What musicians/bands refuse to play their hits in concert?

Reading this thread about Eric Clapton in concert, there is discussion about artists who do not play their older stuff. Is there anything worse than hearing a legacy band say the worlds, “Here’s one from our new album”?

I’ll indulge a rock god the opportunity to slip in a few “pay the bills” moments in effort to sell their new album. But c’mon. Do you really think people filled a 50,000 capacity arena to hear your subpar stuff? We want your megahits. If you are so committed to your “art” (and I respect it if you are), tell people you are not going to play your hits and then sell tickets to a more intimate 5000 seat venue.

What acts are particularly guilty about this? What acts know what the audience wants?

A few exceptions/oddities:

  • I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert and he played very few of his biggest hits. He went very old (pre-massive fame) or very new (21st century stuff). I’ll say this, despite not knowing the words of many of the songs he played, the guy was SUCH a great live performer that he made the show work. But most performers are not Bruce. He owns the arena. I can only imagine how good it would have been had he played more than 2 of his greatest hits.

  • The recent Police reunion concert didn’t really fit either category. They played all of their greatest hits, but they played them in a different manner than originally performed (I think I read they added a Latin fusion flair to their songs…). Kind of screwed up a good thing.

Why do you assume a recent song from an artist with a lot of history is not a good song (you said subpar)?

I saw the monster triple bill of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison in 1998. There were remarkably few radio hits played all night, but Van Morrison was the one who really stuck out. No “Moondance,” no “Brown Eyed Girl,” no “Blue Money,” no “Domino,” no “Wild Night,” no “Jackie Wilson Said”…the closest thing to a hit he sang all night was “Cleaning Windows,” a non-charting single from 1982.

The Grateful Dead didn’t have that many hits (“Sugar Magnolia”. “Casey Jones”, “Touch of Grey” are about it) but they could vary their set list completely from show to show…leaving the “Drums/Space” in the middle of the second set as a constant). Of course the audience was too often stoned to notice.

Bob Dylan is famous for not playing his more familiar songs, and, when he does play them, doing them in versions that are almost unrecognizable.

Van Morrison is probably my favorite living performer (I too flew up to see the two Seattle Van-Bob-Joni shows in 1998, and then headed down to the San Jose gig as well, so I saw 3 of the 7 total nights they played together) and when he is “ON” his concerts are trancendent, hypnotic, absolutely pure magic as he channels an ancient Celtic muse, his passion physically palpable…

That said, he is LEGENDARY for being the most mercurial performer around, and his live shows are the epitome of a rock n roll crapshoot.

I have seen nights where his discomfort/stagefright was so evident that the audience was actually racing for the exits. I have watched him berate his stage crew while he was still on the stage, screaming at them like the worlds biggest prima-donna asshole.

His shows are infamous for their “hit or miss” quality, and I could go on for pages about his music and his performances.

That said, he dosent play the hits with any regularity, and when he does his core audience of cult-like followers are usually dissappointed.

Radiohead doesn’t play “Creep” anymore.

Since there was a core group of thousands who saw virtually every show in any given year, they noticed EVERYTHING (including the most trivial minutiae possible) about each and every Grateful Dead show.

Anything (musical or otherwise) the Grateful Dead did on stage was studied, debated and catalogued under microscopic scrutiny, by a (quite often) stoned, yet incredibly “deadicated” and as some would say, obsessive audience.

Was about to say something similar…

It was commonplace to see audience members jotting down the song names on scratch paper as they were played. Abbreviations became standard (BIODTL=“Beat It On Down The Line”, etc.) carried over to/from “tapers”; illegibility as the night wore on/doses kicked in was imminent.

The searchable catalog is here - DeadBase

I would imagine that we probably crossed paths a few times in the late 80’s and early 1990’s… :wink:

Think he said on the Imus show while promoting the recent Astral Weeks tour that he hates “Brown Eyed Girl” & usually only plays it when he wants to get off stage fast. Saw him do exactly that at a casino show in AC, “Brown Eyed Gir” & off, no encore.:frowning:

I’ve heard that Linda Ronstadt doesn’t sing her old hits in concert.

That’s the one I was at. :cool:

Ronstadt not doing old songs makes sense because all her new music is way different than her pop hits of the 70s and early 80s.

U2 has stopped playing Pride in concert.

And speaking of obsessive fans, here is a website with the set list from every U2 concert ever, dating back to their first performance as Feedback in their high school cafeteria… Link

David Bowie quite publicly “retired” a couple dozen hits in 1990, amid media claims that he would never play any of his old songs again, although Bowie’s own statements left a little more wiggle room. He did avoid playing most of those particular songs for about six or seven years.

Of course lately he’s avoided playing much of anything.

I’ve seen Ben Folds twice and haven’t heard “Underground” or “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces”.

I’ve also seen Dylan twice and in one concert the only one of his big hits I heard was “Lay, Lady, Lay”. In the other one the biggest hit he played was “Quinn the Eskimo”.

What do you mean, “anymore”? They haven’t played “Creep” with any regularity since about 1997. :slight_smile:

(IIRC, the only tour in the past fifteen years in which Radiohead played “Creep” in more than 5% of their sets was the “Hail to the Thief” tour in 2003. Yes, I know too much about this band.)

He does both songs regularly, actually, although he tends to phase them in and out in rotation with other old Ben Folds Five songs, like “Philosophy.” It’s actually a bit depressing to see “Underground” live now… it’s just not the same without Darren Jesse and Robert Sledge. Their replacements don’t do the song justice.

In one concert their replacements were Ben Lee and Ben Kweller, in the other the replacements were the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

In both cases they held their own.

Bobby McFerrin does not perform “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” at all. It was more popular than it deserved, It hink.