The Medicine Show

Rock and Rollers never die --
they find Rock Med instead.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian
By Marcy Sheiner June 28 - July 4, 1995 page 22
It's 10 minutes before show time. Kids, feverish with excitement, roam the halls, bathrooms, and auditorium of Oakland's Kaiser Convention Center. Tucked away behind the backstage area, cornered off by yellow tape, a group of 30 volunteers ranging from their mid-20s to their late 50s transforms a dingy little room into a first-aid station. Kris Koering, like any host awaiting guests, prepares "table service" - glass jars filled with Tylenol, earplugs and bandages. With a colorful scarf holding back her hair, Leigh Davidson inventories the road boxes that hold blood-pressure cuffs, syringes, eye wash, and ice and heat packs.
Welcome to Rock Medicine, a program of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics that has been providing medical care at concerts throughout California since 1972.
A security guard for Bill Graham Pesents stops by for a briefing: Green Day, tonights band, has drawn a young crowd - some kids are as young as eight years old - who, lacking concert experience, are likely to become scared, dehydrated, or injured. Rock Med's "pit crew" - the guys who stand below the stage and pull distressed kids across the barriers - strategize tonight's battle plan.
Tom Taylor, who holds the record for most shows worked last year - 92 - calls a staff meeting. A tall, imposing figure in denim overalls, with long hair and a handlebar mustache, Taylor is a full-time emergency medical technician at Marin General Hospital. He runs down precautions for treating underage patients - basically, no invasive treatment such as prescription drugs or sutures without parental permission. He says there's a likelihood of head and neck injuries from moshing, the high-intensity slam-dancing the punk-pop crown goes in for.
No sooner has the crew received its orders than an outburst of applause rolls through the space like thunder, followed by the lightning twang of electric guitars. As if on cue, the bodies start piling in backstage.
Two paramedics wheel in a gurney carrying an unconscious girl who looks no more than 14. Then a gangly youth with green-streaked hair, drunk out of his mind and with blood gushing from an unidentified source, is dragged in by three equally drunk buddies. Another girl hobbles in, her face contorted by pain, clutching her left knee. A guy with a blond ponytail wants a Band-Aid. A couple asks for earplugs. A pudgy kid wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt comes in shaking, his eyes darting around like someone on an acid trip.
I'm flipped out, running from one seemingly dying child to another, stunned by the immediacy and scope of the disaster. But as I confer with the composed medics, I learn that the unconscious girl, who is now puking into a barf bucket, is simply drunk. The dripping blood is coming from a torn fingernail. The popped knee has been soothed by an Ace bandage. And the Sex Pistols kid just has a bad case of the flu.
'People overdo it'
Volunteers say they can predict the kinds of ailments they'll treat at any given venue by the type of music being played. With punk rock, there'll be accidents ranging from arm bruises to spinal-cord injuries to death; at country-and-western shows there'll be broken hands and jaws from fistfights; a recent Beastie Boys concert turned into a beerbottle bloodbath. With the Grateful Dead, whose shows were Rock Med's original raison d'etre and remain their most abiding passion, intense psychedelic reactions (IPRs), foot problems, and general health care are the order of the day.
"We're known as the Deadhead HMO," says Glen "Raz" Raswyck, Rock Med's director since 1980 and the only paid staff member. The dismal state of medical care, he says, has pushed the demand for the agency's services up tenfold: some concertgoers use Rock Med as their primary care physician.
"Nowadays kids cut loose at 18," Raswyck says. "They have no insurance. They can't afford to go to a doctor or hospital." A typical patient, he says, is a white, urban 16- to 21-year-old with walking pneumonia who comes to the Rock Med tent for free antibiotics. The group's philosophy, articulated by Dr. George "skip" Gay, is considered sacred text: "Take care of the individual now and return him to his friends or his family, and do away with the necessity of either hospitalizing him, or getting him involved with the law." Rock Med considers anyone who has to be "rolled" - sent by ambulance to a hospital - one of their failures.
Nonjudgementalism is the theory and almost always the practice: at a Rock Med station you'll hear no put down's of moshing or barefoot dancing; no moralizing about substances, be they beer , pot, or nitrous oxide; and, above all, no disdain for any type of music. "Rock Medicine happens," reads the group's manual, "because of the music, and may the music never stop."
Raswyck expands on this philosophy. "Rock and roll is by its nature an emotional form of entertainment," he says. It provides a release. This week it's moshing, next they'll do ballroom - that's just how it is. No one purposely goes to a concert to hurt or be hurt, but people overdo it. Horrible things do happen, but with security and medical care it can be OK."
As a Vietnam vet who underwent post-traumatic stress therapy, Raswyck feels that "it's an honor to serve these people, a way to get rid of the ghosts. I'm reinvesting in the karmic plane." He cherishes the memory of his friendship with Bill Graham, Rock Med's patron saint. Today Raz garners similar respect from the agency's rank and file: volunteers are frequently reminded that if their work isn't up to snuff, "Raz will hear about it."
Richard "Buster" Johnson, who loads and unloads supply trucks, wears a "Team Raz" button on a lanyard dripping with rock and roll symbols - a sea horse for Nirvana, a devil for the Stones. "If I don't do at least one show a week, I go through withdrawal," he says.
