10 years ago today…

It’s one of those events that I will never forget. Sitting, transfixed to the TV, wondering how a Great White show was responsible for a fire at the “Station nightclub” in West Warwick, Rhode Island.  100 people lost their lives and over 200 were injured in a fire caused by the band’s pyrotechnic display.  I still remember the grief and shock on Jack Russell’s face as he pleaded for forgiveness to the local media.

I had just come home from a restaurant opening party that stretched into the early morning hours of February 20th.  My wife and I were passing in the kitchen as she was getting ready to leave for work.  I planted myself in front of CNN with a bowl of cereal in preparation for a bit of rest.  The continuing coverage shocked me, as I stood jaw agape at the description of the scene in Rhode Island that morning.  I don’t know why it hit me so hard, maybe it was the amount of time I had put into figuring out the hand gestures for “once bitten twice shy”, or the hours I would spend washing dishes at a local diner, with that cassette in my “boom-box” playing continually on auto-reverse.

Maybe it was when the verse…

“You didn’t know what rock-n-roll was
Until you met my drummer on a grey tour bus
I got there in the nick of time
Before he got his hands across your state line”

finally made sense.  So dirty… I want a guitar!

This is very serious, and I am so sorry for families that lost loved ones ones on that cold rainy morning 10 years ago.  That said, it was the first show for them in decades in which they could say they ‘killed’. (sorry had to).

 

~clutchfield