She did a tour that was promoting some… book of children’s poems? Album of children’s songs based on poems? I don’t even remember but I spent nearly two hours in the Chicago Theater watching her yammer material that absolutely no one sees Natalie Merchant to hear.
To be fair, after a lengthy intermission she said something like “Ok, so you allowed me to indulge in what I wanted so now let me give you back what you wanted” and did another hour-plus set of her solo album stuff and a couple 10,000 Maniacs songs but it was a long road to get there.
I once saw Joan Jett open up for the Jerry Garcia Band, it would have been early '80’s at either the Capital Theater in Passaic, NJ or in Port Chester, I don’t remember as we frequented both…it was such an unusual pairing, she was just loud, they sounded terrible, it was almost embarrassing as the promoter who thought that one up totally misjudged the crowd.
But the worst show I ever saw was a performance by one of my favorite guitarists, Jorma Kaukonen, he came to Ithaca in '83-ish, I think I was a junior, played at a little bar downtown, it was just him on an electric guitar sitting on a stool…or attempting to, I think this must have at or near the depth of his alcohol and drug use, he would occasionally fall off the stool, started and stopped songs, forgot lyrics and what singing he could do was just garbled nonsense…
I have seen him numerous times since, solo as well as acoustic and electric Hot Tuna, totally different, amazing guitar player, he’s pretty outspoken as to his addiction, writes an occasional blog entry on his website about his continued recovery, I’ll see them at the Egg this fall.
Gallagher. Ever gone to a stand up comedian show and not had a laugh? That’s what happened when I saw Gallagher live. It seemed he had a new cable special every other month or so back in the 1980s and they were always decent. But, at least for the show I saw him at, he fell flat and we weren’t close enough to really enjoy the watermelon smashing.
I saw Chuck Berry perform after either an Orioles game or a Colts game in the old Memorial Stadium, would have been mid-70’s, and they did the same with the Beach Boys around the same time…both were unremarkable, the sound was terrible, and it seemed like they both played maybe 4 or 5 songs, wasn’t a complete concert…pretty underwhelming…Chuck did play to the crowd, but you could barely hear him in the upper deck…doubt it sold any more tickets, in fact, it seemed most of the people left while they were setting up…
I really hate to say it because I adore their (his) music, but Assemblage 23.
We went to see them (him–the band is really just Tom Shear, but he adds musicians for the live shows) in San Francisco, and I was so excited because I love practically everything they ever put out.
Unfortunately, the show was too loud, very muddy (this is an act with some great, thought-provoking lyrics–would have been nice to hear them), and half the time Tom was off-key. I’m not sure if he was having a bad night or if he’s just much better in the studio than live, but we left early and didn’t regret it. I still buy every album he puts out, though.
VNV Nation, by contrast (similar type of music) is *amazing *live.
I went (got dragged) to a Def Leppard concert about 20 years ago by my ex.
Their lyrics are meaningless fluff. The music is predictable and formulaic. Of course I’m not a fan and didn’t want to go in the first place. But I put on my brave face and pretended to enjoy myself.
For some time (through the 1990s, at least), Ron Gallagher, the brother of the famous one (full name: Leo Gallagher) did comedy tours that apparently used a lot of his brother’s schticks, including the Sledge-o-Matic. At first, Ron did this with his brother’s blessing, but as time went on, Ron (or his promoters) increasingly obfuscated the fact that he wasn’t the original Gallagher. It looks like this finally ended when Leo sued him.
So, depending on when you saw him, you may not have seen the Gallagher that you had planned on seeing.
I thought that Kyari Pamyu Pamyu would be wacky and fun live.
Very bland show. She was clearly bored out of her wits (if there was ever any question whether she was manufactured by a producer, seeing her live cleared that answer right away) and outside of dressing dancers up in cutesy/weird outfits, there wasn’t anything particularly outree about the whole thing.
I was only expecting to last a couple songs - it’s not really my thing - but I didn’t make it through the first.
I saw Rush at the Gorge in 2008. Not exactly a regret so much as poor planning on my part, but I didn’t realize how far the Gorge is from Olympia, hadn’t booked a hotel or a campsite, and had an 8 AM shift the next morning, so I wound up not making it home until nearly 4 AM and barely getting any sleep that night.
