Can you share any "backstage pass" experiences you have had at concerts?
07.06.2025 05:38
Yes, back in the 80s my friend Steve and I used to go to pretty much every heavy metal and rock show in Los Angeles and Orange County. We’d even drive down to San Diego or Riverside, to see the same bands multiple nights in a row if it was a band we really liked.
Lita was in her dressing room prepping to go onstage, so she was absent from the backstage barbecue. Chris Holmes was backstage and friendly, social and genuinely enthusiastic about music. While chatting with him, I noticed he had a temporary, single-day pass on, so I asked him why he had a cloth, peel off one, as opposed to a permanent laminated pass. (His soon to be wife was one of the headliners dadgummit!)
I figured she was just being polite and would soon walk away, but we had a great conversation, peppered with humor and flirting and seemed to genuinely click. I noticed a rocker dude pacing back and forth behind us, looking agitated. I leaned in to Lita and asked in her ear, “Do know who that guy is behind us. He keeps giving us dirty looks.” She said, “Oh, that’s my boyfriend, don’t worry about him. I’m ready to break up with him anyway.” (I didn’t know who he was, but apparently he was the drummer for some band called Witch.)
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Lita and Chris ended up getting engaged and later married. As a consolation prize, Tawn wanted to set me up with another friend of hers, insisting her friend would love me. Tawn proceeded to say her other friend was Stevie Nicks, from Fleetwood Mac, who was single, while insisting I was totally Stevie’s type. I never met Stevie, but every time I saw Tawn after that she reminded/teased me about it.
I was acquaintance/friends with Tawn Mastrey, a DJ for the local heavy metal station KNAC and I knew she was good friends with Lita, so at the next KNAC function a couple of months later, I explained what happened and why couldn’t find Sam’s party. Tawn said Lita and Punky, (the drummer for Witch) broke up and said I definitely made an impression on Lita, saying Lita wanted to to see me again, but unfortunately she just started dating Chris Holmes, the guitarist for W.A.S.P. However, Tawn assured me it wouldn’t last and as soon as Lita was single, she’d make it happen.
Through the crowd I saw Chris, Lita and an older lady with them named Lisa, who it turns out was Lita’s mother. Lisa was so incredibly nice and proud of her daughter. Chris seemed irritated by something. Not friendly at all, (at least not as friendly as he’d been four months earlier at the Yngwie concert in Irvine). Lita was nice and seemed tickled that I was having a nice conversation with her mom, but if she remembered me as the guy from a year and a half before from Alice Cooper, I have no idea. She gave no indication, so perhaps I was just a blip in the backstage life of a rockstar. She was sweet and asked me to get a picture with her and her mom. Chris Holmes is also in the picture, at 6’7”, he’s looming behind us like Death’s angrier cousin. (I’m the dork with the short dark hair, looking more like the Karate Kid than Nikki Sixx. My hair was short for the hair metal scene, or so my friends often gave me shit for.)
In the early 1990s the music scene switched, seemingly overnight to grunge, like changing the channel on a television. I started dating a school teacher from Bishop, California, moved away from Huntington Beach and never saw Lita again. Just as well, Chris was a giant and probably would have placed me into the category of the guy who stole his backstage pass.
He told me at a previous concert he was walking through the crowd when a fan stole his lanyard pass by tearing it off his neck, and how he chased the guy down into the bathroom, intending to rip his arms off, but in his blind rage he grabbed the wrong guy instead. As Chris was telling me how he almost ended an innocent concert goer, I realized it wouldn’t be the wisest time to jokingly remind Lita of our missed opportunity.
It was the final night of Alice Cooper’s ‘Constrictor’ world tour, and being in Los Angeles in 1987, was the world epicenter of rock and heavy metal. Everyone who was anyone was backstage. For a dorky metal fan like me, it was like going to heaven.
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I walked up to the bar and Lita Ford was grabbing a drink next to me. I tried to be casual and nonchalant, and she was incredibly nice and engaging. Keep in mind, this was when she was extremely beautiful and the same year she recorded her duet with Ozzy.
Famous rock stars wandering around eating, drinking and chatting, free food and an open bar, with a long cake that looked like a 15 foot python, reflecting Alice Cooper’s style at that time.
