Concert Fatigue
October 17, 2005
I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a theory that the older you get, the more tiresome club shows become. I’ve been to three shows in the past month, a particularly high ratio of shows to days, considering Buffalo doesn’t offer many drive-worthy gigs anymore, and I’ll tell you, as good as the feature act may be, I’m starting to come away with more negatives about the concert going experience than positives. Let’s start with last Friday, when I had planned my whole day around three happenings; one, a critics screening of George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.”, which went well, two, a few hours of poker at the Seneca Niagara casino in Niagara Falls, which also went well, after a grueling start, and finally, a nighttime concert at Club Infinity with my favorite Canadian rock star, Matthew Good. Sounds like a decent, fun filled day, and it was, until the show, when the 8 o’clock start time was pushed back nearly an hour, God knows why, and after two long, boring opening acts, Matt Good finally took the stage around 11 p.m. to an appreciative audience sore from standing around waiting hours for the act they actually paid good money to see. I try to avoid opening acts as much as possible, but there’s nothing you can do about a start time getting pushed back except stand there and bare it, slowly medicate your aching back with overpriced Canadian beer, wish your Chuck Cons had more padding for your burdened feet, and think about the time you could have been using to build your stack at the casino, because any good poker player knows, a big chip stack is a nice intimidator, and one of the keys to poker is whether or not you have what it takes to intimidate weaker players into giving you their chips. Poker isn’t the focus of this rant, so we’ll leave it at that, and get back to a few of the more annoying aspects of weekend club concerts.
The biggest problem I have with jam-packed club shows, despite the difficult task of listening to unknown opening bands, is the waiting; it seems like no matter what you do at a concert, it always involves waiting. You want to get a beer, good luck with that crowd, you want to go to the bathroom, get in line (the end result of that is usually pretty sleazy as well), you want to get to your car after the show, sidle up like cattle in a pen and patiently push forward as 1,100 desperate people all try to cram through the theater’s one open exit. By the end of the Matthew Good show, after two-hours of standing in an increasingly tired crowd watching no-name wus rock opening acts, and despite a riveting, beautiful set of songs by Good, I had had so much trouble standing and waiting that, hunched over like a hipster Quasimodo, I could barely ease myself into my Mustang for the hour ride home. On the plus side, I can now die happy that I’ve seen Matthew Good sing “Avalanche” live in concert, his best song off of one of the greatest Canadian epics of all time, but the poor management at Club Infinity (one exit? Not good), the less than polished bongo stylings of little known opening acts, the unflattering product of my long, dried-out hair and the stale hot air of a nightclub, and my aching 25-year old lower back, tells me I might be losing the passion I once had for small venue rock concerts. Not that large venue shows are much better, because they have their faults as well, but at least if I go to see Metallica at HSBC Arena, or Paul McCartney at the Air Canada Center, I can sit down during the annoying, inevitable, soul crushing waiting period.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love live music, and all three shows – Disturbed at the Dome Theater in Niagara Falls, Pennywise downtown Buffalo at the Town Ballroom, and the usually United States phobic Matthew Good at Club Infinity – featured stellar lead performances by the headliners (Pennywise’s rare local appearance was a blistering 70-minute non-stop punk fury, mixed with their usual angry political diatribes: punk bands don’t like Bush, remember that) that almost makes up for the back-breaking waiting, high beer prices, and the ever-present annoyance of cell phone cameras on every second person. As memorable as these bands can be live, the hassle is getting tiresome, and even though I’ll still continue to go to shows of the bands I like, as I get older (is 25 old?), it becomes less and less special, and more and more tiresome, in a cynical shouldn’t-I-be-watching-“Citizen Kane”-or-reading-“Finnegan’s Wake” kind of way. One of the main reasons The Beatles quit playing live post “Revolver” was because the muddy mixture of live instruments and screaming audiences didn’t do justice to their masterful studio recordings, and the result of the added time was the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ sessions, a total 100 percent concentration on studio technique and audio mastery that changed the face of rock music in the late ‘60’s. The Beatles are a step or two above everybody else, so the reference is obvious, but they might have had it right, because the only live music that sounds better in person than on a polished studio recording is a philharmonic orchestra, and something tells me that after an night with the BPO, I wouldn’t have to worry about an exiting stampede, hundreds of sweaty, miserable teenagers, and crippling spasms in my poor working man’s lower back.
by Adam Suraf