In 2004 I won a radio call-in and got tickets to see the Dead. I wasn’t familiar with their material at the time and was completely straight-edge, so I wound up sitting there mostly bored for about four hours.
Culture Club, .ca. 1998 at San Diego State’s outdoor amphitheatre, was awful. Boy George’s range had dropped about two octaves and the music wasn’t really re-keyed. An embarrassing mess.
Indigo Girls, 1995 and 99: boooooring. In both cases a friend had tix and begged me to go; I didn’t really like them before, their stuff all sounds the same to me.
Tracey Chapman, again at SDSU in '98, literally stared down at her feet the entire time. Fantastic voice, no showmanship, may as well just listen to the CD.
So I’m not a total curmudgeon: bands I’ve seen at least twice and years/decades apart that still rock it:
-Annie Lenox (Eurythmics and solo)
-Depeche Mode
-Howard Jones
-Tears for Fears
I have a theory that there are performers where your ticket price is a 50/50 gamble. As an example: Are you going to see Drunk Dylan who doesn’t give a crap about himself or the material, let alone the audience? Or do you get to see Dazzling Dylan?
We knew that going in, and by surprise we got to see Delightful Dylan. He put on a great show, and changed up his lyrics and styles (“Wait, what’s this Power Sax Motown number? I think… yeah, it’s Just Like a Woman. Wow.”)
But I have friends who saw Drunk Dylan. Wasted a lot of money, and an evening of their lives.
Ya take yer chances, folks… Van Morrison, Van Halen, Van Zant, Vans Warped Tour (sorry), Van McCoy, Van Fleet (she’s always great, but I couldn’t resist)… it’s a 50/50 chance…
I know someone who’s German Shepard was run over by BB’s tour bus in Wabuska on one of those trips to Reno.
It was never about ticket sales. The concert was free and they were trying to do some promotion for “The Boys” (some kind of video shoot or TV special), and were hoping some of the football fans would stick around to make it look like they drew a crowd (also, the bused in kiddies). I seem to recall the game was a massacre, like 72-0 (slight exaggeration, sue me!), and a bunch of folks were gone by the start of the forth.
My wife was a massive Whitney fan, we made a whole weekend of it for the concert in a regional wine growing area. (Think of it like an Oz equivalent of Napa Valley). The concert was a disaster, I’m sure she was as high as a kite that night, she spent ages just rambling on about nothing really. An hour into her appearing on stage and we’d got maybe two half-assed songs, and a third she basically just bailed out of mid-tune. We walked out, at my wife’s suggestion by the way.
Saw him at a small Pittsburgh venue. During his sound check he was in a bitchy mood, complaining loudly about the venue, his mic, the soundboard guy, etc. He was just being plain nasty. Eventually heckling happened; I’m proud to say that I started it and continued to fan the flames. He finally walked out, cancelling the show.
After I got home I found his website online. I wrote an honest, scathing review of the “show”. He wrote a reply pretty much in realtime, calling me all kinds of obscenities. By the next morning my review and his replies were gone.
Went to see Garrison Keillor a few years back with the family. I enjoyed A Prairie Home Companion occasionally, and thought seeing something like that live would be interesting. Well, it wasn’t “something like that”. It was a couple of hours of him. Alone. Sitting in a chair and telling long, depressing, rambling stories about growing up in the Minnesota countryside, and none of his stories had a touch of humor or excitement to them. Imagine paying someone 40 bucks to listen to them ramble on and on about how boring and hard their childhood was.
I saw them in 2000, at Glastonbury. I was a big fan at the time, they were the main reason I went to the festival, and the least memorable bit of the whole event. I had the same opinion; not bad, just not really anything. I can’t remember what they played, just that Trent Reznor’s hairdo wasn’t hiding his bald patch as well as he thought.
I don’t wish I hadn’t seen them (aside from anything else, I probably wouldn’t have gone if they hadn’t been playing, and the rest of the festival was kinda the highlight of my teen years), but if you got a bunch of people in a park and played a previous show of theirs on a decent size screen, you’d have the exact same effect as that live show.
(slight exaggeration, sue me!), and a bunch of folks were gone by the start of the forth.