Sounds like ZZ Top. They were an opening act for Tom Petty. Loudest concert I ever heard.
I saw Counting Crows several years after their zenith. They sucked. Every single person in the audience wanted them to play their hits from August And Everything After. They wanted to play a bunch of spectacularly crappy new songs and threw a hissy fit when they tried to start a sing-a-long and no one knew the words. The lead singer was swearing at the audience. But they were not responsible for the crappy new material.
I think I’ve posted about this show before but it was , sadly, Buddy Guy. Looked forward to the show for quite a while, had several of his albums and enjoyed them quite a bit. The show was at a bar venue that was pretty large and had an excellent sound system and sound engineer. His back up band came out and did almost a full set without Buddy. They were amazing and worth the price of admission. Finally Buddy comes out and plays some blistering blues and then stops, tells some stories, flirts with some ladies in the audience, plays a little more (spectacular) stops, talks for a long time, plays a little more, stop, talk for another long time. I was thinking this was just an off night for him and he just felt like BSing a little more that particular night but I later found out online that this was pretty much his usual thing at the time. I still love the guy but don’t know that I’d spring for a ticket now.
Heh, kinda dovetails with the one time I saw Buddy. It was at one of those all-day concerts I referenced upthread, and he only had like 30-40 mins. He’d quit a song halfway through and shout, “I don’t have no time!” and start another, play part of THAT song, and repeat. He tried to fit a two-hour concert in a half-hour. He was entertaining and a lot of fun. I was disappointed he wasn’t a headliner.
No idea but this reminds me of seeing Rilo Kiley at the Riviera in Chicago and the sound was just terrible. Distorted, muddled, too loud and just generally awful. To the band’s credit, they were giving it a solid try at a performance and I don’t know if they were aware of how shitty it sounded in the seats. I always wondered if that was a band issue or a venue issue.
I saw BB King and Buddy Guy in ~2012. Buddy Guy was great. BB King was barely alive and it showed. I think he “played” 3 songs, one of which was a sing along of You Are My Sunshine. I think it was unethical of them to call it a BB King tour when he was completely unable to perform.
The Mahavishnu Orchestra was the loudest concert I ever attended. It was in a venue with particularly good acoustics, but it really made my ears bleed. It was impossible to hear the music.
I’m pretty sure it was the band who decided it. Jerry Goodman, formerly of the Flock, was in the band, and before the concert started, someone told me that that band had also been impossibly loud.
A year of so later, I heard them again outdoors. Much better.
I don’t know any Black Crowes music beyond what I hear on the radio. However, I saw them on their Page/Crowes tour and they were fantastic. I’d see them again just based on that. Chris (and Jimmy) did a great job.
Are we talking about the same group? The most well known Counting Crows song is either Around Here or Mr. Jones?
We are not. I read that wrong. Which is odd, because I kept wondering why someone that would talk about ‘their zenith’ would misspell Crowes.
Yup. Not sure how I missed that. Normally I only make that mistake when someone says “I’m going to see the Crow(e)s next week”. I always enjoy the reaction when I say “uh, Counting or Black?”.*
Anyway, can’t say I ever would have gone to a Counting Crows concert, but The Black Crowes (with Jimmy Page) put on a great show.
*Because their reaction is nearly always a look of disgust that I’d even imply that they were going to see the other one. ie “The Black Crowes, why would I want to go see The Counting Crows” or the other way around.
Talk about irony, I was never a Black Crows fan. But one day I got free tickets and a free VIP pass, so I figured: Why not?
I enjoyed the crap out of that concert. But I think I was the only one in the entire venue that did. The group that I went with, the people I chatted with at the bar, all hated it.
Basically 90% of the show was instrumental, acoustic, or obscure off album stuff.
That was sorta how my first Tom Petty concert was. A friend of mine was meeting some of her friends at a concert about 2 hours away and convinced me to go (may have even bought my ticket) because she didn’t want to drive all the way there and back alone. I went kicking and screaming because I only knew like one or two songs and didn’t really care for him.
As it turns out, I knew every lyric to all but one or two songs and the show was one of the best shows I’d been to up until that point. That was my first of 9 Tom Petty concerts (in three states) I went to. Turns out I really like him and he put on a hell of a show every time he took the stage.
To this day, when someone tells me they only know one or two of his songs, I can rattle off quite a few more songs that they know, they just never really paid attention to him and didn’t realize he’s on the radio a lot, especially if you listen to Classic Rock stations.
In December of 1999 my little brother and I drove up to The State Theater for WCYY’s Holiday Bizarre concert. We liked all four bands - Angry Salad, Guster, Shootyz Groove, and Jimmie’s Chicken Shack - so we expected it to be awesome.
We had not, however, ever been to The State before.
It was, perhaps still is, a very old theater, described as “Historic theater…which features a combination of Moorish and Art Deco architecture.” Stucco walls, lots of strange angles, balconies…it was probably nice to see Shakespeare in.
What it wasn’t was nice to hear a rap-rock band in.
