood on his nose -- it probably wasn't something a lot of the attendees saw.
Still, McCrea struggled to keep his cool. He thanked the audience for their "enthusiasm," as he termed it and joked all the throwing of the tennis shoes had to be expensive for the audience. The joke was on them, he said -- they only had one shoe now.
Cake wasn't a minute into the radio-friendly tune "Never There" when either a tennis shoe or a water bottle was thrown, hitting McCrea's microphone stand. The microphone hit him in the teeth, he stood back, swore once again at whoever did it and walked off the stage, not before throwing a filled water bottle back. The rest of the band left as well. What may have been the last song in their set was never finished.
It was announced Primus would play not more than five minutes after the incident occurred.
Not quite the rapes and fires of this year's Woodstock, but definitely an echo of it; one can bet Cake won't be back next year.