I’ve seen Sonic Youth four times. The first three shows were amazing driving high energy fun. The fourth show they were totally off and uninterested in the crowd or the performance, played very few actual songs, and mostly noodled with their backs to the crowd for an hour. Soured me from ever going to see them again.
Dylan’s kicking off his world tour in Milwaukee. I’ve got friends that want to go (“Dude, it’s gotta be his last, right? I mean, he’s like eighty…”).
I warned them that I saw a great Dylan concert once, but I was lucky to catch one of the rare 10% of his shows… where he was sober and straight and actually cared about the music and the audience.
Hey, performers, if you can’t care about your music and your audience, cancel your tour.
I went to see a Warren Haynes Christmas Jam in Asheville a few years ago. As usual, there were many guest performers, including Jackson Browne and Peter Frampton. We were down on the floor, standing for about six hours. Most of the show was pretty good. However…
Jackson Browne made it clear that he didn’t care about being there at all. I got the impression that he was being rather bitter about something, maybe his career in the last few years or having to play at that point in the jam. Anyway, I did not enjoy him at all.
He was shortly followed by Frampton, who was the exact opposite. He acted like he was overjoyed at still being able to play for large crowds. He was enthusiastic and really gave it 100%. The comparison between the two was staggering.
In September of 2002, I went to what was called the Harley Davidson Festival and concert which took place at the Fontana Speedway (car race track) in SoCal. Three acts were to perform at the outdoor venue, headlined by Stone Temple Pilots, who were absolutely amazing. This was one of the best concerts I had ever seen. The middle act appearing before STP was Billy Idol, who put on an excellent show!!! I was impressed by his guitarist, Steve Stevens who did an amazing Latin guitar intro to Eyes Without a Face. Again, it was a great show.
The opening act, appearing before a small gathering in the afternoon to start the day was Nickelback. I was pretty much right in front of the stage and saw the whole thing. The concert was awful. They were very cheezy, came across as phony and had some horrific, cheap pyrotechnic props that were laughable. I am a pretty easy person to please concertwise…I pretty much like everyone I have seen perform live. Nickelback was the worst concert I have ever seen and one of the only bands I have seen who were a poor live band. Thankfully the rest of the day more than made up for that bad start.
WHO DEY
I had a weird experience just last night. I saw Squeeze with opening act The English Beat. The theater was maybe 1/3 full. Squeeze was great: They played and sang well and were into it. On the other hand The English Beat were terrible. The mike on the lead singer wasn’t working and they didn’t notice until three songs into their set.
I saw the Replacements on their last tour in early 1991, a couple of months before they split. It was a solid show, firing on all cylinders. Their rendition of “Bastards of Young” blew me away. But, like with you and Elton, I’d been primed with stories about the 'mats being totally out of their minds, playing nothing but Thin Lizzy covers with their pants around their ankles. It was a solid show, but I can’t help feeling like I was born too late for the legendary stuff.
This one is both bad and fantastic at the same time. I saw Stevie Ray Vaughn on multiple occasions and it was always between great and legendary. In retrospect knowing about his life now this one concert was during the depths of his addiction. He played at the Rutgers University gym. Probably about 3,000 seats. Most of the songs turned into long jams. From other concerts I knew his sets were usually tight with occasional longer improvisation. I was right with him but I could tell those in the audience who weren’t huge fans were drifting away (including my sister). The performance confirmed how great a rhythm section Double Trouble was. They never knew when he was going back to the lyrics or where he was going but they anchored the music wherever it went.
Be assured, Nickelback in the studio suck ass as well. Really, they are the greatest joke/travesty rock music ever had.
Since others have brought up opening acts I will mention another one. It was at what is now called PNC Arts Center. It has about 7,000 seats and room for 10,000 more on the lawn. The lawn probably wasn’t filled but there were a lot of people there. The headliner was Steven Wright.
Comics are tricky. In an arena you are going to have it filled with fans of that particular comic. But their tastes might not run the same for the opener. What do you do, another comic? A singer? Well in this case it was Randy Newman.
I can’t say that he was bad. He was his normal Randy Newmany self. It was just him and a piano singing mostly slow songs that no one ever heard of. In an intimate setting I probably would have enjoyed it. But this was a crowd that came to hear jokes and laugh. The crowd was lost from the beginning. At best the background conversations were threatening to drown out the performance. At times it it became openly hostile. He eventually pulled out I Love LA and Short People. You could tell he really didn’t want to don’t he later. When Steven Wright came out he seemed pissed at how Randy was treated but then settled into his set and everything was fine. It was just a matter of picking the wrong act as an opener.
Back in the early 90s went to show where Chicago opened for the Moody Blues. Chicago was having obvious sound problems and clearly the band was getting increasingly frustrated. They stopped at several points but whatever fix they attempted it didn’t last long and the sound kept intermittently cutting out. They got off the stage exuding an aura of defeat. Then after the break the Moody Blues took the stage and all sound problems vanished. The Blues put on a high energy show that featured an imaginative light show as well.
Medeski Martin & Wood in the early 2000s. I wanted to like them, and I enjoyed some similar music, but I just couldn’t get into it. Just too non-melodic for me.
I was going to say Phish at Fenway Park but honestly, my expectations were so low that it would have been hard to be disappointed. It confirmed my belief that I would never have made a good Deadhead.