I was never a fan so I hadn’t bothered to check how original a line-up it was… Anyway, it seemed note perfect, and utterly soulless. And as my notes say, having a five octave range doen’t mean you have to use it all.
But, as I said, we went to see the support, Curved Air, and what we caught of them was excellent.
Well, the original line-up was all gone by the time Annie joined, so checking wouldn’t have helped much! 
I would have liked to have seen Curved Air myself. I had no idea they were still around in any form.
Yeah, Sonja’s the key survivor but most of the other main players, except Francis Monkman, have done Curved Air gigs in the last few years. Florian, the drummer, was the other mainstay but he’s now left. Darryl Way plays/played gigs with them occasionally and Kirby Gregory was with them at the gig I’m talking about. Other musicians have been playing in the band for years, but not from the classic days of the early/mid 70s. Mainly the classics, but still lots of room for improv sections in the songs.
They mainly do small festivals and small/medium halls these days.
Every year from 1992 to 2012, there was a free outdoor concert in Times Square called Broadway on Broadway to kick off the new theatre season. I saw some great performances there, but a few clunkers. The one that stands out the most was Sebastian Bach’s Gethesame from Jesus Christ Superstar. It was pathetic.
Bill Maher, live.
I was never a huge fan of his, but I did enjoy politically incorrect when I caught it, and some of his stand up specials that I had seen were amusing. I watched Real Time when it came out and for a while after.
He was doing a tour, and coming to my town, so my friend and I figured we’d go check him out.
I did not enjoy his performance at all. Partly we were early on the tour, so maybe he hadn’t polished his material yet, but largely because it was recycled jokes from Real Time monologues that I had already seen, and I can’t stand to see performers repeat material.
That was about when he started down his descent of smug self aggrandizing as well, and that wasn’t all that much fun at all.
Back in 198…5, I want to say, Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis toured together. On the night I saw them, Fats played first. He had a 10-or-12-piece band. Fats sounded great; the band was tight; the energy level for the whole performance was off the charts. During the last number, Fats and all the band members came out into the crowd, playing and singing in the aisles, dancing, shaking hands. It was one of the best music shows I’ve ever seen.
Then, after a short intermission, Jerry Lee Lewis came out and absolutely put the room to sleep. It was just him, a piano, and one backup singer. Most of the material was from his country music days, and was slow and dull. He rarely acknowlwdeged the audience, and at one point he yelled at a stagehand for not bringing him water fast enough. He seemed like he’d rather have been anywhere in the world other than that stage. By the time he finally got to his recognizable hits, his heart clearly wasn’t in it anymore. Yeah, he kicked over the piano bench during Great Balls of Fire, but it was rote and mechanical, and then he was gone. A huge disappointment.
[Moderating]
No, we can’t. Tags don’t work in title lines. I can remove the formatting entirely, or I can do something like “…wish you hadn’t seen”. Let me know what you want and I’ll do it.
Bob Dylan playing on the esplanade at Stirling Castle. He turned in the laziest “Will this do?” performance I’ve ever seen*. Incoherent mumbling from start to, well, we left after an hour.
- and I’ve seen The Fall play where Mark was so pissed he could barely stand. At least that had an element of reckless danger about it - will there or won’t there be an actual fight with the drummer, an on-stage band member sacking, perhaps?
Early 90’s. I knew a guy who did freelance parking for concerts at a local ballpark. He would hire out friends to do the dirty work (guiding cars in the parking lot) for the pay of getting into the concert for free. It was a pretty sweet deal. I saw a few pretty good shows there (Def Leppard was good, as was Bon Jovi, then there was Stevie Windwood, James Taylor, Moody Blues, a few others).
And then there was The Beach Boys. Good god was that interminable. First of all, I worked that day with the usual crew of friends - nobody cared about The Beach Boys, I guess. Go figure. Most of the time working the lot for a big show, kids would share beer and weed and blow and whatever you wanted to get into. Not so much for a Beach Boys show. I didn’t get anything from anyone. The only thing I did get was sunburned. So I go into the show and walk up to the beer concession and was refused service because the guy thought I was too drunk already. I hadn’t had a drop up to then. Anyway, I scored a beer from a different vendor and found a spot in the bleachers and settled in. Fine, I was already cranked up on the cynical pissed off meter and I was in my mid-20’s at the time, but I was not prepared for the sea of old fuckers (50’s, heh, I’m 53 now) swaying unrhythmically right in time with Mike Love up on stage, whipping frisbees and beach balls all over the place.
All in all I felt like I was in the middle of a late night infomercial reminiscing about all those keen hits from the past, but through like a cheese cloth, because the sound sucked so bad and nobody up on stage was really trying in the first place. I left after three songs.
All I can come up with is the artist. Place and date are uncertain. Gregg Allman and a “support band” (no names I can recall now) were at a Nashville venue – I’m thinking either War Memorial or another large Nashville hall – and they were just too bloody LOUD!! I mean that “bloody” part as my ears were bleeding before we finally bailed out. I still like Gregg’s music but on something where I can adjust the volume!
That’s the only bad experience I’ve had with “live music.”
I saw a singer-songwriter at a great venue in Salt Lake City. Just him and his guitar.
He couldn’t remember the lyrics of his own music. The audience had to fill in for him.
