In the spirit of the other two ongoing threads, who have you seen perform, either living or dead, that was so godawful/boring/depressing that you wish you *hadn’t *gone to see them?
I’ll start by remembering the time I saw Beck, Bogert and Appice. I figured I would enjoy anything Jeff Beck did, but not so much when he hooked up with these two clowns from the Vanilla Fudge. A turgid, noisy mess.
Plus, the opening act was Black Oak Arkansas, featuring some bozo named “Jim Dandy” leaping around with his shirt off to no particular end.
What say you?
Mods: could you please fix the heading to show italics where I have indicated?
Back in the mid-80s I caught Neil Young outdoors in one of his “weird” phases (International Harvestor Tour). Not your typical Neil concert. Still worth seeing, though. It was the opening act I could have done without: Johnny Paycheck, still trying to milk any money left from his only hit song from years before “Take This Job and Shove It.” On top of that he had the flu and sounded even worse than normal. Thankfully his was a very short set.
ETA: Come to think of it, I saw Sheena Easton at the same venue 3 days later. The things a man will do to get laid.
I’ve been attending concerts since 1966. Nobody has come closer than Mannheim Steamroller. We were gifted tickets several years ago and I have never wanted to leave a show as much as I wanted to leave that one. Unfortunately, my in-laws had gifted us the tix and they were sitting right next to us. At one point, I was counting seats to see if I could figure out EXACTLY how many people the concert hall could hold.
Back in the mid-'90s, we went to a Shirley Jones (w/orchestra) concert. Bad. Left at intermission because it was snowing. We weren’t the only ones. And the tix were free.
Sonic Youth / Pearl Jam in 2000 or 2001 was just awful. Sonic Youth was nails on a chalk board, which I could almost tolerate because I just wanted to see Pearl Jam anyway. But then PJ played like zero songs from their best album, Ten. They played a bunch of “new” crap nobody ever heard before or since.
My wife is an Indigo Girls fan. I took her to an IG concert (even though I can’t stand them). The opening act was just OK, but the IGs were atrocious. My wife agreed.
Floyd’s Animals Tour and Roger Water’s Radio KAOS tour. I found both shows really depressing, probably because I felt Waters had a negative vibe about him in those days.
I’ll say that it was the Motorhead concert I attended in late '85, while I was in college. They played in, literally, a gymnasium, and we were standing about 15 feet away from the amps. it was so loud, and in such a bad setting, acoustically, that it was nothing but 90 minutes of distorted noise.
However, the real reason that I wish I hadn’t attended that concert is that it directly caused me permanent hearing loss. Ever since then, I’ve struggled with hearing clearly in noisy or crowded areas.
I regret buying tickets for the Kids in the Hall 2000 North American Tour, as it turned out 95%+ of the material was word-for-word taken from their TV series.
Back in the day, my friend took bass lessons from Flea. Her parents would let her go to Red Hot Chili Pepper shows featuring said bassist if I went, because I was a nice girl (something like that). So I got dragged to dive bars at the beginning of RHCP’s career to listen to really loud, fairly bad music, and get face stomped when the lead singer stage dove.
Later in life when they had production values and actual music, I would have loved it.
A couple of shows I wish I didn’t see–because of the audience: Steve Miller in San Diego and Peter Frampton at Wente Vineyards. Both times there was a constant chattering going on in the crowd that went on for almost the entire set. Like being in a crowded bar with a live band playing off in the corner.
It bugged Frampton so much at one point he stopped during a song introduction, looked down at some of the kibitzers and said “I’m sorry, it’s MY turn to talk now.” That shut them up. For about 5 minutes.
Later I discovered that the group had broken up and reformed and it sounded like they booked the date under the original name and hadn’t had time to rehearse and polish their act.
Bert Sommer was a one-hit wonder who opened for Loudon Wainwright III. In theory, it was not a bad fit, but Sommer had very little material and it just didn’t work.
Mark-Almond was a a terrible experience. The concert was scheduled for 8 pm, but they didn’t open the doors until 10 on a freezing night. When they finally opened the doors and let people come in, the band came out – and proceeded to do a sound check. When the audience showed their displeasure, they were very snippy about it, and didn’t bother to explain why they showed up two hours late. I barely paid attention to the music at that point.
