Everybody wants ta get inta da act!
—Jimmy Durante
IN THE 2007 IRISH MUSICAL film Once, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová portrayed two struggling musicians in Dublin, Ireland. Their characters wrote and performed songs that told the story of their romance. The pair, who performed in real life as the Swell Season, also composed the film’s score, including a number titled “Falling Slowly” that won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Original Song. So it was somewhat ironic when, on August 19, 2010, their concert was stopped by someone who fell very quickly onto their stage.
The duo and their backing band were playing an outdoor show at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California. The twenty-two-hundred-seat amphitheater is perched high on a mountain with views across the Santa Clara Valley and is built around the facade of the original winery. The winery building is the backdrop to the stage.
It was a perfect setting for the duo’s intimate, romantic folk pop, and many of the nineteen hundred people in the audience recalled the night as “magical”—magical, that is, until it turned into a horror show.
Shortly after 10:00 PM, the group took an intermission of sorts. Most of the musicians left the stage to the fiddler player, who performed a traditional Irish song in the balmy breeze. When the ensemble returned, Hansard sang “When Your Mind’s Made Up” from the Once soundtrack. He followed that intensity with some levity, teasing the lead guitarist about the first song he ever wrote. Hansard began to lead the audience in a sing-along, getting another big laugh when he promised to be “rocking out to the maximum.”
It was around then that some people in the amphitheater, high above the performers, noticed the figure on the roof of the winery behind and above the stage. It was a person in dark clothing. They saw him run across the tile shingles and then leap into the sky, as if taking off from a diving board. He descended rapidly and silently near the lighting rig, flipped head over heels in midair, and, after a forty-foot drop, smashed with a loud thud onto the stage, about five feet away from Glen Hansard.
Some people assumed that the figure was a dummy. The way the body fell certainly looked as if it could have been thrown off the roof. One witness thought he was seeing a black cape or sheet falling. Some assumed a speaker or lighting rig had fallen. Some thought the jumper was part of the show, that he had something to do with Hansard’s routine with the guitarist. Others knew immediately.
Hansard rushed over to the fallen man, knelt next to him and looked toward the wings. “Quickly!” he shouted.
By then, people in the audience were already punching 911 into their cell phones. Doctors and paramedics from the audience ran to the stage and began CPR. A crew member stepped up to a microphone and asked if anyone could help identify the man. Then he asked that everyone remain seated, so as not to clog the narrow mountain roads used by the ambulance that was already on its way.
Everyone watched the doctors, EMTs, and firefighters work on the man for a good half hour. Eventually a black curtain was placed around them to block the view. A doctor who’d been in the audience declared the man dead on the stage.
The man was identified as Michael Edward Pickels. He was thirty-two, from nearby San Jose. Pickels had arrived at the show with a friend. Around 10:00 PM, he’d left all of his personal belongings on his seat and disappeared. A short time later, he was seen on the roof. Apparently, he’d gone around the back of the building, where it was easy to climb up.
If there was no apparent reason for his public suicide, there were at least indicators. On New Year’s Day, Pickels had gotten into a violent argument with his girlfriend. He’d tied up her hands and legs, pointed a loaded shotgun at her, and threatened that he was going to kill her and himself. Somehow, the girlfriend convinced him to let her go. She ran to another house and called police, who negotiated with Pickels for ninety minutes before he gave up the gun and surrendered.
He was arrested and charged with assault with a firearm, domestic violence, and false imprisonment. The night of the Swell Season show, he was free on $150,000 bail and facing a court appearance in October.
The morning after, the Swell Season extended its sympathies in a MySpace post: “Our hearts go out to the victim who decided to take his own life at last night’s gig . . . and to his friends and family.”
“We are just in shock and grief and full of bewilderment,” Howard Greynolds, the band’s manager, told the local Mercury News. “Clearly, next year, we are going to come back to the area and do a show for a suicide prevention or something, if it turns out to be a suicide. Maybe at the Warfield [in San Francisco] or someplace—I don’t think we’d want to go back to the Mountain Winery.”
The Swell Season played as scheduled that Friday night at the Oregon Zoo in Portland. They later promised to pay for group grief counseling sessions for hundreds of fans who witnessed the suicide.
The Mountain Winery did not offer refunds to the traumatized concertgoers, many of whom told their stories in the readers’ comments section of the San Francisco Weekly:
The ghastly image in my head still won’t let me sleep. What a horrific abrupt ending to a sublime concert. . . . The adorable Marketa made a comment earlier in the show that she will always remember Saratoga because it was her first ever “costume change” (she was cold and changed from her dress to jeans and a sweater). Now she will remember Saratoga for an entirely different reason. What a nightmare.
Honestly, I’m really pissed that this jerk ruined an evening for so many. This was a fantastic show up until this point, and how many of us (not to mention the bandmembrs themselves) will remember this selfish dead man when we listen to their music?
As the audience response made clear, there’s a big difference between an amateur trying to steal the spotlight and performers who dedicate, and ultimately give, their lives to their art onstage.