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Chesney show brings loutishness to Pittsburgh

3 min read
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Let’s toy with hypotheticals for a second.

Imagine if, almost every year, a concert happened at Heinz Field on a hot, summer Saturday that’s known for its unruly fans who leave behind mountains of trash and who consume copious amounts of alcohol, tie up police and emergency crews and make people who are not interested in partaking of the revelry think twice about whether they want to venture into Pittsburgh that day.

Imagine that the musician headlining this concert was, say, Snoop Dogg, and the concertgoers were predominantly African American. It’s easy to envision scorching indignation coming from residents around the region, calls for the concert to be banned and laws to be rewritten. Almost certainly, someone would claim the melee was President Obama’s fault.

But when the headliner is Kenny Chesney and his fans are overwhelmingly white, it all seems to be shrugged off as the cost of doing business.

Double standards aside, perceptions seem mixed on how the proceedings played out Saturday, when Chesney, Miranda Lambert and other country artists made their annual stop at Heinz Field. Previous years yielded scores of arrests and hospitalizations and, perhaps most embarrassingly, heaps of garbage that took hours to clean up and left Pittsburgh with a black eye. How could the region’s country fans behave in a way so completely boorish and demonstrate so little regard for the people who would have to clean up after them?

Pittsburgh officials said things went better this year. Visibly intoxicated ticketholders were turned away, free trash bags were distributed and 200 portable toilets were in place. Guy Costa, Pittsburgh’s chief operations officer, told the Associated Press that “major, major improvements” were made.

However, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported one police officer was injured while trying to break up a fight, and it painted a less than sunny picture of the concert’s aftermath.

“As the concert let out around 10:30 p.m. and cars began to clear from the parking lots, a reeking, hulking mass of garbage leftover from the day’s earlier festivities began to appear behind the exodus of country music fans.

“Pickup trucks crunched glass bottles underneath tires; fluid from port-a-potties overflowed into the street; people covered their noses with their shirts to escape the stench.”

A woman from Virginia Beach, Va., who attended 20 other Chesney concerts in other cities told the Post-Gazette she had “never seen this amount of trash, ever. What are we, savages?”

A companion remarked, “I feel bad for the city. I’m ashamed that people come to that.”

It’s worth noting a Billy Joel concert happened at nearby PNC Park the night before, and came off without any major incidents.

Granted, the 67-year-old Joel has a following that skews more toward the relaxed-fit jeans demographic, and comfortable, well-worn ballads like “Piano Man” or “Just the Way You Are” are unlikely to spark large-scale disorder. But at least Joel fans don’t seem to view scattering garbage hither and yon and behaving like louts as being necessary components of the event. Chesney’s fans should take note.

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