No Rock for You!

Aerosmith played a concert in Hawaii last night, but chances are, you weren’t invited. It was a private gig for Toyota, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary in Honolulu.  (The band was scheduled to perform for the hoi polloi on Maui on Wednesday, but that concert was canceled.)

The automaker paid the University of Hawaii half a million dollars to basically take over the lower half of the Manoa campus. Security was tight, and students and citizens alike were turned away at the gates. So apart from snaring an invite from Toyota, the only way to get a taste of Aerosmith (and equally rockin’ opener Stevie Nicks) was from the dormitories (or nearby bushes). Students gathered at windows and on rooftops for their own Aerosmith parties, making up for poor sound and worse-than-nosebleed seats with good company and good… beverages.

Today, most of the extravagant concert setup was already disassembled, and when classes resume tomorrow there’ll be almost no sign that rockstars graced the Manoa campus.

Apart from the missing speed bumps, that is.

Yes, one of the stranger requests the concert organizers made of the university was to remove several speed bumps from lower campus roads to ensure the smoothest possible ride for equipment, attendees, and undoubtedly sensitive celebrity backsides.