Angry Salad and Guster were okay. While I doubt people farther away than Maine and Vermont never heard of the opening act, Boston-based Angry Salad, I have a sense that people far from New England gained familiarity in time with fellow bean-towners Guster, so maybe you know that their earliest songs were acoustic numbers complete with hand drums. Their Lost and Gone Forever album, when they were just beginning to move away from that original sound, had only dropped a couple of months before, so they played a bunch of their lo key earlier music too.
Then Shootz Groove took the stage. Lil Bro and I had listened to their CD on the long drive to Portland. But we had no idea, for nearly an hour, what they were playing. I mean, there was a point when I thought they might have been playing NYC Minute, but if they played Dear God (Oh My God) or L Train you couldn’t prove it by me. Because all you could hear was interference from all that freaking stucco or maybe the balconies that the walls sprouted in many places.
Super terrible. Everyone was unhappy, probably the band too though they kept up a cheerful facade.
So, Jimmie’s Chicken Shack (you at least know them from High or Dropping Anchor, right?) who was last listened to the grumblings of the angry crowd, and on the fly decided to drop an acoustic set. It was good! Especially considering they hadn’t planned for it.
But yeah. Neither Lil Bro nor I have ever gone to another concert there. Reviews as recent as a year ago say that the sound is still god-awful despite a partial remodel in 2010.
Saw Petty in metro Detroit in 1998 and it was still to this day a top five all time concert for me. Wasn’t expecting much, as I was aware of his stuff but pretty far from a fan, and he blew me away with his performance.
That show is memorable for me as being one of only two times, out of dozens of concerts that I attended there over the years, that I ever saw the Palace of Auburn Hills completely fill with pot smoke as soon as the show started (the other was the Dead in 1995 in their fourth-to-last show before Jerry died).
Note that I don’t rate this show top five because of the contact high I got that night, the show was legit good.
Aerosmith, Market Square arena, Indianapolis. Late '78. They said they were taping for a live album. We sat in the nosebleed seats just under the time of day sign. Man, the sound sucked and it was really hard to tell what song they were playing. Joe Perry decided to show off by jumping off of the drummer’s podium to start a song, but he fell and rolled across the stage into some speakers. He slammed his guitar into the drums and ran off stage. The others finished the song without him. He returned for a couple of songs eventually. The crowd kept yelling “Dream On, Dream On!” Tyler looked out and said, “yeah? Dream on!”
At the end of the concert soon after that, Tyler had the nerve to do the Beatle thing by saying “Good night, I hope we’ve passed the audition!” They left the stage and the lights came up immediately.
It was the only major act I ever saw that got booed!
I don’t remember the band, but it was outdoors, and the acoustics were such that I couldn’t understand the lyrics or even really hear the vocalists. Also, apparently you were supposed to bring a chair, and the grass I could sit on was wet.
I’d have rather been in one of those kids concerts where the kids can’t sing.
Not sure if that was the same tour I saw him on the first time. It was 1999 in Madison, WI. I don’t see any tour dates for 98, but looks like he was in Michigan a number of times in 99. If it was the same tour I was at, there were big flag/banners hanging over the back of the set throughout the show (you can see them here), they just looked like set decoration. A few times throughout the show, they started moving (you can kinda see it here during Don’t Come Around Here No More around 1h11m into the clip, and hey, look, it’s Howie). One of the people in our group had to leave the show when that started. He had liquid acid in a dropper bottle and took waaay more than he meant to*. When the set dressing started moving, he had to excuse himself. Admittedly, even sober, it was hard to tell if the actual set was moving, if it was a projection or just the lighting.
And because I’m going down this rabbit hole, here’s one of my favorite clips. For whatever reason I absolutely love it when the crowd sings alone, and Tom always encouraged that. I love that in this clip, the crowd practically sings the entire song for him, gives me chills every time.
*Pro-tip, if you have liquid acid in a dropper bottle, in a dark concert venue. Don’t attempt to put a drop directly on your tongue. Put a drop on the back of your hand and lick it so you can see what you’re doing.
I blame a combination of old age and drugs in my twenties. Looking at setlist fm, it appears I attended the 10/9/1999 show in Auburn Hills. No setlist is available from that show other than to mention it was the Echo tour. Not sure that a setlist would have helped me remember much about that night, again from the contact high 
The band Yes at “Pine Knob” in the Detroit area, probably around 2000. The opening act was Kansas, and I wouldn’t be surprised if over half the people there came out mainly to see Kansas. The show was not well received.
The opening song was Close to the Edge. That’s a fine track to start with if your fans have heard it before. Most people who are attending a concert where they’re mainly there to see Kansas probably haven’t. They went on to play Edge of Delirium, which I had never heard before, and then something off Tales from Topographic Oceans, which I had never heard before. I now own those albums and am a fan of them, but consider it from the perspective of the Kansas fan who’s heard over an hour a music, and there’s only been 3 songs, and none of them are radio hits since they’re so damned long.
They eventually played Roundabout, and everyone thought they were finally getting into their radio hits, and that was their last song. No encore. I was not terribly excited by the experience then though it did introduce me to some of their music that caused me to like them even more than the stuff I had heard before, which was just what was on the radio.