Made the same mistake at Summerfest. I’d texted my kid and said “Hey, Erin and Matt and Ben and Brett playing tonight at S-fest. Wanta grab a vanful of friends?”. She recognized her favorite performers and said “Can it be just a dad/daughter thing?” Awww.
Now, I grew up in Milwaukee, hearing “…and cooler near the lake” on summer weather reports. I should have realized that Summerfest is held at a recycled Nike missle base… Right On The Lake. Where cold air comes from if the wind starts howling, which of course happened halfway through the first opening act. A twenty-degree drop, along with horizontal drizzle. So, we gave up our great seats in the wind and moved down into the unwashed masses just to stop shivering.
I don’t care if it’s 150 degrees when you leave the house, always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS bring a sweatshirt to Summerfest. Cooler near the lake is even more important when you’re going to spend the next three hours 20 feet from the lake, after sundown, with a breeze.
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
First, the air conditioning wasn’t working, so it was about 110 degrees inside.
Second, my wife and I were about the only ones in the dome NOT smoking pot, so we were stewing in a marijuana sauna.
Third, Page and Plant were on one of their “We’re tired of all our popular songs, so we’re just going to play obscure songs you’ve never heard of” kicks.
Never really attended more than two concerts, which I have no complaints about, but in middle school when I was performing in a band concert the lighting was directly in my eyes so I couldn’t see my music too well, luckily I did okay.
Unfortunately I can’t blame the lighting guy since I was the lighting guy for that concert. :smack:
Another one that was pretty damn bad was a concert by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, or a part of it anyway, that was held on a floating stage in the Ohio River.
Except that the stage was moored at a park near a heavily travelled overpass and the roar of the semi trucks was louder than the music.
Also, they chose music poorly for what was supposed to be a happy summer funtime concert in the park affair. The pieces they choose were described by my date (an accomplished musician) as “noodly bullshit chosen to show off the skill of the player rather than entertain the audience.”
I saw Mazzy Star at the Metro in Chicago way back sometime in the 1990’s and Hope Sandoval just draped herself over the microphone and mumbled somnolently for ninety minutes or so. At one point, the strap on her dress broke (Lord only knows how since she wasn’t moving) and she mumbled “'scuseme”, wandered off stage for fifteen minutes and came back – presumably safety pinned into place – and resumed her job of keeping the microphone stand in place.
I’ve seen videos of her shows and apparently she doesn’t get much more lively on her best days. Granted, I understand that this is Hope Sandoval we’re talking about but still… sheesh. Drink a cup of coffee before you come on stage or something. Even her (relatively) livelier songs from “She Hangs Brightly” were barely mumbled. You couldn’t even see her because her arm was draped in front of her face the whole night. A few months ago, my sister-in-law saw her with The Warm Inventions and then called my wife to complain. My wife just handed the phone off to me and we discussed what a terrible performer she is.
first one was MY fault… Grateful Dead “brown acid” kinda thing…'94 at Sand Stone outside of KC. A friend gave me three hits of blue “pyramid” gels…AFTER I took 1.5 he told me “DUDE, those were triple doses”, you should have only taken a 1/2 dose…Spent 80% of the show shackled in the detainment area (and i mean shackled) I could see the stage but was confined and very “out there”…the cops were walruses and Jerry and Elizabeth Taylor did a duet, at least in my mind they did. Cops let me go AFTER the show ended. I ended up from the venue to downtown KC and catching a bus home cause I could not find the friend that had driven us there.
Second was getting told “dancing” is not allowed at a** Paul Simon** concert at RiverPort amphitheater in St Louis. It was right after GNR and Axel Rose caused a riot at the first concert ever in that venue a few days prior…We danced anyway and Paul verbally recognized it and did a reprise of “Boy in the Bubble”…just for us. He said,on stage “This is for the the dancers in the back”. For Og’s sake, we were on the lawn in an amphitheater and the security tried to say we couldn’t dace. We proved them incorrect.
