The Jerry Pompili Interview

"Rock Medicine"Bill had this amazing ability to pick people. As long as I knew him he always chose people for specific things they were able to do.He would always say, "don't ever think we're in show business. We're not in show business, we're in the business of public assembly. We put asses into seats, and we do it better than anybody."I was really good at dealing with people, especially crowds. I also had this ability to anticipate problems before they arose. I had a good "shit hit the fan"' mentality too. We were doing a whole bunch of shows in the 70's at Winterland which held a little over 5,000 people. We always had problems at the shows with drugs and alcohol. It was a finite number of problems and depended on the kind of show you had. The heavier the show the more problems you tended to have. Every once and awhile we would do a show at The Cow Palace. The Cow Palace was three times the size of Winterland, but the funny think I noticed almost from the start, was that we didn't have three times the number of problems. We had nine times the number of problems. It became a geometric progression with medical type problems. Bill booked this show at Kezar Stadium with Led Zeppelin in 1973. This capacity was 50,000. I'm running the numbers in my head and I'm thinking, "oh shit, this could be a really big problem."I went into Bill's office. Usually when I went into Bill with an idea the first thing he would say is "how much will it cost," unless it involved the safety of the audience.I went into him and gave him all these numbers and said, "what can we do?" He picked up the phone and called Dave Smith at The Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic and says, "I'm going to send my guy over to you to explain what we need." He never asked me how much it would cost. David Smith asked two of his doctors, Skip Gay and Darryl Inaba, and they put together the whole "rock medicine thing." Setting up places to handle medical type problems that arise at shows, people freaking out, nodding out, or overdosing or drunk and throwing up. Prior to rock medicine, when there was a situation, it was either call an ambulance or call the cops. If it was just someone freaking out, take three or four of the staff and just sit on him.I'm just the guy who came up with the idea, that's the anticipation thing."