I liked Wilco the first time I saw/heard them during the “AM” era at Summerfest in Milwaukee. I stood my ground at the Leinie Lodge om the drizzle while Therese endured Marcia’s appreciation of Meat Loaf at the armphitheater. I’m pretty sure I got the better part of that deal. It was a great show.
lThe next time I saw Wilco was at the Barrymore Theater in Madison. It was during the time of the Woodie Guthri stuff. They played for 45 minutes or so, and left the stage acting like that was the end of the show. Af roadie or tech or something came out and made arm gestures encouraging the audience to cheer for an encore. f This I said this was 45 minutes into the show, right? And I could see Tweedy & co. standing in the wings downing bottled products.
Since then I refuse to send any money in that direction. Anybody else have the same type of deal with a band?
Phish. They’re great musicians and I was a big fan of their albums in high school, before I was aware of the hippie/drug-influenced subculture that followed them around the country, and their reputation as a largely-improvisational “jam band.” When I got tickets to see Phish live during the fall of 1996, I was psyched for the best concert ever, but the first sign of Phish’s arrival at the University of Florida were hordes of smelly stoners descending on our college campus, like tie-dyed locusts. The “trustafarians” went around all afternoon knocking on random dorm doors, bugging people. We overheard one guy say “Hey man, can you hook me up with a ticket for the Phish show, and some vegan dog food for my dog?” It was surreal.
I know Phish isn’t to blame for their fans, but I will blame them for NOT SAYING A DAMN WORD THE ENTIRE SHOW. They never said “Hello Gainesville!” They never said “Hey, we’re Phish!” They didn’t introduce any song titles or engage in witty inter-song banter. Didn’t address the audience once, and just engaged in a lot of meandering solos and structureless noodling on stage that must have been really exciting if I was “smoking the kind bud” or “tripping balls” or “eating vegan dog food.” While I still think their studio recordings sound great, I was less than thrilled with my live Phish experience, considering the following they had (literally) and their reputation of one of the best live bands of all time. Pretentious, insipid wankers, if you ask me.
Nirvana. Saw 'em live in '92 - they meandered on stage, Cobain mumbled a bit into the mike, they played a half-arsed set that could have been delivered by any wannabe student band with a single on college radio, except without the enthusiasm, Cobain mumbled a bit more, and 55 minutes into the show they shuffled off again. No encores, nothing.
Aww, Kurt has a tummy-ache. Aww, Kurt doesn’t like the whole “rock star” trip. Aww, Kurt is a sensitive artist. Didn’t stop the bastard charging me $50 for a rotten show, when $5 at the local punk club would get you six bands who actually felt like playing for the punters {with admittedly varying degrees of skill, but nothing much worse than what I heard Nirvana turn out}. Screw Nirvana - they never got any more of my money, and they never will.
Years ago I saw Van Morrison live and he said hardly a word all show. He never said “Hello Sydney!” He never said “Hey I’m Van Morrison.” He didn’t introduce any song titles or engage in witty inter-song banter. He spent most of the show with his back to the audience…but he and his band were absolutely fantastic.
The only band I guess I ever “banned” was the Stones. Everytime I see them the band is shithot, Keef plays his heart out and Jagger sounds like a drunken Mick Jagger impersonator. I got so sick of hearing him butcher their works that last time they toured here I knocked back a free ticket.
I once saw Eric Burdon in London and he was one of my heroes, one of the great rock/blues voices. After his performance I would gladly have shot him to put him out of our misery.
Wilco live are an odd bunch. I saw them at Glastonbury post-Summerteeth and Jeff Tweedy spent the entire set calling the audience cocksuckers and generally being a dickhead. Put me off them for ages. Then I saw them again recently having been reconverted by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it was as if Tweedy was a completely different person. Funny, chatty, self-deprecating, and did comedy running-on-the-spot, as well as playing an all-round ace set. People were commenting on how different he is these days, so maybe he’s sorted himself out a bit. Honestly, it’s worth giving them a second chance, the new albums are ace.
Anyway, I by and large refuse to get on up, or for that matter get down, to anything by James Brown, because he’s a wife-beating git.
