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But we needed two.”Īccording to one eyewitness who was onstage, it was hard for anyone, including the band, to see what was happening in the pit, other than the usual exuberant tumult. “There were some girls,” he says, “and they were extremely difficult to pull up. In Praise of Oasis' 'Be Here Now,' A Flop To Rememberīut as Pearl Jam continued to play, Johansen noticed that something was wrong. The Roskilde Festival – one of Europe’s most popular summer concert events, held for the past twenty-nine years in the small farming community of Roskilde, twenty-five miles west of Copenhagen – had become the scene of one of the worst concert-related death tolls in rock history, just two short of the tragic stampede at the Who concert at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum in December 1979. A ninth man died in a hospital five days later. Eight young men, ages seventeen to twenty-six, suffocated to death in the mosh pit as Pearl Jam performed. Within an hour, the area directly in front of Johansen had turned into a rock & roll hell. “We’d had that crowd before,” he notes, “and there was no problem.” But not dangerous.” Johansen, 37, had done security at Roskilde for the past ten years.
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The size of the audience, Johansen says now, was “nothing special. A volunteer security guard at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival, Johansen took up his assigned position in the narrow pit between the crowd barrier and the Orange Stage, the largest of the festival’s seven performance areas, and looked out at the approximately 50,000 fans waiting to see Pearl Jam. On Friday, June 30th, at 10:15 P.M., Per Johansen reported for duty.