I saw Melissa Etheridge open for Little Feat.
I won’t say she blew them off the stage, but even after an hour long* “Dixie Chicken” encore, all anyone was talking about was her.
- Well, at least fifteen minutes
This is secondhand, but in the liner notes for the Gang of Four’s “A Brief History of the 20th Century”, Greil Marcus mentions going to see The Buzzcocks, and Gang of Four, whom he had not seen previously, was the opener. He left before The Buzzcocks came on, feeling it was pointless to stick around after Gang of Four got done blowing his mind.
I honestly can’t remember what the audience as a whole thought, but when I saw Butthole Surfers open for Flaming Lips open for Stone Temple Pilots - when STP first blew up MTV with that “I am I am I am I wanna get next to you” song, so they were the new hot thing at the time - all I could do afterward was try to find different ways to quantify just how much more mindblowing the Butthole Surfers were than any other live band I’d seen in my life. It still reigns high as one of my favorite live experiences (though the Flaming Lips were pretty good too). It was just as intense as tripping, while being completely sober. STP were utterly forgettable and clearly less experienced, by contrast.
In a similar vein, much more recently, the Melvins played with Jello Biafra, opening with a set on their own before they played backup for a rousing set of Dead Kennedys classics. I was a decades-long fan of DK & Jello and didn’t know much about the Melvins, but I realized during the Jello-less opening set that I would be perfectly happy if Mr. Biafra called in sick and didn’t show up at all. They were capital-A Amazing.