The Mahavishnu Orchestra. I generally like their stuff, but they played so goddamn loud it made blood spurt out of your ears and eyes. Extremely unpleasant. I saw them again in an outdoor venue, where the sound could dissipate.
I saw them in the early 1990s. The opening act was a Native American woman who banged on a drum and hollered for far too long (yeah, she was some kind of activist) and I too was disappointed with Amy and Emily.
As for regret, I can only think of one, and that was Van Halen in 1982. It would have been OK if they’d actually played some songs, but no, 90% of the show was EVH, who was probably too drunk to know what he was doing, running back and forth across the stage making noise on his guitar. And the people I was with had a fight during intermission and weren’t enjoying the show either, for that reason. I should add that one of my friends smuggled in some joints, and we got high and that was the only time I used any illicit substances at a concert. (Yes, really.)
(1) Peter Frampton, Philadelphia, 1976 (JFK Stadium) - Was only there to see Yes, who followed Frampton (who followed Gary Wright, who followed Pousette-Dart Band)
(2) America, Philadelphia, probably 1977 - Sounded like they put a copy of their Greatest Hits album and were lip syncing. Lifeless.
(3) Sonic Youth, Milwaukee, early 1990s - They were opening for Neil Young. Non-stop feedback, as someone else said like nails on a chalkboard. We (and at least half the audience) left the arena and hung out in the hallways until they were done.
I saw Mazzy Star ages ago and it was boring as hell and I say this as someone who enjoys Mazzy Star/Hope Sandoval. Sandoval came out, draped herself over the mic and mumbled her way through the set while barely looking up and never saying a word to the audience with one exception: the strap on her dress somehow broke or came undone (don’t as me how since she wasn’t moving) and she murmured “'scuse me” and wandered offstage for 5-10 minutes so someone could presumably safety pin it. Then she came back out and resumed her draping and mumbling.
I’ve seen other “atmospheric” musicians before who actually had some stage presence so I don’t feel like this was a case of “well, what did you expect?” just because of her music style. Years later, my sister-in-law was going to see Sandoval perform several states away and I told my wife the story. Later that night, my SIL calls my wife to say “Wow, that suuuuuucked” and had the same criticisms I did, but without the excitement of that safety pin interlude.
The one time I saw Jerry Jeff Walker, he was so drunk he could barely pluck the strings of his guitar. It seemed really insulting to his audience.
Back in the 80s Austin, Lou Ann Barton was very hot for a short while. She showed up to perform at an outdoors concert I attended. The crowd went wild to see her, but she was a nasty bitch to the audience and probably lost a lot of fans, including me.
I don’t remember the group or the name of the opening band, but the opening band truly sucked. After their last song, I think people were applauding at the fact that it was over. The emcee came on stage and yelled, “Who wants more?!!!” There was a smattering of applause, and the emcee stared at the crowd and said, “You’re kidding, right?”
Everything that was in the big 'concert arena" we used to have here. You couldn’t see the performers they were so far away, being shorter than most people, I didn’t even get the chance to not see them in the distance, and the acoustics were atrocious. It took me a few shows to realise that it was a waste of money and that I didn’t enjoy anything about it. I won’t name the last performer I saw, it wasn’t his fault that it was awful, it was the venue’s.
An ex-boss of mine had a few seats in a luxury box at the arena, and whenever some event came through that he wasn’t interested in, he’d let us have the tickets. His rule was that I could take friends, but I had to be there, “in charge.”
Around 20 years ago, there was a tour with Pantera and Slayer. I like some metal, but I’m not much into the hardcore stuff. My little brother, however, adores Slayer, so he begged me to ask for the tickets to the show. I agreed. I thought Slayer actually put on a pretty good show. I developed a raging headache about three songs into Pantera’s set. I tried to stick it out, but the singer was a fucking idiot (though my brother did warn me about that beforehand), and they just weren’t very good. I wound up breaking the rules and waiting outside for my brother (who didn’t stick around for the whole show, either).