It was a weird, fucked-up brand of mezcal. It was a great gig, but before the encore someone from the record company brought over a bottle of mezcal – which usually comes with a worm at the bottom, and which a lot of people confuse with tequila, but is actually a lot stronger – with a scorpion in it.
I had a few customary pre-gig drinks of rum and coke. It was an early evening show, which we played before dinner, ie on an empty stomach. But no – the bucket of piss, delivered with loving precision, wins out every time. Or the live rounds of automatic pistol ammunition thrown on to the stage during a show. Or the 10in steel spike impaled in the stage next to me at soundcheck when "fans" climbed into a roof gantry over the stage at soundcheck. Or anointment by the freshly plucked but seriously used tampon hurled with uncanny accuracy at another enormodome. Or being hit hard in the larynx by a baseball at Philadelphia Spectrum arena. I could have picked the gig at Denver's Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 1971, when riots and police tear gas threatened to stop the show. The unmistakable pong wafting from my then-ample head of damp hair and freshly laundered stage-clothing would remain for the duration of the show. Only as I began the inaudible first verse of Thick as a Brick on acoustic guitar, did I realise with resigned horror that the liquid I assumed to be beer, was not, in fact, beer at all. In those final moments before walking out on to the field, I was suddenly drenched with warm, sticky liquid from high above, where some of the rowdy, 50,000-strong audience looked down on to the players' access ramp.
Commercial jets on final approach to the adjacent La Guardia airport drowned out the sound, when it wasn't being drowned out by the firecrackers, whistles, hoots and hollers of the crowd. As with the Beatles' Shea show 10 years earlier, this was not to be an artistic success, to say the least. I stood with the rest of the band at the top of the ramp leading down to the field of Shea Stadium.
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