Your favorite types of shows to see
I go see a pretty wide variety of shows, but most are at small bars/indie clubs. I’ve seen shows with really quiet audiences, such as Low or Damien Rice (although the fans call out stuff between songs quite a bit). I’ve seen shows with incredibly wild, rowdy audiences, like most of the all ages shows I saw growing up as a teen in Seattle.
(Seattle was known for it’s crazy audiences. If you watch Pearl Jam’s video for “Evenflow,” that’s exactly how Seattle shows were. That wasn’t being put on for the camera.)
I think the funnest shows are the heavy metal shows. Specifically, the all ages metal shows. The kids go crazy. Stage diving, crowd surfing, moshing. The energy of it is just so fun.
Some bands have really die hard fans that go crazy, old and young alike. Two I’m thinking of specifically: High on Fire, a stoner/doom metal band, and the Melvins, a, um…well the Melvins are in a category all their own. (But I’ll say this much, they’re the heaviest band in existence.)
I just found out one of my favorite bands from my teen years, the Hoodoo Gurus, are touring the west coast. I haven’t been this excited about a show for a long time! (And I’m seeing one of my favorite artists night after tomorrow—Jackson Browne.) The one time I saw the Hoodoo Gurus counts as one of the funnest shows I’ve ever been to. It’s the only show I’ve ever seen where I knew the words to every song that was played, opening band and headliner, alike. (The Young Fresh Fellows, a fave Seattle band I saw countless times, opened.)
So I also enjoy the shows where you can sing along. Stadium shows are good for this, when the whole audience knows the words and sings along. But I don’t go to many stadium shows—too expensive.
But my number one show of last year was Damien Rice. I have a thing for performances that are really emotionally intense. That’s why I think Damien, the Frames, Calexico, and Low are some of the best live bands around.
Posted on February 20, 2007, in Live Shows, Music. Bookmark the permalink. 10 Comments.
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For me, it’s best when you have an audience that really cares about the musicians and pays attention. That’s part of what bothers me about larger arenas and bigger bands — you get a lot of guys just hanging out fiddling with their Blackberries or whatever.
I need the sound to be good. Arenas are rubbish unless you’re on the floor; small clubs can be rubbish if the sound system is crap. So, I like the “medium-gig.” Low in DC with about 500 people was perfect.
500 people is a small club to me. A medium-sized venue would be a 1,500-3,000 person theater.
Most of the small venues I see bands in do have good sound. But then a lot of the bands I see in small bars are doom metal bands, and they’re more interested in volume than sound quality.
Small in Vienna (like Headlights) was 30!
Yeah, I’ve been to shows where the only people there, besides me and maybe a handful of others, were the other bands on the bill. They all basically rotated and played for each other!
But I consider anything under about 1,000 a good size, small-venue-wise. Small enough that I can still get a spot against the stage.
I have not been to many shows in my life. But they almost all were in venues where the sound sucked.
I saw B-52s at the Concord Pavillion. The audience was fun, but the sound wasn’t great.
Cocteau Twins at the Warfield — I’ve heard that it’s not a bad location, but the sound mix was terrible and for a band like that it was deadly.
I saw EMF outdoors at Stanford U. It was actually a decent, energetic performance, but I wasn’t really in to the band and they got attacked by bees and only played 3 songs.
I saw a bunch of bands at the Shoreline Amphitheatre — one of those radio festivals. The crowd was rather listless, but Green Day, Rancid and James had fantastic (albeit brief) sets. The headliners not so much. And the sound got swallowed a bit. Better than an arena if you were up close, but useless far away (and even though we had some good seats, my friends insisted on going up to the lawn for half the time).
I’ve expressed before my disappointment with the sound mix at the New Order show I as at the Henry J. Kaiser in Oakland. The crowd also was rather disengaged.
Oddly enough, the best show I’ve seen is the Cure at the San Jose Arena — the Shark Tank. The sound was loud but not muddy. We were on the floor about 20 rows back so the crowd was totally devoted, totally in to it. And Robert Smith flat out delivered an amazing vocal performance.
The first time I saw the Cure was one of the loudest shows I’ve ever been to. My ears were still ringing the next day. And it was awesome.
The second time, they’d gotten more popular, and I mostly remember all the teenage girls screaming. It was weird.
I haven’t been to an arena show for a long time. I don’t have fond memories of the sound.
My ideal venue for most music would be really small (~500) with chairs and everyone sitting down. But that doesn’t really happen with the kind of music I like to see, even though nobody really dances or does anything that they couldn’t just as easily do sitting down. But it’s OK. Standing up works too.
Ideally, Eric Clapton and I would be by ourselves in a room with a wide variety of his historic guitars and I’d be two feet away from him and he’d let me interrupt him while he was playing to ask “how did you play that chord?” and he’d say “well I usually play it this way but I remember when Jimi said I should try doing this” and then …
(SNAPS BACK TO REALITY)
I like medium venues like the Warfield in San Francisco…
I’ve seen shows at Henry J Kaiser, Shoreline, Oakland, Stanford, all that, but the suckiest sound ever has to be Shoreline. When they first built it, it wasn’t so bad, but since it’s on the bay, the sound really carries, and the folks living across the water totally complained, and in the years ensuing, the sound just got quiet and muddier.