It was for a Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelinshow at Kezar Stadium circa 1972 that Bill Graham first asked the Haight Ashbury clinics to staff an emergency-medical-care tent; Bill Graham Presents has been Rock Med's primar contractorever since. Today about 150 shows a year are covered by volunteers drawn from a pool of 600 that includes doctors, nurses, EMTs, supply people, and other support staff, as well as an inevitable smattering of hangers-on. Volunteers vie for shifts; slots are filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Rock Med won't be accepting new volunteers, other than doctors and nurses, until at least 1996.
There are a number of reasons why folks clamor to work with Rock Med - for paramedic experience; to do something meaningful that's more interesting than stuffing envelopes; to attend concerts; or in the case of professionals, to providemedical care without the stress and conflict of charging people who can't afford it. Many volunteers go on to further medical training after joining up with Rock Med.
But the biggest attraction seems to be a sense of community. Volunteers refer to the group as family; some are even second generation. Kris Koering has been doing Rock Med for 18 years, and now her 21-year-old son has signed up. "We don't recruit volunteers," she says. "We just have babies."
'Medheads'
Anyone who's been to a Dead concert knows it's more than a musical event; it's a gathering of the faithful. Rock Med, with its long-haired staff and hang-loose philosophy, constitutes as much of a subculture as the Deadheads. "Medheads," like Deadheads, place bets on the playlist, speak Dead lingo, and refer to geographical areas by song titles such as "Shakedown Street."
Perhaps it's this affinity with the Dead culture that makes Rock Med so good at dealing with bad acid trips, or IPRs as volunteers call them. Tents furnished with mats and tie-dyed tapestries are provided for trippers, where they - or anyone suffering the effects of "crowd syndrome" - can find a quiet place to meditate, hallucinate, or as the manual puts it, "search for higher beings (Jerry)."
If needed, staff will "talk down" a tripper; sometimes restraints or even low doses of Ativan and Haldol are necessary. When a tripper returns from the stratosphere, they are presented with a lavendar handout telling them exactly what Rock Medicine has done, what kind of treatment they received, and recommended follow-up, if any.
Rock Med's expertise with trippers is widely acknowledged, and they've been asked to train medical and law-ewnforcement personnel in other states. Their skills were recently put to the test when a suicidal tripper climbed a tower and threatened to jump. While the Dead played on and the audience continued trance-dancing, Rock Med's Gordon Rupp, who is also a firefighter with San Jose's search and rescue team, climbed the tower. After a tense session, Rupp was able to tie a harness around the tripper and lower him to the ground.
When I visited the Rock Med station on the last day of the Dead's California tour, there were 23,000 people in the audience and 65 volunteers on hand to care for them. Skip Gay had predicted Rock Med would be flooded with IPRs, because the last show is traditionally a time when Deadheads pull out all the stops. But in fact the only bodies than came to rest inside the tent were victims of a flu that was circulating through the tour. (Because Deadheads follow the group from one show to another, anything contagous is apt to spread like wildfire.) Still, the station wasn't completely quiet: hundreds partook in the table service, particularly the Gatorade that wards off dehydration, and by the end of the show there had been more than 60 patients, with Dr. Gay sewing up three faces and one hand.
Moshers and boozers
At the Green Day show, watching the spectacle from the top row of Kaiser auditorium, I realize how easily paople can wind up at Rock Med from the mosh pit, where personal boundaries are eradicated as the audience becomes one amoebic creature, writhing and spitting am occasional body up toward the stage. Random circles of spinning bodies erupt like fractal images on a computer screen.
There is no way I could ever submit myself to such horror - but others obviously feel differently. After recovering, one asthmatic mosher who had to be passed over the barriers explains that for him moshing is a release. "I was really pissed when I got here, but I feel better now," he says. "It's like a gang war without the bad feelings. But you gotta be in good shape to do it."
While he sits in the Rock Med station breathing through an inhaler, three more of the injured arrive: a girl with a bruised arm; a hysterical 10-year-old who'd fallen down in the crowd; and a girl whose spine was encased in a precautionary brace.
As I watch the wounded come and go, I wonder how many concertgoers in need of medical care don't find their way to Rock Med because they don't know it exists. Several years ago when I took my son to see his idol, Kenny Loggins, I was stung by a bee. I spent the entire concert with my finger in a cup of ice I kept replenishing - for a fee - at the snack bar. Had I known about Rock Med, I could have gotten all manner of bee-sting remedies - not to mention a complete checkup: at a concert like Kenny Loggins, Rock Med staff welcome such diversions.
"We go to those shows - Barry Manilow, Amy Grant - but we don't have much to do," Dr. Gay says. "We did have one incident at a Neil Diamond concert - a cop fell on his tailbone."
Ah, but things are not so benign among the Green Day moshers and boozers, still staggering into the station even as the music winds down. I wonder what will become of these kids - the drunk, the wounded, and the frightened. Will they stay overnight? Require hospitalization?
But just as the first guitar riff brings in the first wave of patients, so the final chord delivers a signal. The crying girl's father arrives, and the two go off singing arm in arm. The girl in the brace is pronounced free of injury, and she wanders off in search of a missing sneaker. And the handful who've spent the entire concert throwing up or sleeping it off all get up and go home.

The Medicine Show

Rock and Rollers never die -- they find Rock Med instead.

Rock and Rollers never die --
they find Rock Med instead.