I Shoauld Have Been a Rock Star - BOC and Trippin in Wichita

Blue Oyster Cult in Wichita and Trippin’

The guys and I at Sterling College heard on the Wichita Rock station that Blue Oyster Cult was coming to play in Wichita. It was like a musical black hole there. Sterling was a farm and small college town, surrounded by other small farm towns. The nearest city of any size was 60 miles away.We grasped at strands to hear and find anything new. There we were. In the midst of the AOR rock and Roll era, and all we could see what that it was all being taken over by Disco… the spawn of Satan.
We hated Disco. At least, most of us. We wanted our Ted Nugent ( long before his apparent right wing psycho era), Kansas, BOC, Boston and BOC. Even the one time 60’s rock band, the Bee Gees, had converted to disco, and the club we had traveled to in near by Hutchinson had converted form a rock and blues club to a disco club.
The chance to see and hear BOC was something none of us could pass up. We scraped and scrambled, borrowed form each other and finally bought several tickets to the mid-January concert. When the date finally arrived, we all piled into Pitts’ converted van to travel to the show. The van itself was a wonder of mechanics. It had been one of those vans where a huge lump rose between the front seats to house the engine… but Pitts and his brother had decided to do some work on it, welding an extension onto the frame, and moving the engine forward out of the interior. They created a boxy nose cover that protruded out of the regular van grill to house the newly extended motor.
So, this mutant van, loaded with longhaired and clean-cut college students alike, lurched out of Sterling and pointed south in the cold, cold Kansas winter late afternoon in search of rock and roll. Two sat in the newly spacious front, while the rest of us piled in the empty back, sprawled atop blankets and pillows.
Almost half way to Wichita, the worst of situations. The rear left tire went flat under the weight of a hefty crew of college football players and civilians. We fell out the van into the darkening cold on the side of a 2 lane state road that stretched both ways without break. There was no convenient service station. No cheerfully lit convenience store awaiting our arrival. It was a frigid lonely highway and flat tire that threatened our dose of metal and mayhem in the shape of Blue Oyster Cult.
Pitts jacked up the van, removed the tire. We stood staring at it with dumb expression. The ugly fact surfaced that the spare had been taken out of the back to make room for our bulks in the van.

Stranded.

There we stood, my long hair and whipped by a bitter Kansas winter wind. Pitts stood silently, but defensively as others said “ what a dumbass thing.. Taking out the spare!” “How else would we all fit?” Piitts argued. Of course, none of us planed for the worst. And as far as giving Pits hell, that was part of it. Each of us would catch our appropriate amount of shit when our turn arose. The others sat inwait of a screw up 9n order to drag you kicking and screaming across the coals. It wasn’t personal… we all got it.
Shifting from foot to foot, unequipped to stand in the unexpected cold, finally, Scott said, “ We passes a town a few miles back there.” “But that was haven.” We all chimed in.
Haven was a Mennonite town nestled on a broad turn in the high way. We went o college with some of the Mennonite students who liv4ed on the farms surrounding the town. The sight of horse drawn carriages trotting along the side of the roads in Rice County was not an unfamiliar event. We couldn’t conceive that Haven would have anything that would propel us toward the warm confines of the Wichita Convention Center and the thunder of electric guitars.
Scott volunteered to walk back to haven with the tire. Pitts went as well. Scott had always been our get-things-done guy. His all American looking 6’4 frame grabbed the tire and began moving quickly toward that Mennonite haven. The rest of us, all 6, stood, shifting from foot to foot, walking and flapping arms to stay warm since we were unable to reenter the van as it perched precariously on a jack in the gravel side of the road.


It was then that the weirdness began. Our starting quarterback Dan and our middle linebacker Steen announced that they had dropped acid shortly before getting into the van for the one and one-half hour drive to the concert. “Things are getting weird,” Dan said.


Apparently, the weirdness permeated the entire area. Pitts and Scott made t to haven, where they finally located a group of people who stared at them suspiciously. It was in a small bar like building where we always suspected they met t0o exchange secret plans and handshakes. Pitts was able to convince someone to help him and they opened a tractor store to fix the tire. Pitts always said it had been a twilight zone experience in haven, but they were inflated and began the cold trot back to the stranded mutant van.

Meanwhile, both Dan and Steen had started to enter a deep experience that resulted in both running around without their shirts screaming, ‘It’s not really cold! Just think about Florida!!”
I thought I was going to found at morning light, frozen and sitting beside the road, ice caking my Fu Manchu and eyebrows. Even my bones seemed to be creaking from the biting winds that drove from the North across the flat prairie.

Finally, Scott and Pitts arrived, red cheeked and triumphant. We quickly remounted the tire with frozen fingers, crawled in to the dark corned of the van as the heater sparked to life and warmed our frosted bodies.

The lucky thing about most concerts I the 70’s was that nothing started on time. BOC was no different. We handed our tickets to the man at the door and hustled in to find standing space in the open seating that was so common then. It would take a tragedy at a Who concert to end that style of seating. Several kids were killed, literally trampled to death as people rushed the doors to get the best standing spaces on the floor at the Who show in Cincinnati.
We were mostly big guys. We created our space on the floor and shifted from foot to foot waiting for the show to begin. Dan leaned toward me and whispered suspiciously, “Duge, this check over here is trying to talk to me I think. Dies she have a dog head because all she’s doing is barking?”

At last, the lights dimmed, the crowd roared and hundreds of lighters flickered in the darkness to welcome the band and to light the rolled paper crops that they had smuggled into the arena. None of the guys I was with lit up. Most of us had come to see the show, and it as something I could never understand, even after I finally tried pot. Why pay so much to be messed up at a concert? I wanted to hear every note and feel every sound. I know a lot of people disagree with me, and say it enhances the experience, but I never saw a concert stoned.

Now, Dan and Steen were a different story. They were in a groove. The bass guitar shook the floor, and laser lights shone out at the crowd and ricocheted off the huge glass ball suspended over the auditorium. The wall of sound BOC cranked out thundered through us and we were filled with music and the presence of others swaying and screaming to the same beat.

As the show drew close to an end, the band members started playing a song that had a long, throbbing, building rhythm. As the grinding rhythm grew louder and louder, a wall of laser light appeared over the crowd. The wall, stretching from the stage to the back wall, inched lower and lower over the standing audience, looming like a solid object set to crush us beneath the weight of the heavy beat. Dana and Steen were freaking out. The apparent solidness of the wall of light had them bending lower and lower as the wall moved closer and closer. They held their hands upward as they bent lower to hold back the wall if possible. “man,” shouted Steen, this is gonna crush us!”
I held my arm above me, creating a break in the light, to show them that the wall was only an illusion. Then they, in obvious relief began poking their hands into the light timidly and laughing with relief with the pardon forma death by being crushed.
The wall lifted and BOC finished with a thundering rendition of “Buck’s Boogie.” All five members of the band, keyboardist and drummer included ended up at the front of the stage, al with guitars played in sync as Buck dharma finished the show with a blazing guitar solo.

We exited the auditorium, refreshed and tired. Hungry, we found a burger King and ate before making the dark, and thankfully, uneventful return to our small campus in the center of the state and plains of Kansas.