When you go to a concert or a festival, you have every right to expect to be reasonably safe. There’s security. There’s inevitably a police presence. And EMS people are standing by with their medical tents and ambulances.
In the last 25 years, security has stepped up. There are bag searches, pat downs, and maybe even drug-sniffing dogs and magnetometers. There is also greater attention paid to everything from the paths people walk to crowd control and weather monitoring.
It’s not that organizers want to be authoritarian about anything. It’s just business. The business of staging concerts involves following local laws. And then there’s the matter of insurance.
When hundreds or thousands of humans gather in one place where alcohol and drugs are in use, dangerous and weird things can happen. People get angry, drunk, high, and just carried away—and that leads to trouble.
As the organizer of the gig, you do not want anyone to get hurt (or worse) because that inevitably will lead to legal problems and lawsuits.
But sometimes imagination about what could go wrong fails us—probably because we can’t possibly conceive of something so horrible ever happening.
Such was the case on the Las Vegas Strip on October 1, 2017. It was a country music festival called “Route 91 Harvest.” Things started as usual, but just after 10, the festival was transformed into a shooting gallery.
WARNING: This program gets very, very intense.
Get Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry wherever you get your podcasts. Both Uncharted and The Ongoing History of New Music will be heard back-to-back overnights five days a week on these Corus news stations:
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