As we were leaving, but still in the lobby of the arena, a guy with a briefcase walked up to my ex-girlfriend’s sister Lanya and started chatting with her. At that time the girls attending rock shows all looked pretty similar, wild manes of vertically sprayed Aquanet hair, skin-tight jeans or spandex pants and looking like cloned extras in a Twisted Sister video. Lanya didn’t look like that. She was more into Adam Ant, Prince etc. and only joined us for something to do, not because she was into the music. She had short hair, was in her late teens and looked more like a new wave model from a Paris fashion show than a Ratt or Mötley Crüe groupy. As such, Lanya stood out like sore thumb. Which is why the guy with the briefcase was instantly enamored with her. (I think the guy said he was Megadeth’s manager.) He enthusiastically chatted her up and offered her a backstage pass. Lanya was indifferent and said only if her friends could come. He promptly opened his briefcase and handed each of us backstage passes.
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During the concerts from 1984 to 1987, going backstage seemed like an impossible destination. We saw the backstage doors, and wished we could enter, but it was impossible, so we thought.
I kept replaying the address in my mind, so I’d remember it. As the backstage party ended, we left and made our way up the 405 freeway to Los Angeles and stopped at a gas station off Sunset Boulevard, so I could buy a street map and find the party. We drove around the winding streets of Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills for hours, desperately trying to remember and find the correct address. Eventually we gave up and drove home.
Dave Mustaine, the singer for Megadeth was soft spoken, polite and articulate. Not at all what I was expecting from seeing him onstage earlier that night, growling out songs of doom and gloom apocalypse. I mentioned I lived in Huntington Beach and he said he used to live there and reminisced about his favorite spots in HB, talked about art and such, but with a humble, in depth awareness of a sommelier. Again, not at all what I was expecting from his persona.
In March of 1987, a group of us attended a concert at Long Beach Arena, Alice Cooper and a then up and coming band called Megadeth. It was the final night of Alice Cooper’s world tour, and a phenomenal show.
I went to many, many of concerts in the 1980s, and backstage to a more than a few, I had no idea at the time just how important that time and place truly was in the history of metal and rock. I was just a knucklehead who liked going to concerts. My friend Steve and a group of rocker friends also used to see bands at the Roxy, The Troubadour, The Rainbow and a bunch of places in the San Fernando Valley, Orange County and such. We saw one up and coming band as they broke up and joined other bands, eventually becoming Guns ‘N Roses. We used to see them multiple nights, across numerous counties, several in a row in back to back shows. Unlike most rocker shows at that time, where the singer basically repeated the same corny jokes and shtick for the whole tour, only changing the town and venue details, the Guns shows were completely different, depending on Axel’s mood. They were truly original and one of a kind. Cameras were not allowed at any shows, but I sometimes snuck one in, (behind my jeans and belt buckle, which was not easy with the 80’s skin tight look.) I have some phenomenal pics of Axel, Slash and Duff when they played at a college in San Diego. This was before Axel started jumping into the crowd to pummel unsanctioned photographers.
In September of 1988, I went to an Aerosmith concert at the Pacific amphitheater in Costa Mesa. (Their opening act was a then up-and-coming band called Guns ‘N Roses.) Backstage a hot girl was giving out free banana daiquiris, but they were weak and I wanted to get a quick buz, so I guzzled several, one after another, promptly getting a severe ice-cream-headache. I complained to the girl making them that they needed more rum in the mix and she proudly exclaimed, “Oh, these are virgin drinks. The boys are clean and sober so we don’t have any alcohol backstage!” Ugh.
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At one point my friend Steve, (who I attended all the rocker shows with), came up to me, drunk on the free booze, with wide eyes and an ear to ear grin and yelled out, “This is fucking amazing! I can’t believe we’re here! And you’re picking up on Lita Ford, and she digs you!” Steve said this loudly, and Lita heard it, but she just gave me a mischievous smile as if to say, “Yep, he’s not lying.” Embarrassed, I gave Steve a look like, “Dude, what the fuck, stop being a goofball.” A manager type person told Lita that Sam Kinison, (a popular comedian at the time), was having an after party and Lita and some of the famous guests were invited. While he gave her the address in Beverly Hills, Lita leaned over, gripped my arm and said, “You’re coming aren’t you?” I confidently said, “Yes, of course,” when in reality I was not invited, and was afraid at any moment someone would say, “Who are these dorks and how did they get backstage?” I was sure I memorized the address to Sam’s party and as she was pulled away by her entourage she said, “You’re coming right? I’ll see you there.” I wasn’t sure if she actually liked me, but I was smitten.
After the Alice Cooper show, I learned it was relatively easy to get backstage. Once I understood the dynamics of who was issued passes, I went backstage to numerous shows. In May of 1988 I went to the KNAC pre-concert backstage barbecue for Yngwie Malmsteen with Lita Ford and Black and Blue opening for him.