U2 lead singer Bono said the Paris concert attack was the “first direct hit on music that we’ve had in this so-called War on Terror.”
But the music business – or at least a big crowd of music fans — has been hit by terrorism before.
And Atlanta, not Paris, was ground zero.
Andrew Kastner remembers playing on stage in front of thousands of people when the blast of a bomb at Centennial Olympic Park blew and knocked him back on his feet.
It was 1996, during the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games. Anti-abortion activist Eric Rudolph rigged a backpack with a bomb – three pipes packed with nails – and propped it near a prime location at a late-night outdoor concert in the brand new downtown park. More than 100 people were injured. Two were killed.
“I saw the blast and felt it in my chest. It kind of rocked me back on my feet,” Kastner remembered. Then everyone ran, something they could do more easily in a park than in an enclosed concert hall.
“It was pretty much pandemonium,” Kastner recalled.
The concert business survived that round of terrorism. In fact, Kastner and others in the Los Angeles-based soul band he still leads, Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, played private gigs later during the same Games.
But ever since, Kastner never takes to the stage without quietly mapping out an escape route in his mind.
I imagine many more fans will do the same now, in the wake of the horrific evil of the Paris attacks, no matter how many security guards are added to protect us.
Kastner is 65 now and lives in southern California. The band only does a few performances each year, though they are working on another album. They’re all professional musicians – songwriters, voice-over artists, performers for other, bigger bands — who originally started the group as a way to have fun performing their own music.
Bloody Bataclan
He told me he has watched videos of the Paris attacks on YouTube. The blasts outside the soccer stadium sounded just like what he remembered in Atlanta, he told me. And the images of the Bataclan concert hall terror were far bloodier than anything he witnessed during the Olympics, when someone ordered the band immediately off stage and he was whisked away in a van.
It would be natural if he imagines being on that stage in Paris.
"I'm curious," he told me, "why they didn't shoot at the band?"
The fact that the terrorists didn't, he reasons, may be a sign that they weren't trying to make a statement about the performers or the music. They just were looking for a soft place where they could kill lots of people who weren't equipped to fight back.
The North American concert business has been booming. Touring shows by recording acts generated $6.2 billion last year, according to Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the global industry. The top 100 tours on the continent attracted more than 38 million people last year, and ticket prices have been rising, now averaging $71.44 compared to $40.74 in 2000.
Security varies not only by venue but particularly by artist. At big shows it’s typical to see police officers nearby and security guards taking peeks inside the bags of fans. But I’m told security isn’t perceived as being consistently as aggressive as what fans notice at big sports events.
Security reviews
I imagine that will change in the wake of Paris. I’m sure plenty of venues are reviewing their safety protocols.
“It raises the paranoid factor,” Kastner told me.
In fact, he said, “I’m worried about it more now from the Paris thing than from what happened to us.”
He’s not sure what can be done, though. Adding more armed security guards might help, he said, but they could be gunned down, too.
Mostly, he sees the same news the rest of us do. He knows the odds are that most of us are safe. That doesn’t stop him from worrying about being in packed public places in Europe or in U.S. movie theaters or sending his son off to a university.
They’ve all been scenes of mass violence. And it’s hard to get used to.
“After anything that is a big terrorist event,” he said “something changes.”
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