I boycott The Pretenders and whatever is left of them now because of Chrissy Hynde’s militant vegetarianism.
Please don’t get me wrong–several members of my family are vegetarian. I really don’t care what people eat–you can eat dirt for all I care. But I do resent it when someone decides to tell me what to eat.
This is only slightly related, but I boycott most of the “trendy”, 3 chord faux-punk, or emo bands that teenagers love oh-so-much. I’ll make exceptions, like if I know the popularity is going to be short lived and their praise is deserving a la Modest Mouse, but generally you will not find me even remotely patronizing what I feel is some of the most pretenious music made today. Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday, Something Corporate, Simple Plan, Thursday, The Used, Vendetta Red, My Chemical Romance, Bright Eyes, Cursive, Yellowcard, Hawthorne Heights, The Spill Canvas - yea, you get the idea.
don’t ask’s description of Van Morrison is very similar to my two experiences with Bob Dylan (recent) as well as Creedence Clearwater Revival (lo-ong time ago.) I’m done with Bob.
To be fair, CCR was probably on one hell of a punishing If This Is Tuesday It Must Be Denver roadtrip that year (1969–but the other bands on the bill, Wilbert Harrison and Ike and Tina Turner, were awesome).
I’ll never be done with Neil Young. I’ve appreciated his not-always-successful genre experimentation. And the old dinosaur still rocks hard, he gives his all, really enjoyed him at Red Rocks a couple years ago. But I was finished with Crosy Stills and Nash quite some time ago. I never liked them as much as Young to begin with, and they seem so complacent and stale now.
Actually, now that I think about it, with Warren Zevon gone, I pretty much boycott all the aging Boomer bands except for Neil Young and Richard Thompson.
Tweedy has had some well-documented substance abuse issues and a recently equally well-documented stint in rehab. Combine that with the personality issues that have plagued the band (much of which, IMO, seems to be related to Tweedy’s inability to work well with others) and inconsistency is not unexpected.
I’ve seen them twice–once in 1997 after “Being There”, and once last year–and they were fantastic both times.
To their credit, they have tried to rein in the audience a bit. Security at a Phish show is an order of magnitude greater than you’ll see at most shows, and they beg people to not show up without tickets. I often thought they could have done more, but at least it was something.
As for banter, a lot of bands–especially in this genre–don’t really say much. I don’t know why, and I think there’s a time when it would have bugged me, but these days when bands yammer on between songs I just want them to shut the hell up and start playing. Besides, it would be silly for Phish to introduce all of their songs, since 95% of the audience not only knows all of them, but has eight or nine live versions in their collection at home.
If I invest the time and money to see an artist in concert and the artist is an asshole, he/she has lost me as a fan. The worst experiences I recall were Jerry Jeff Walker (so drunk he almost couldn’t play, and an asshole to boot) and LouAnn Barton. You’ve probably never heard of her, and rightly so. She put out a great album circa 1986, but the time I saw her perform she was snotty asshole bitch with attitude. Insulting your audience is not generally the way to build a singing career.
Re stage banter: The fabulous Townes Van Zandt was notably laconic on stage, but I once attended a show where he was babbling like a brook. I strongly suspected that he had partaken of a forbidden substance prior to coming on stage. It was pretty cool. Since he was essentially a poet, it was just as good to hear him talk as to hear him sing.
I see your point, but if I wanted to listen to the songs, I’d just listen to the CDs and not put up with a bunch of drug-abusing beggars with poor personal hygiene. When I pay money to go to a show, I expect the performer to make an effort to be entertaining and gracious, and to at least fake being as excited to be there as the audience is. And when I played in bands, we always tried our best to do those very things.
My high school was pretty much permanently locked into circa 1971 except for a few sore losers (like myself) who did radical, crazy, nutty things like listen to REM or the Replacements. Yeah, I was a real psycho rebel.
Being this psycho rebel, I had the audacity to like both classic and “alternative” rock. I thought a lot of the Dead stuff was pretty fucking cool. Life sure was fun being a musical ecumenicist: I’d get shat on by the stoners for listening to “Rear-End Men”, and shat on by the punks for listening to “brain-dead hippy wank”.