Deep Purple, late 70’s. Heading to the show, I noticed that a minor toothache was worsening. During the show, it intensified. The whole side of my face was throbbing. The pain reached its peak during an extended (had to be 10-minutes) organ solo during the song ‘Lazy’. Ended up needing a root canal.
I had a pretty miserable time at Lollapalooza 1992 in Vancouver. It was rainy and the place turned to a sea of mud. The performances were fine, but i just wasn’t in the mood for that sort of day.
Oh, I just thought of one that I was in the audience for. I was at a church camp (oh yeah, starting of as a signifier of good things already). Now, I’ve never really been a Christian, in all honestly it only barely dawned on me that people were actually religious until later in high school, I didn’t really object to going to church on any reason other than it being dry, but I treated it more like someone would treat “Lord of the Rings” than a life philosophy. Yes, I thought Christianity was like a mainstream version of Trekkiedom, sue me.
Back on topic, I was into metal, rock, alternative rock, and J-pop (yeah… still not sure how that last one snuck in there) and we booked… Paula Larke. If you don’t know who she is, don’t worry, she’s not even notable enough to be on Wikipedia. Now, to be perfectly honest, she’s kind of funny, and to her credit she didn’t harp on God too much. However, her music was pretty uninspired yet all the kids were getting really into it. She had some dead-basic African drumming, basic chord progression guitar aided “songs,” and semi-political glurge that was completely at odds with my beliefs. It was, all in all, even less interesting than listening to the church choir practice (okay, I love hymns, I’ll admit it. But I think you get the point).
On the plus side, a girl that went there with my church (never saw her before, or again after, sadface) and I had hit it off by then, we both agreed ahead of time that it was going to be lame so we sat in the back away from everyone else and got to play snark/MST3k (to ourselves, we didn’t want to bother anyone who would enjoy it) for a few hours.
Another Grateful Dead story. (Note to those unfamiliar—the Dead were one of the most touring bands of all time. Many of us took in hundreds of shows during their run, so their apparent overrepresentation in this thread shouldn’t be conflated with a typical Dead show. Hundreds of unique, outstanding performances.)
Actually, the nasty part isn’t the Dead show so much as the opening act. Some time in the early nineties they toured with Sting. I’m not all that much of a Sting fan, but I wasn’t particularly against him. But that tour had a lot of awful moments. First, his credibility shit the bed. It’s odd to go on tour with one of the most free-flowing, improvisation bands in the world and put on a relatively flat, static show. Jerry and Bobby would come out on and play a bit here and there (I caught about fifteen or so shows on that tour), but no matter what they tried no one else left the safety of the song. Meh. The most uncomfortable bit was when Sting spilled a bit of tea. Every. Fucking. Show. There he was in this oh-so-chic overalls sipping his tea from a casually placed china cup, and he’d spill a bit and look out at the crowd in a cutesy I’m so cwumsy! Whatever shall I do? look. Blech.
The absolute worst, though, were the Sting fans. Dead shows were tens of thousands of the most laid back, chill music fans around. Yeah, yeah, no collection of people is without a standard proportion of assholes, but the general culture was very relaxed. Then his fans started showing up in hairspray and heels. Teased hair and high heels don’t go so well at an outdoor venue (think floor at a football stadium), and really didn’t fit in with the overall vibe. Done-up folk were never a complete anomaly (Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac and all), but the hoards of rude, pushy, nasty Sting fans made for a real shitty summer tour.
John Prine at a big festival in Kentucky about 20 years ago. He decided to get off stage and wander around in the crowd and sing *“Hey, baby, wanna boogie? Boogie-oogie-oogie with me. We can boogie in the park, we can boogie in the dark, come on baby, it ain’t very hard.” *
For 25 minutes by my watch. Over and over and over again.
No, John, I don’t want to boogie-oogie-oogie with you.