I was upset that I didn’t leave mid song.
I can’t remember his name.
Could you capitalize HADN’T? Thanks!
:smack:
Long ago, after a college football game (major crowd, huge stadium), The Beach Boys were going to play for free. The stadium announcer kept hyping it, “Be sure to stay in your seats for the Fabulous Beach Boys! Blah, Blah, Blah”
The game ended, and everybody left. They had bus-loads of school kids and herded them up to the front of the stage and prompted them to scream and shout.
It was embarrassing. Luckily, I escaped before they took the stage.
Back in the early 90s, maybe 1992/3, a gig was announced to happen in a town nearby by the “Ginger Baker Group”. Now the venue was a local youth club in our very rural region of Germany, a venue where local bands played, but a name like Ginger Baker was unthinkable for a spot like that. The problem was: in 1992, nobody here cared for or had even ever heard of one “Ginger Baker” except for all the local musicians and die-hard rock fans like me. So that’s what the audience looked like, maybe 80-100 people in a cellar room of our youth center, half of them drummers themselves. Ginger Baker came up on stage (or what counted for a stage there, a niche in the basement room) with two Swedish guys playing bass and guitar and they play something like Jazz-Rock. The audience was kind and gentle, but everybody in the room knew that it was a farce. After about 45 minutes, Ginger Baker said: “We are very disappointed. We go.”, grabbed his wine bottle and left. What a strange experience.
Went to a Kenny Rogers show in Vegas about a decade ago at a Vegas casino because I got free tickets to it. The show was great with 20 songs being played and he sounded as good as I remembered but he did a bizarre thing where he abridged his own songs by about a minute, so stuff like the middle refrains were cut. It was rather expertly done because I didn’t notice until a few songs in since it didn’t interfere with the melody but man looking back what an incredibly lazy thing to do.
I was drug to a Jean Michel Jarre show back around 1978 in San Diego. One man show with 10 different keyboards and a drum machine. We left before the end of the show, many other had already left before us.
Tim Allen at an Indian casino about 5 years ago. He started the show claiming he did a clean show without swearing then spent 20 minutes ragging on Obama. I got up to leave with others and he noticed. He made a snide comment about liberals can’t face the facts. One guy that was leaving hollered back “What facts, all I hear is a bunch of diarrhea coming from your mouth”. I was among many others that were flipping him off. I refuse to watch anything that fucktard does or ever did.
I’ve been to a lot of concerts, but I struggled to come up with my one example. And it really wasn’t even the band’s fault.
I saw Deep Purple in the late 70s. At the time they were considered the loudest group around. We had horrible seats and I had a very painful, throbbing toothache.
I just wanted the show to end so I could go home. The lowlight was the organ solo on the song ‘Lazy’, which seemed to go on for a half hour that appeared at the height of my toothal discomfort. I can still the unending organ riff in my mind. Up the scale, down the scale, back up the scale…
Oh wait, I saw **Asia **after winning some tickets. Never a fan, that was pretty bad too. No toothache, though.
mmm
Oh, yeah-- a friend once won four tickets to the nosebleed section of a Neil Diamond concert. This was in the 90s, when he was past his prime, but still had his devotees. Old women (well, OK, women in their 60s or so), kept walking up to the stage and laying flowers on it. These were people who had paid I-don’t-know-how-much for tickets actually on the stage. Diamond was on the stage on a platform, and there were about 20 folding chairs on either side of the platform, for people with way too much money. My seats were so far away, he was a tiny little dot to me. Not that I cared. I accepted free tickets for the sake of spending time with friends, but I wouldn’t have paid 50 cents to see him, if I’d had to pay.
I don’t hate Neil Diamond, and when his songs come up on an oldies station, I’m OK with it-- there are songs I turn off, and none of them are his, but I have to say, after that concert, I had really had my fill of Neil Diamond.
Another show I saw that sucked was The Police, on their reunion tour, at the Boston Garden, or TD Bank Garden. The show may have been pretty good, but not from where I was sitting.
The whole night was kind of a cluster fuck. I had scored the tickets through a work connection months previous for cheap, and I got what I paid for. Leading up to the show, the friend I had invited forgot about it and blew me off. I ended up taking my brother-in-law. When we got there, the only thing we knew was that we had tickets in the upper tiers. We asked an usher to help us out and he pointed us toward the escalator leading to the luxury boxes. We thought we scored. Not so much. They led us up to that level alright, and then up another flight, practically in the rafters, past the video control rooms and utility closets to a row of folding metal chairs set up along the rail overlooking the arena. Literally, there was not another seat in the entire place that was farther from the stage than mine. And the audio just didn’t make it up there. We could recognize the songs by their rhythm and muddled chords and notes floating up, but lyrics were Charlie Brown trombone. Between song banter was wah-wah-wah wah-wah-wah-wah, wah-wah. If there weren’t giant videotron jobbies on the either side of the stage the entire night would have been a perfect waste.
I’ve got to assume that this was some sort of tribute to The Moodies, or a rip-off of their name for a completely different musical show. I can’t imagine that the mid-80s Moodies would do this kind of show (though four guys would be right if you count just the original members). In any case, this grabbed my attention, as I am a long-time Moodies fan and saw them many times in the 80s.