Ozzfest Attendees Try To Bring Chaos Of General-Admission Shows To Crummy Colorado Shed

Ozzfest’s stop at the Coors Amphitheatre in Colorado wasn’t only notable for Ozzy Osbourne’s post-show hospital visit–someone decided to make Static-X’s set more exciting by inciting “an absolutely ridiculous and shameful war of thrown items between the lawn-seat visitors and the reserved-seat visitors,” according to a blogger for MyFox Colorado who goes by the name of “SCRIBE2”:

It started with a few bottles and cups being tossed into the seats from the lawn. They were mostly ignored or met by glares. However, crowd-think set in and the casual provocations became a hail of detritus from above. The people in the seats responded as comes naturally: in kind. So began an unstated war of the classes.

My younger adult son, trying to ignore the first volleys of detritus while sitting in his seat took a partially-filled bottle of water, thankfully capless, right between the eyes and ended up with a (thank goodness) minor gash. Even as I tended to his wound, a rain of bottles and sod fell on and around me, most of it deflected by my six-foot-tall elder son’s skillful bat-and-catch. My daughter-in-law, a delicate petite, took a number of hits as well. It was infuriating and appalling.

The first impulse was to pitch back, to “give them a taste of their own medicine.” That proved to be the worst policy, as it a) returned weapons to a bunch of riled-up drunks to be chucked down again and b) brought us down to their level. Our group of four quickly abandoned the stupid reactionary response and took shelter as best we could against the dividing wall. We still found ourselves fending off short-fires from both directions, but it was better than had we remained at our center-section seats as the near-riot escalated.

One man who responded in some way or another after his girlfriend was beaned by a projectile while walking along the walkway was pounced on and pummeled by first one, then three drunk thugs as some “seat people” and his girlfriend tried to pull the attackers off him. The staffers in yellow shirts, seriously outnumbered and unequipped to deal with a volatile crowd, finally arrived. Thank goodness one of them was a powerfully-built trained military person. Otherwise, I doubt they’d have been able to break up the fight and an ugly scene would have turned morbid or spread like a germ. The victim was eventually wheeled off to the first aid area.

Even a wheelchair-bound attendee was not safe from the wickedness – a two-pound chunk of sod just missed his head.

Ah, class wars: They can erupt even when everyone pays the same amount of money–and that amount adds up to zero! (Or did this stop on the tour have some American Express gold circle setup, in a last-ditch effort for Sharon Osbourne to raise plane fare to London?)

Ozzfest Brawl Ridiculous, Shameful [MyFoxColorado, via Blabbermouth]