Never had a bad experience with a big name act, but (like many) I got burned by a local band. It was a friend-of-some-friends thing and for two hours I had to watch three women about 20, with extremely long blonde hair, thrash out incompetent and deafening noise. (The fembot type, in that era, where their music* was defined by shouting out words like VAGINA! and CLITORIS! and PERIOD!) The highlight of their act, performed once per song*, was to shake their long hair in front of them like a waterfall.
They looked just like three Cousin It’s.
So they are forever stored in my memory under the name “The She-Its.”
Back in 1999, I saw the band Acumen Nation on campus at Northern Illinois University and it was awful. I can’t really blame the band because the venue was the worst I’ve ever seen - just a big room in the student center. It had all the atmosphere of a classroom. The crowd was pretty small and sitting in chairs situated entirely around the periphery of the room. They were an electronic rock band and at that point, just had all the electronics on tape while they played as a live rock band. They were playing a lot of new stuff and everybody just sat there looking bored.
At some point, the lead singer said “Do you guys have any requests?” And someone on the back said “Anything from the first album.” And the lead singer said “Oh … we didn’t bring any of that stuff.”
Bob Dylan, I don’t know, maybe 5-10 years ago. He acted like he honestly didn’t give a flying fuck about being there, did not introduce a single band member, zero audience interaction, mumbled through his songs with new, unrecognizable tunes, and generally was there to cash a big check. As much as I admire his work and have nearly every CD, his live show sucks ass.
My ex wife made me go to see Paul Young, who was a heart throb pop act at the time. Paramount Theater, Seattle, 1985.
SHRIEKING teenage girls at a decibel level that would drown out Deep Purple forced me to spend the concert sitting in the lobby with fingers in my ears. So long and painful.
The Replacements, Lawndale Arts Center, Houston, around 1982. I’ve told this story before, but when I arrived at the venue, I had to step around a drunk passed out in the mud next to the doorway. This turned out to be Paul Westerberg.
The band got going more than a bit late (I still remember the guitarist, a tall blond dude with a crewcut who was wearing a victorian-era widow’s dress). Westerberg, who was still falling-down drunk, had considerable difficulty remembering his own lyrics, and a dispute erupted almost immediately between the band and the venue’s management, resulting in the power being cut off about four songs into the set, at which point a chair-throwing riot broke out. This really should have been Number 1, but I have to admit the whole thing was fairly entertaining, if not in the way intended.
2 . Todd Rundgren, at a fieldhouse on the campus OF the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, ca. 1977. The place really wasn’t set up for an amplified concert; the sound was utterly awful, just an echoing hash of discordant noise. He had this elaborate stage setup based on an Egyptian pyramid theme that could have been lifted from “This is Spinal Tap”. Basically just a totally unsuitable venue for what they were trying to do.
ZZ Top, Johnstown (PA) War Memorial Arena, about 1975. 8000 drunk, incoherently screaming, vomiting louts, and one of the most off-key, shambling performances I’ve ever seen from a supposedly professional band. One wonders how many takes were necessary to get the relatively tight sound they had on their studio albums, because they frankly sounded as if it was the first time they’d ever been on stage together.
The crowd really took the cake, however. Three chords into the first song, a lit M-80 sailed up onto the stage and exploded a few feet in front of the bass player’s face, sending him back into his stack of amps. The lights went out, and everyone assumed that was the end of that show, but a few seconds later they came back up and the band played on, announcing “We’ve seen worse”. Meanwhile, some blind-drunk yoyo sitting right behind us alternated between yelling "YYYEEEAAAHHHH!!! and puking his guts out at random moments, for nearly the entire show.
I had a date with me who was attending her first concert ever, and I suspect the events of this night had some influence on her decision a few months later to join a fundamentalist Christian sect.
Two spring to mind. First was Ozzy Osbourne in 95 or 96, just before the Sabbath reunion. When “Paranoid” isn’t recognisable until halfway through, there’s something wrong. Geezer was there on bass, so I spent most of the gig watching him play, seeing Ozzy was just painful. I’ve not really listened to anything from him since, but the new Sabbath album sounds pretty good, so maybe he’s finally got it back.
Secondly, The Levellers and Rev Hammer acoustic. Yes, the show’s called “Drunk In Public”, but the first time I saw them they were enjoyably tipsy and lose. The second time, they were all too drunk to sit down successfully, let alone stand, let alone play or sing.
As for Dylan, I’ve never seen him, but from the bootlegs I’ve heard, his good shows are astonishingly good. The bad shows, though, seem to have been well described here. When he’s on form, he knows exactly how to use what’s left of his voice.
I’ve mentioned this before (and I know there’s a doper who had the opposite experience)…the worst show I ever saw was Led Zeppelin’s Day on the Green gig, Oakland 1977. Rick Derringer and Judas Priest were good, but LZ was very late and very sloppy. There was a lot of drama swirling around the whole tour, and it seemed to all come to a head in Oakland. It proved to be their last show in the USA.
