The Coheed and Cambria concert started peacefully. A small mosh pit began to gather as their songs rose in intensity. Suddenly the mosh pit inflated with a mess of rolling and tumbling bodies.

I watched as it subsumed each row standing before me. I could not tell if more people piled into the pit or if the pushers got pushier. Gradually row after row felt and I found myself pinned right up against the semi-sentient collective known as “the mosh pit.” I could feel the furious pulsation of a crowd who acquiesced into a formless mass united in their burning desire to play bumper cars sans car. So there I stand, forming up my trifling 125 pounds against a violently vibrating conglomerate of sweat-drenched drunks.

Determined to hold my slot of that consecrated concert ground that grants you vision of all of the band members, I shoved back a few straying strands into the frayed yarn bouncing about beneath the band. My melodrama might go mistaken for hatred, but a part of me liked standing down the expanding swarm of personal space-invaders. It helped that I never felt alone.

I was a brick cemented into a wall encasing the pit. We were far from Thermopylae, but I felt quite Spartan when formed up in phalanx, working in concert with people behind and next to me. Had I attended the show alone, I might have moshed a bit myself. Even alone though, I would rather give my attention to the band than to a raucous crowd.

I get the point of a mosh point. A long week can ball your body into a fist. So who does not occasionally feel like roughhousing a gaggle of strangers to the tune of a band they love? But the folks that want to mosh make it pretty hard for the folks that want to just sit back and listen to the music to get near the band. Everybody should get to listen to music and enjoy it how they please, but what about when that form of amusement shuts off a whole section of a venue?

Moshing is practically a cultural institution and perfectly fine in open areas, but when you are crammed into the 9:30 Club, it sucks to know that you cannot stand near the stage without having to elbow a guy in the chest and fight to keep your shoes from getting stolen. It didn’t help that I did not expect to see a large pit at a Coheed concert. Coheed does not have a “metal band‰” sort of following. Coheed and Cambria did not start as, or become, a metal band. The mosh pit at the first Coheed concert I attended only formed for “Welcome Home‰” and consisted of about 10 people, hardly creating an abyss of uncoordinated flailing around the stage.

Coheed and Cambria came to the fruition off the back of a nerdy and less aggressive fanbase. Coheed and Cambria marketed to people who loved science fiction, progressive rock and the kind of ridiculously complex storylines and guitar riffs they wove. Like most progressive rock bands that go anywhere, their ability to create zealots who bought every comic book and saw every nearby show sent them sailing towards greener pastures.

So, in the case of a band that did not make moshing its tradition, how obligated are any of us to tolerate the irritations wrought of the pit? If you go to see Slayer, you should expect an active mosh pit, but not as much from Coheed. By the time I understood how voracious the fully formed pit would get, I could not move backwards through the phalanx or forward through the abyss. The situation born from my ignorance carries exceptional qualities, but it raises a larger general question we must all answer! What role should the pit take on? Should we discourage, encourage or just expect it?

As a metal-head friend of mine once said, “Moshing is great, but some people mosh for the whole show. That‰’s silly. There‰’s a band on stage, listen to them.‰Û

Just standing at the edge of the pit drained away my concentration. Talking with fans afterwards and seeing the deeply unhappy looks on the faces of 9:30 staffers tasked to help contain the throng of aggressively writhing bodies, moshing at such a crowded indoor venue seemed outright rude. Contrasting that with all the people happily slamming into each other, it does not seem as though there‰’s an outright answer to the problems raised by a mosh pit, just the hope that next time the large, hairy guy in the audience does not get enough sloshed courage to throw his shirt off and get involved.