Kiss, me, and the beer tent from Hell

That time I volunteered to be drenched in cheap beer

For no particular reason I’m posting a few pieces I wrote a few years back. In short, they’re some of the pieces that I had the most fun writing, such as this first-person account of the time I volunteered to work in a beer tent at Ottawa Bluesfest, which is Canada’s biggest annual music festival, on the night that Kiss played the main stage.

“Which beer tent do you want to work in?” they asked me.

“The beer tent closest to the main stage,” I replied, not knowing any better.

Suffice to say that when I got home after the show I stepped straight into the shower, beer-soaked clothes still on.

It was July 15, 2009.

32,000 fans

136 decibels.

By Peter Simpson

Can you smell me?

No, and a good thing too. I reek of beer. I feel like tiny cups of beer have been poured into each of my pores. I squelch, squelch, squelch when I walk. And this after one shift in the beer tent at Bluesfest – though it was during the Kiss concert on Wednesday, which may have been the biggest, booziest thing to ever roll over Bluesfest.

Spend a couple of hours in the beer tent at the main stage and you see this as a city of insatiable beer swillers. It’s like the Niagara River of beer flowing over the precipice into the gaping maw of Ottawa, which stops singing between “I wanna rock and roll all nite” and “Shout it, shout it, shout it out loud” just long enough to gulp another brewski.

Or two. Nobody battles through that crowd for one beer, at least not to “Parkway 1,” the main beer tent on the south side, closest to the main stage. With a mass of Kiss fans inexorably pushing back and to the sides of the field, there’s no room for line-ups, so even getting to the beer counter is an expedition, the kind of thing you plan and chart with maps and ropes and a sextant. Why do you go to the beer tent, they asked Sir Edmund Hillary? Because it is there, he replied.

It’s almost as crazy inside the tent. It’s loud, fast, chaotic, crowded and at times slippery. I’m astonished that in four hours of slinging hundreds of beers, I didn’t spill one. Well, not a whole one. A little always sloshes out of the cup as they’re whipped from one table to the other, just enough to get on your hands and arms and legs and hair and clothes, but not enough to yell “spillage!” while chugging the dregs.

Yelling is essential when you’re 400 feet from Kiss, or 300 feet from Gene Simmons’ tongue. Customers yell orders – “Two Canadian! Two Coors Light! Two Rickard’s Red, one Mike’s Hard Lemonade!” Cashiers yell to servers, who yell to runners, who yell to pourers, who yell to the guys in the truck behind the tent whenever a keg is empty. Which is frequently.

Bluesfest can go through 150 kegs on a good night, which I’m told is about 45,000 beers – and that’s not including the cases of cans Creemore lager and Mike’s Hard Lemonade and cups of wine. The empty kegs line up out back like the Great Wall of Beer. You can see them from the space shuttle.

(Here’s a fact: During Great Big Sea's show last year, with thousands of ex-pat Maritimers on site, the beer tents went through 180 kegs. Take that, Kiss.)

This is how it works, in brief, frantic detail: The truck behind the tent is full of kegs, which feed taps on the outside panel of the truck, where pourers fill cup after cup without turning off the taps. I take a shift and feel like I’m protecting the city from a dyke that’ll burst if I miss one drop from that tap. It’s relentless. You can’t drink any. It’s oppressive.

The instant the pourer puts down a beer it’s grabbed by a runner, who moves it to a long table in the middle of the tent that is divided into areas for the various drinks. The routine could be stultifying – grab two beers, spin around, take two steps, put beers on table, repeat ad nauseam – except that you have to stay alert and watch the other runners who constantly cross your path, taking beers to wherever they’re needed most.

On the other side of the central table are the servers, who are assigned one-on-one with the cashiers, who stand at the front table across from the customers. Customers bark their orders to cashiers who relay them to the servers, who turn around, grab the requested number and combination of cups from the central table, spin again and lean around the cashiers to put them in front of the customer. Being a server is even more chaotic than being a runner, because also in the mix at the front table are omniscient managers, burly security guys who pull various people out of the crowd for various reasons, and skimmers – who come by to remove cash from the floats and temporarily stop everything.

At times it’s so crowded that I can’t find a way through to serve customers. That’s why a server needs “the nod,” that almost imperceptible tilt of the head to whichever customer seems most likely to be the next out of the crowd. The customer, pushing and squeezing like a baby walrus struggling to be born, yells . . . something. Maybe it’s an order, but maybe not so you lean closer. “It’s like a war zone out there,” says one bedraggled guy. Another chap pops out of the writhing mass and says, “I hate crowds.” Buddy, welcome to Hell.

Or Heaven, depending on your perspective. One woman is asked for an ID. “I’m 25 years older than you,” she protests to the young cashier, though she’s thrilled at the implication. You can tell by the glow in the Ivory girl complexion she now thinks she has.

I can’t understand at all what one portly 40-ish gent is saying, but I’m thinking that the Kiss shirt he’s wearing fit better when he bought it 20 years ago. A better fit is found on a rather randy young woman in a tiny bikini top who leans over the table to search for her ID. Well, ahem, I can tell you where it isn’t. Bikini woman returns later and stumbles. A cashier asks me if she should serve her another beer. I want to say, “Darlin’, if you’re asking me I say you should give her a whole damned keg,” but it comes out as, “I think you should ask somebody who really works here.”

Another repeat customer is wearing a T-shirt that shows Curious George smoking a doobie. “You look like Harry Potter,” he says to me and my round frames, his buddy and him sharing a suspiciously hearty laugh. Yes, and we’ll see if you get anything from my magic keg. Ha. Ha.

The customers are unfailingly polite, unless they’re cut off. One young buck – the kind with trouble written on his expansive forehead – gets refused. He insists he’s not drunk, then stands back and gives the 300-pound security guy the finger. Both hands. I wait for the bouncer to fly over the table, but he shakes his head sadly and turns away.

Another guy is cut off but I don’t know it, so I hand him two Canadians. To see his look of pure joy melt into despair as the security guard steered me away was heart-breaking, like a TV ad for starving children.

It was late, by then, and as they shut it down I had serious respect for volunteers in the beer tent, who work for nothing but satisfaction and the beer they can squeeze out of their damp clothes when they get home.

Here’s the other thing I learned: don’t wear Kiss make-up in the rain. By 11 p.m., the place was looking like a sad-clown convention.

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