You love this band. Their music is on constant rotation in your home, your car, your headphones at work. And they're coming to play a concert in your town. Oh joy! Oh rapture!
So you buy your tickets-pay the stunningly high prices that are now a given-and wait impatiently for the day of the show.
Shawn RyanIn your seat at the concert, your knees bob up and down in excitement. The lights go down, your heart races and the music starts.
And the show stinks.
It happens. Bands on tour simply can't hit the mark every night. Fatigue. Illness. Boredom. They can crop up on any given night. And sometimes, the band just isn't any good.
A big fan, I saw R.E.M. three times in concert. The first was on the "Fables of the Reconstruction" tour in a small basketball gym at the University of Alabama. Amazing show. The next was the "Lifes Rich Pageant" tour in an 8,000-seat outdoor amphitheater. Good, but not great. The third was "Monster" in a sold-out, 18,000-seat arena. Terrible. R.E.M. is not a band that should play an arena; their music is too intimate to work in a concrete pillbox.
Of the three times I saw Guns N' Roses, they never put on a decent show. Not once. Most of it was Axl Rose's temper tantrums, but the band never hit stride either - and they were always at least an hour late. Huge disappointment.
U2's show for "The Joshua Tree" was as close to a transcendent religious experience as I will ever have. I'm not a huge fan of the band, but the atmosphere inside Atlanta's Omni was worshipful and overpowering. It sucked me in. The next time I saw them was on the "Zooropa" tour. I walked out about halfway through. Flat and uninvolving, it was not worth staying to the end.
Deep Purple is one of my favorite bands, and I saw them twice in the 1970s. On the "Come Taste the Band" tour in 1977, the 15,000-seat Omni was sold out when they began. By the time they came out for the encore, there were maybe 500 people. Yes, they were that bad.
First time I saw Bob Dylan, it was such a train wreck I didn't even recognize "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" until the third verse. Guy sitting next to me, who'd seen Dylan 27 times, said, "Tonight he's trying to be a poet, not a musician. He's trying to pull the meaning out of every word." Whatever he was doing, it was lousy.
While David Bowie's "Glass Spider" tour in 1987 was a theatrical and visual feast, I have no idea what he was trying to accomplish. The hits - which he had to play, of course - actually were clunky in the context of the rest of the show.
Contact Shawn Ryan at mshawnryan@gmail.com.