A couple years ago, Wilco did a series of “shrinking” shows in Chicago where they started at the Opera House and then every other night or so would play at a smaller and smaller venue (Riviera, The Vic, Metro, and Lincoln Hall). Basically going from a 4500 capacity venue and ending up at one that can only hold 4-500. We somehow lucked into getting tickets to the first four of these shows. First of all, the band was incredible as always. No complaints. However, the last night of our run of shows was at Metro which holds around a thousand people. The place was obviously sold out, but it also felt quite oversold because in the upstairs balcony area, they had most of it blocked off for band guests and radio VIPs. And those areas were empty because everybody wanted to be down on the main floor. The band was great, but the crowd was an absolute shit show. You couldn’t move anywhere, it was difficult to even see the band (being stuck in the rear), and the place was lousy with asshole drunks. I didn’t enjoy the show at all, even though I was seeing my favorite band in a tiny venue. Bad night.
Richard Betts Ocean City, NJ several years ago. Two buds and I walked out after about four or five songs. Unbelievably loud. And we are all Allman Bothers fans. My one friend saw Dickey smoking a joint just before the show and he seemed pretty drunk as well.
If we can shoehorn live musicals in here, my parents-in-law paid for us to go to a supposedly wonderful theater experience in Tennessee. It was ‘Oklahoma’ and it was all very over the top and the lead actors were chewing on the scenery so badly, it was amazing there was anything left. I was the drama director for my high school for 10 years, and I was cringing at most of it. The clincher was when the sheriff walked on stage as if his balls were sunburned, and unfortunately for my composure, he was a black man. I leaned over to my son-in-law and quoted “Blazing Saddles” – The sheriff is a n*****! We both dissolved into giggles and my husband nearly kicked us out. The only enjoyable part of the whole thing.
Most wretched concert overall: I went to a Pat Green concert at Billy Bob’s in Ft. Worth about a decade ago, and after I actually agreed to go into such a hick joint in the first place, to see a country act, and spent nearly an hour going to Fort Worth, Pat Green played like half a song and bailed on the concert. We got rain checks, but it definitely sucked.
Worst concert I’ve been to that actually happened: Cowboy Mouth, also about a decade ago, but after Billy Bob’s. For whatever reason, they played the Richardson Wildflower festival, and had a crowd comprised of old-farts and non-drunk college students who didn’t get into the crowd participation of the show. It was just strange and kind of awkward. Which is even stranger, because typically Cowboy Mouth puts on a terrific high-energy show with a lot of crowd participation. I think there had been some band changes as well, and their sound was off, which didn’t help either.
I immediately bought pricey tickets when I saw an ad for:
PETER GABRIELwomad festival thinking I’d be seeing a big production show with all the lights, smoke, f/x.
Nope, it was an all day lame hippy world music fest that you had to sit through all day since there was no assigned seating. Peter Gabriel kind of made an ‘appearance’ at the end 12 hours later to sing a couple of his songs with the lights on up on a bare stage. Lame.
Megadittos for Dylan. And don’t give me that line about feeding off the audience. The show I saw a couple of years ago was at a college, where the audience was prepared to revere him. He would start a song and they would lean forward to be amazed, then fall back as the noise on stage was utterly unintelligible. Sometimes after five minutes or so, a few notes of a recognizable tune would leak out sparking a smattering of applause. He kept teasing the audience with that small hope of hearing a Dylan song from Dylan, enough that the entire audience didn’t walk out en masse. No other concert was ever that soul-suckingly insulting.
Sometimes a concert is bad despite the performers. Many decades ago I attended separate concerts by Steve Stills and Van Morrison at a now-vanished place called the Dome, basically a concrete bomb shelter that normally housed hockey games. By experimentation I found that if I walked to a spot a few feet away from the rear wall, I heard something approximating music from the waves bouncing off the circular wall and concentrating like a whispering chamber. Stills stopped playing at one point and shouted “this is the worst fucking venue I’ve ever played in” to the cheers of the crowd. Why I went back for a second plunge into misery can only be explained by the words “Van Morrison” but it really was the venue and not Stills.
Mitch Hedberg was either so drunk or so stoned the time I saw him that half his words came out slurred or not at all. Which, you know, sorta defeats the whole point of comedy.
I don’t buy it. Pretty much anybody going to a Dylan concert since the mid-'70s is going to be a big fan who’s stoked to see him, because who the hell else would want to go see Bob Dylan at this point? You can’t blame the audience for his shitty performances any more than you can blame the audience for Axl Rose’s temper tantrums. I mean, there was no unresponsive audience in the studio for his horrible Christmas album, was there?
I’m not sure I would have left, but I can get alongside the poster’s opinion. Watching someone on stage that is Just So Full of Themselves can be an unpleasant experience no matter how good the other aspects are.
The opposite are shows like a John Mellencamp concert I saw in his early days - he practically did his sets while lounging with the audience. No distance, no glass wall at all.
And it gives me a huge tickle to tell this story. Near the end, he said, “You know, one day you’re going to be telling your grandkids you saw me live, here. (pause) (holds hand out flat about four feet off the stage) And he was a little, tiny fucker!”
Too perfect.