Stampede

On December 3, 1979 The Who played a sold-out concert at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. Most of the seats were unassigned so ticket-goers waited at the doors, hoping to race each other to the front of the stage. 

“We didn’t call it festival seating,” says a Riverfront Coliseum employee. “We called it animal seating, because when they came in, they came in like a herd of cattle”.

By 7 PM, 7,000 fans were waiting outside the doors. The crowd swayed like palm trees. Sometimes violently as rumors that the band had already started spread through the crowd. There were already people whose feet weren't touching the ground. At 7:05 PM four doors were opened and the crowd moved like a tsunami. Eleven people lost their lives.

Phil Sheridan described the scene to  Rolling Stone .

I could see people smashed up against the doors that weren’t open. I had ahold of my girlfriend and my buddy grabbed me by the shoulders and I took him by the hand and we started to make our way through the turnstiles. Well, in that ten or fifteen seconds it took us to get our act together, we were now inside between the doors and the turnstiles and the door was a frenzy and they’re still trying to take tickets! God, it was insane! I was three abreast in this goddamn turnstile, which was only eighteen inches wide! People were getting hurled in and shoved through the turnstiles and the ticket takers were still saying, ‘Hey, where’s your ticket?’ 

Mark Helkemp says it all happened too slowly to be a stampede:

I was stuck in it for forty-five minutes. I went down twice and wasn’t sure that I would make it. I saw guys with blue lips – they couldn’t get oxygen. I saw, I think, four ticket takers after I walked over all the shoes to get in. I couldn’t keep my feet on the ground the whole time. I kept my arms in front of my chest to keep from getting crushed. People were climbing up on other people’s shoulders. Some people went berserk and started swinging their elbows. That was the only blood. There was no group panic. After I saw the dead people, it sunk in. Dead. Just dead. It pissed me off to see Uncle Walter Cronkite blaming us for this.

Sheridan went back outside after the concert has started:

It was still crazy. It was crazier between the outside doors and the turnstiles than it was outside, cause by then people were really going for broke. I found my friend Bill and he said he saw people going over the tops of the doors, he saw bodies piled in front of the door, and people were going over them and around them any way they could. At about nine, I saw more waves of people. I looked outside and saw what must have been thousands of dollars’ worth of personal articles strewn everywhere, these terrible piles of shoes, shoes trapped in that chain-link fencing behind the turnstiles. I wonder about the kinds of injuries that weren’t reported.

Festival seating has not been outlawed. Acts as respected as Bruce Springsteen and U2 have recently sold first come, first-seated tickets. Tonight WCPO-TV will air a special bout the concert featuring interviews with survivors, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend who says he is still traumatized by what happened.