It’s been a dangerous and deadly summer for bands and concert fans this year with the Cheap Trick, Sugarland and Pukkelpop stage calapse incidents.
And earlier this week Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune reported on how Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielson and the band visited Congress to lobby for the regulation of temporary stages.
“I felt like I was in a Buster Keaton movie where the building falls down on him,” Nielson said Monday in an unexpectedly dramatic Future of Music Summit panel with the band’s manager, Dave Frey. “I ran forward looking for the equivalent of daylight as the blackness descended.”
“We want to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again,” Frey said. He and Nielsen hope that Congress will consider a “standard certification process as you would have with elevators or a ferris wheel at a carnival.”
“For whatever reason this never got done” in Ottawa, Frey said, and “that everyone got off that stage is unbelievable.”
What Say You?
Cheap Trick’s plan sounds like a no-brainer for an industry that clearly needs more rules in place to protest bands and fans at shows.
But will Congress listen? Is lobby for certification enough? Should bands, officials and promoters be focusing efforts in other areas?
We’ll continue to explore this topic and we’d like to hear what you think about Congress regulating temporary stages.
We also know many fans and bands were impacted by these tragic and traumatic events and we invite you to share your stories in the comments below, and we’ll share them during a future episode of Live Fix Radio.