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65,000 people.

That’s over four times the amount of folks that lived in Mount Vernon, Ohio. And they were all clumped together in Mannheim, Germany in the fall of 1990 to scream and shout for us. (The Germans, that is, not the residents of Mount Vernon, Ohio.) At least I wanted to think so. We were the first band on a huge bill that boasted much larger names than us. I can guarantee that of all the bands, we were the most excited to be there.

It was the highlight of our summer tour, and we were to play this and another in London. A journalist had come over to Europe with us and she would be covering the week’s worth of festivities. It was a decent story angle: a rookie band in front of a whole lotta Germans.  Visions of parade grounds definitely goose-stepped through my head.

She sat on the stage during our show, which was to be 40 minutes long. It was almost a lot shorter, because the drum company that "supported" our drummist had "misplaced" his drums at an unknown airport. With an hour to show time, we scrambled to find another drum set. Anthony begged one of the headliners' techs for help. While he expressed regret at our situation, Chad said couldn’t pawn off his boss’ drums to us. That was really a blessing in disguise, because Tommy Aldridge’s kit looked like a decent sized drum store. This thing would have been gaudy for Spinal Tap. We would’ve been dwarfed by his percussion pyramid. With or without Stonehenge.

We trudged backstage from band to band, tent to tent, seeking help. Anthony is muttering bitterly because he’s the only one without gear, and the fact that he couldn’t borrow his hero’s set disrupted his chance in the candy store. Finally, we ask DIO's Simon Wright for help and as luck would have it, he’s a generous guy who just happens to be managed by our manager, Wendy Dio. Why didn’t we think of this first? Probably cause Ant was ambitious, and figured he at least deserved a shot at a mega-drum kit. Can’t blame him one bit. Simon lent us his kit, and there is much rejoicing backstage. Mostly from the other bands, because we stopped pestering them.

Now it's 15 minutes before the biggest show in our lives, and we have another problem. With the drum kit. It’s only a single bass set, which is half of Ant’s usual set. For a drummer who is of the twin bass drum variety, he’s just had half his livelihood amputated. For you non-drummers, imagine trying to walk on one leg. The band now has to rearrange it’s set around the lack of drumming apparatus. Again, panic.

So we called verbal rehearsal. That's right, verbal. No guitars, no drums, no singing. Panic creates strange solutions, yes?

We’ve played every song (sometimes on autopilot) in a pre-arranged order for months now, and we have a rhythm and timing that will now be disrupted. Kind of like trying to play a football game backwards, we draw up a new set that hopefully won’t confuse us. In front of 65,000 Germans (have I mentioned that?). To guys on the road, the set becomes like the ABC Drunk Test: you know it forwards, but if asked to recite it backwards, you’ll screw it up and be hauled off. And we weren’t even going to try and touch our noses and lean back.

After much arguing, we get the song order set, get dressed, emerge from our luxurious backstage lean-to, and almost sprint towards the stage. We were very eager. On the way, I saw Steven Tyler sitting in a chair conducting an interview. He stopped and yelled to Joey Kramer: "Joey! What was that Mercedes I was thinking of buying?" Joey yells back the model number, Steven gives him the ok sign, and the interview goes on. Erik Gamans looks at me and says:

"We really don’t have that problem, do we?"

Nope. But, we were ready to play in front of a crowd starved for music, and that would be plenty right now.

As we walked up the gangplank to the stage and shoulder our instruments, I nervously hoped that it would all go well. I remembered a story about one opening band that had the misfortune of supporting AC/DC in Germany. After the normal 1, 2, 3, 4 opening shout, the crowd took one look at the band, turned around and collectively gave them the middle finger for an entire 45-minute set. I was direly hoping we didn’t get that one-gun salute.

We got introduced in German, which none of us understood until we heard "KAHLD SVEET!" and realized it was time to go go go. This is where my friend the writer came in handy.

From her spot on the rigging, she was armed with my camera and her tape recorder. Her assignment was to get pictures of this huge career event, and get the sound of a medium sized city cheering. At least I hoped they cheered. I was trying to optimistic, and erase the mental image of many German backs, flipping me off.

They did cheer. After the first song was over, they went nuts. Lucky for us, they were ready to be entertained. Granted, we were a great band, but we lucked out. The whole mish-mashed set flow smoothly and we wound down to our last number, an eight minute version of Willie Dixon’s "I Just Wanna Make Love To You".

I'll wager it was the only song the crowd recognized, and they began singing along at the breaks that are unaccompanied, vocally. This is where the recorder was indispensable. It caught the loudest sound I ever heard in my life: All those people singing along with our band. It was ground shaking, and caused all of us to drop our rock-star cool, and smile like a bunch of goons. Or, smile like bunch of kids in a garage when they get a song right for the very first time.