Are Punk And Metal The Most Dangerous Concerts? Science Says "Well, Yeah. Duh."
Pondering a question raised by a sore back suffered by an aging punk fan at a Bad Religion gig
Bad Religion’s Greg Gaffin. Photo: Adam Kovac
My first time in a circle pit, I was 15 years old.
Some friends and I had gone to see legendary (in our minds) Montreal ska band The Planet Smashers. It was during their finale, Sk8 Or Die, that I found myself in the middle of the swirling vortex of bodies. As the band sang about attempting a skateboard jump off a roof, my lanky, underweight teenage body fell to the floor.
You ever find yourself in mortal danger and realize you’re entirely calm? I still remember being totally lucid and thinking to myself “This is it. This is how I die.”
I was told later that one of my friends, witnessing my tumble, turned the other and just said “Welp. Kovac’s dead.”
Luckily, there are rules in a pit and the big one is, if someone falls, you pick them back up. As feet stomped all around me, I felt very large hands dig into my armpits, hoist me up and toss me out of danger. I have no idea who saved me but if you’re reading this, you have my everloving thanks.
In the 20+ years since then, I’ve seen more than my fair share of punk and metal bands. There’s been plenty of bumps and bruises, the most embarrassing of which came a few years ago at Quebec’s Rockfest. Hopped up on liquid courage and well into my 30s, I decided I was going to show the young kids moshing to Sum 41 that this old fart could still throw down. I ran in and immediately got close lined across the chest. My foot flew into the air, my back crunched into the ground and some of my friends came dangerously close to peeing in their shorts from laughter.
These stories came to mind last week when I had the chance to catch two legendary punk rock bands, Social Distortion and Bad Religion. As I looked around Pier 17, it struck me how many gray beards and receding hairlines were around. Even as Bad Religion played, the pit (which I avoided, despite enjoying several of the $20 beers on offer at the concession stand) was small and abnormally gentle. For aging punks, the spirit is still willing but the body is wracked by bad knees and sore backs. The music is still vital, even as the band members approach or surpass retirement age, but there’s only so much punishment the audience is willing to take.
Which got me wondering - while metal and punk have reputations for danger, are they really the most dangerous concerts?
Unfortunately, death and live music have intersected many times, sometimes in places you’d least expect. For years, Pearl Jam refused to play venues with no seats after nine people died at a European festival they played in 2000. People have died at all kinds of rock concerts, from The Stones’ tragic appearance at Altamont to a dozen fatalities at a The Who show. I’m not even gonna go into the insanity around the Great White fire in 2003.
But rock and metal are not the only genre that’s seen fatalities. In recent memory, there was the Travis Scott fiasco. Someone has even died at a Taylor Swift concert.
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of actual study of concert safety, but I was able to find a new nuggets in the literature. And sad to say for me and all the other people who adore guitars and cookie monster vocals (for those who aren’t familiar, they’re exactly what they sound like) but it does appear there is evidence that heavy music is worse for your health than other genres, at least when it comes to concert safety.
A survey of eight concerts found that as many as 20 concert goers out of 10,000 suffered injuries so severe in mosh pits that they had to get transported to hospital while over four times that many needed some degree of on-site first aid and injuries to the head were the most common types of booboos. Since mosh pits don’t really happen at other kinds of music events, this is a threat that only metalheads and punks need to face when they lace up their Doc Martens and head out to a gig.
While I couldn’t find any case studies from pop concerts, there was at least one incident involving a metalhead that left some poor doctor shaking their head, muttering to his colleagues “You wouldn’t believe the shit I saw today” and deciding to document it for posterity. In an article from 2014, doctors wrote of a 50-year-old man who complained of two weeks worth of headaches following a Motorhead concert. A CT scan showed he had suffered a subdural hematoma - basically, he had headbanged so hard he burst a vein between his skull and his brain (which, to be fair, is metal as fuck).
Even your teeth aren’t safe: a study out of Switzerland found metal and punk concertgoers were around twice and four times, respectively, more likely to suffer a dental injury at a show than a pop fan.
Exacerbating the riskiness of metal concerts is that according to one survey, fans of metal are the least likely of any genre to visit a doctor. Then there’s the rather ominous mention in one 2009 study which I couldn’t even access an abstract for that alluded to “mosh pit breast” as a possible threat (rest assured, I’ve reached out to the author of the study to see if I can get some more details and will update this article if I hear back).
Neil Young once said that rock and roll will never die. Judging from the number of people who came out to see Bad Religion on a Wednesday night, he’s probably right. I just can’t say the same is true for my willingness to take part in a circle pit (a phenomenon, by the way, that has garnered the attention of physicists who defined it as a “ordered vortexlike state.”)