I guess not including music festivals I’ve only seen 4 other live hip hop acts. Maybe I got lucky the last couple of times (notably Digable Planets and Wyclef Jean).
I’ve been to several really, really great hip-hop shows, actually. I’d say there are four artists that I will never, ever miss a chance to see if they blow into town:
DJ Shadow during his Private Press tour. Easily the Best. Show. EVER… my friend and I still hold this as the gold standard for live performances, more than seven years after the fact. For his encore, he battled it out with a live drummer.
For that matter, anyone else on the Solesides Crew. They’re all great MCs and DJs, and Gift of Gab can freestyle at unimaginable speeds. I think the best crowd I’ve ever seen at any hip hop show was on a Quannum tour… a spontanenous b-boy battle broke out on the floor in between sets.
The Roots. Maybe it helps that they’re playing their own instruments instead of just jumping around with a mic, but they put on one hell of a show. For that matter, even though he’s not a member any more, Rahzel is worth seeing at least once in your lifetime… he may be a one-trick pony, but he’s a damned talented one.
Kid Koala, on various occasions, including one awesome show in Kingston, ON, in a tiny 40-person venue. The man LOVES being behind the decks… I’m talking pure joy coming out of every pore when he DJs. He tends to do his Moon River shtick a little too often, but he always dedicates it to his mom and that’s sweet as hell.
I guess the disclaimer here is that I used to attend 10-20 live shows a year for most of my 20s, and roughly half of those were hip hop shows… so I’ve seen tons of horrendous hip hop shows, too. The difference is that a good band can overcome a craptacular sound system, a really bad opening act, the inevitable boredom of performing the same show night after night, or any of the other excuses a weak band might use to explain away a bad night.
Laurie Anderson at the newly converted Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Providence, RI.
I was a big Anderson fan and as she doesn’t tour that often this was going to be a once in a lifetime thing for me. But the acoustics were so muddled that for most of the show you couldn’t understand what she was saying.
Which wouldn’t have been too bad since Anderson always had a big grab-bag of different instruments that she used in her shows. Not here. It was just … tell an anecdote … play a little on her violin … tell an anecdote … play a little on her violin … for two hours straight. None of the diversity that you found in even one quarter of something like “United States.”
Most boring concert I’d ever been to and a major disappointment.
Elvis Costello at the World Music Theatre (it’s called something else now; can’t remember what) in Tinley Park, IL, somewhere around 1994 or so. Someone gave us the tickets, so I wasn’t out any money or I might have raised a bigger stink.
Crash Test Dummies opened, and weren’t half-bad. Elvis Costello came on, and the sound was so, SO bad I couldn’t understand anything he was singing, and I knew the words. We finally walked out after 4 songs or so. It actually sounded decent in the parking lot, so we sat on the car hood and listened to a bit more, but by then the mood was gone. Absolutely worst sound I’ve ever experienced at a show.
My bad concerts are nothing compared to your stories above, but two that stand out for me are Morrissey’s latest tour at Jones Hall in Houston and Southern Culture On The Skids at the Continental Club in Houston. Both shows had horrific acoustics, which is ironic considering that Jones Hall is where the Houston Symphony performs. Whoever booked Morrissey also didn’t consider that his fans like to rush the stage; Jones Hall had no moat. After two fat goths ran up to hug him one right after the other roughly 40 minutes in, the Moz called it a night.
For Southern Culture, we were up close and personal, but you just couldn’t hear any of the words, or really anything other than the guitar and the bass drum. Not sure if they were too loud or I was just too old.
Jimmy Buffet was my worse concert ever.
It wasn’t Buffet’s fault.
I’m not a huge fan, but the spouse is, so we went.
The tail-gating and puddles of vomit in the parking lot gave some indication as to how things might go. The Parrotheads were in full swing long before the concert began.
Inside the venue, the couple next to us were stinking drunk and bickered bitterly the entire time. Finally, at the end of the show, he began choking her, we stopped him, and security came and took us away.