Well, in my most daring act of rebellion yet, I went, stone cold sober, to a Grateful Dead show at the Cumberland County Civic Center in 1986. I thought the Dead Heads were a lot of fun to watch, and some of them were really nice folks. The Dead themselves, on the other hand, were the most boring pack of stiffs I’ve ever seen in my life. Phish must have studied Jerry’s on-stage persona meticulously, because theey sound as if they emulate it almost perfectly. Bob Weir uttered the following words between the first set and second sets, and just before the half-hour bongo solo the two sets bracketed: “We’ll be back in a few.” At the end of the show, the loquatious Mr. Weir spoke again: “Thanks. Good night.” The rest was pretty much a Phish concert: Noodling obscurity, such that only the most die-hard fan had even the slightest clue what the hell the Dead were playing at that moment. The only song I could instantly recognize was the last: Aiko Aiko, and it’s not even their fucking song. It was like paying money to be forced to sit through a class on improvosational bluegrass-jazz fusion that the instructor had neglected to attend. Sure, the Dead Heads had loads of fun, because they were stoned out of their fucking minds. So was the band, as far as I could tell. I left extremely disappointed, and basically that one show pushed me over the hump into the punk chauvinst clique, which I kind of regret now because I still did, and do, love a lot of classic rock. But god-damn were the Dead ever a shitty live band. I tossed all my Dead tapes (which wasn’t very painful, as I hadn’t bought a single one, being nothing but a pile of bootlegs and mixes), never bought a single item of Dead merchandise afterwards, proclaimed my utter disdain for the Dead and everything the clearly didn’t stand for to any who would listen, and when I hear “Jerry, RIP”, I spit on the ground. Fuck the Dead and their memory, man. What a bunch of drug-addled wankers.
While I’m not a big Neil Young fan, I did like Trans and re-ac-tor. These were part of a series of “contractual obligation” albums made for Geffen in the late 70s/early 80s. At that time, he was caring for his mentally disabled son. While it would have been best to wait until he had more time to devote to his craft, he was under pressure to produce something.
Tool. Just don’t bother.
Saw A Perfect Circle somewhat by accident, as I prefer Tool’s music to APC. APC opened for NIN on Fragility tour, and MJKeenan was dressed in motley, bouncing around the stage like a madman. Very energetic show. Paid to see Tool on Lateralus tour and he just huddled in a corner rocking autistically back and forth while mumbling into the mike. I can understand having a crap show occasionally, but friends in another part of the country altogether also saw the show (same tour, 2-3 weeks later) and said it was the same. More entertaining to stay home, put the album on and watch your goldfish swim. I have to wonder, though, if APC has a more entertaining show in general or if Reznor just told Keenan “Listen, there’s only going to be one crowd-shy morose lump on the stage on this tour, and that’s me!” (To be fair, the NIN show was mixed; older stuff was presented more energetically and The Fragile work was very low key. I’d still see NIN again, though.)
Although I usually go to Ozzfest (didn’t this year–bands not what I wanted to see) and I am more than happy to throw more money at Ozzy, it can be a bit sad to see him on stage. He’s trying to do all the classic Ozzy show things–the water hose, the buckets, the running and jumping and bouncing around–but by the end of the set it is like watching exercise hour at the old folks’ home. I love Ozzy to death, but waiting for him to collapse on stage is not my idea of a great concert. I usually stay for a couple of songs and then bail before he gets too worn out.
On the up side, though…
Always go see Rob Zombie, Korn, or Violent Femmes. Great shows every time. These bands act like the really enjoy performing, which is what makes going to a show worthwhile.
I hate to say this, given my deep appreciation and respect for this artist, but I’m not going to see Shane MacGowan (sp?) live again. I know the guy has a serious drinking problem, but I was not prepared for this. He was barely standing up, holding the mike for support. He mumbled the lyrics and didn’t seem to give a shit.
It was more sad than enraging, but it’s not something I want to see again. I will still listen to old Pouges albums, and buy ones I don’t have. I hope someone pulls Shane out of his downward spiral.
