Unbelievable

Sit back, my children, and hear a tale of a time long forgotten, a time so far in the past that parts of my story may seem unbelievable to you, but I assure you that every word is true.

In the autumn of 1981, my friends and I went to see the Rolling Stones play the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. We left when the movie theater where we worked closed at midnight and went to "camp out" on the lawn because there were no assigned seats and we wanted to be there early before the crowds the next day. This was gonna be huge, with 100,000 people or so.

After a night of no sleep because the dudes next to us kept playing frisbee and stepping on our heads as well as blasting a continuous loop of Yes on a cassette tape out of a first-generation boom box, we staggered into the stadium at about 10 o'clock in the morning.

We tried to doze in our seats as people around us smoked vast quantities of pot, but we were too excited to sleep very much.

We weren't just looking forward to the Rolling Stones. There were three other acts in an all-day stadium blowout: the J. Geils Band, George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and some other guy we had never heard of.

About 2 pm, the first act took the stage. As die-hard rock and rollers, we couldn't believe our eyes. This tiny little man wearing satin panties and a cape - and nothing else - came out.

He began to perform. It was music unlike anything we had ever heard before. We didn't know WHAT it was, but it sure as hell was NOT rock and roll.

He sang a couple songs and people booed and the crowd began roiling restlessly and unhappily. Then he busted it out. The tiny little mostly-naked man began to defiantly sing a song whose main lyric was "I'll jack you off."

"Faggot!!" people screamed. They threw anything they could get their hands on - bottles, rocks, and, I remember, frisbees full of dirt.

It was over as suddenly as it had started. The little man left the stage and the crowd cheered, happy to have run him off, not thinking that he was perhaps only scheduled to play a four-song set.

Everyone was saying "Can you believe that guy? What a loser! What were the Rolling Stones THINKING having that guy open for them" and talking about how hard J. Geils was going to rock, moving on and trying to forget the performance by the little man in the panties, a man who called himself "Prince."