Your worst concert experience - Paying money to be disappointed

[Grundlejungle]

What is your worst concert experience?
Mine was Smash Mouth.
Even though I'm not into them, I went because a friend worked at the venue and got me a free ticket.
The crowd was sufficiently hyped up by the opening band (Sugar Ray), but when SM actually came on, it was like a switch was flipped.The front man looked like a bloated corpse, and he was out of breath and sweating like a slave in the cotton fields before the end of the first song.
By the end of the third track, people in the crowd were deeply uncomfortable and wondering if he needed to go to a hospital.
When they finally got to " All Star", he probably sang 20 words total, electing to hold the mic out for the crowd to finish the lyrics while he had what appeared to be some kind of asthma attack.
When they played their encore, Smash mouth guy was replaced by the vocalist for Sugar Ray (who did an excellent job).
My friend who worked at the venue later informed me that during the encore, he found Smash Mouth Guy semi conscious, covered in vomit, and clutching a large plastic jug of cheap liquor. When he brought it to the attention of of of their crew, he was told "don't worry, he does this all of the time. You get used to it."

 

[The Heartthrob]

I got to see The Zombies once and the lady in front of us shit her pants I think because it smelled. The audio mixing was shit too so the reverb was painful. We left after the first song or two.

 

[Asian tech support]

A friend took me to see Gogol Bordello for my birthday way back in high school. I lost my shoes somehow in the pit and my feet got trampled pretty badly but was too stoned to notice. The next day I found out that one of my toes was broken. Excellent show though otherwise. I bought a clear LP from the merch table.

 

[Golden Face]

i went to a less than jake concert, and holy fuck, there were so many obese dudes in the audience. i got nearly crushed by all the fat fucks pushing each other around

so much sweaty exposed flesh...

 

[McMitch]

Mine was Smash Mouth.
Even though I'm not into them, I went because a friend worked at the venue and got me a free ticket.
The crowd was sufficiently hyped up by the opening band (Sugar Ray), but when SM actually came on, it was like a switch was flipped.The front man looked like a bloated corpse, and he was out of breath and sweating like a slave in the cotton fields before the end of the first song.
By the end of the third track, people in the crowd were deeply uncomfortable and wondering if he needed to go to a hospital.

Your post seems to be a bit prescient.

 

[keytar]

A friend took me to see Gogol Bordello for my birthday way back in high school. I lost my shoes somehow in the pit and my feet got trampled pretty badly but was too stoned to notice. The next day I found out that one of my toes was broken. Excellent show though otherwise. I bought a clear LP from the merch table.

I've been to a few Gogol concerts and I can see how you could come away with broken feet. Hope it healed quickly

I saw the New York Dolls support Alice Cooper a few years ago. Alice and his band were great, no complains there but NYD were fucking dire. Me and a mate ended up sitting on the floor smoking a joint while some random old fat guy shielded us from security. Thank you old fat guy you were a fuckin mensch. I hope your jaegerbomb sat well with you.

ETA: Once saw Motley Crue at a festival but I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone that they're fucking dreadful. It feels like punching down honestly.

 

[I Shidded I Farded I Came]

When I was a freshman in high school a girl invited me to see Beck at Cain's Ballroom. The concert was okay but she gave me mono. Does that count?

 

[Bargain Bin Laden]

Roger Waters’ last tour was filled with too much liberal faggy preaching for me to scrape any enjoyment from. At least I didn’t pay for my ticket.

 

[Moosebonker]

Def Leppard post Steve Clarke.
Another vote for New York Dolls.

 

[Cheesegirl78]

Isn't David Johansen the only NYD still with us? I know Sylvain died of cancer recently.

 

[.iota.]

i went to see tool at a fairly small venue back in the late 90's.

the flaming fucking lips opened, and then droned on for over two hours. i absolutely loathe the flaming lips, but i tolerated it because i wanted to see tool. except, maynard decided to be a whiny little bitch that night, criticizing the crowd after the first song, before finally storming off the stage after the forth song. that was it ... four fucking songs.

i haven't been willing to listen to either band since. i'm still bitter.

 

[Freshly Baked Socks]

I recently went to a Skinny Puppy concert because they're threatening it to be their final tour. While trying to go outside to have a smoke, they suddenly locked everyone in - and everyone outside out (with a "no re-entry rule" suddenly enacted). Parties were separated, and overhearing the doormen, fraud occurred with a ticket reseller and they let in more than two hundred people who bought unauthorized tickets and the only solution to being over capacity by fire code was to shut the gates. It was terribly packed inside, and seemed safest for me to leave before the concert started once I realized what was going on.

 

[Positron]

Not so much "bad" as disappointing. I bought ticket to two concerts to the late Cape Verde singer Cesária Évora, because I love her live album Live at L'Olympia. On the album she was animated and full of fun; on the concerts I went to she was strictly business like. Great voice, great session musicians (indeed I was more attuned to the sessions than Évora herself), but there was no live atmosphere, no rapport with the audience,

 

[Grub]

Most of the live music I've seen in smaller venues when I lived in the city apart from metal and punk shows were kind of meh. Not usually because of the music but the crowds. Everybody seems too stuck up to dance or get into the show. The majority of people just kind of stand back watching.

I went to see a Jamaican dancehall deejay at a weed dispensary once. That was probably one of the worst. The music wasn't bad but the venue and the crowd were pretty terrible. Just before the music started a cop came in and openly took a large handful of cash from, what i'm guessing was, the owner of the dispensary then left quickly.

I actually felt kind of bad for the jamaican dude. He was actually literally from Jamaica on tour and somehow ended up doing a show at some tiny greasy little shitty weed dispensary on the edge of skid row. The crowd seemed not stoked, mostly on the Jamaican dude's niggery Jamaicanness. I'm not sure really what they were expecting. He really did seem like he was trying to put on a good show. He stayed enthusiastic the whole time.

At one point these two girls were dancing near the front and the dude wanted them to come dance on the 'stage' with him and they like noped back real hard. The whole thing was kind of cringey but at least they had a liquor license for the show.

 

[Cats]

I went to a Dream Theater concert once with an absolutely terrifying case of Swimmer's Ear infection in both of my fucking ears. Kings X opened and by the end of their set I was in agony. Dream Theater came on and proceeded to play literally nothing but songs from their newest album at the time which was honestly one of their worst, and I was sitting there with my eyes watering, toughing it out just in the hopes I'd get to hear Glass Moon, Pull Me Under, Take the Time, really anything from Images and Words. Fatal Tragedy or anything from that album...something.

Final song was a medley and it sucked, (extremely) unfortunately. They just weren't on their A-Game that night, John Petrucci was playing his new at the time Music Man JP6 which I thought was cool and all but I did and always will love his original primary color Picasso Ibanez the best and I didn't even get to see it even once that night. To top everything off James LaBrie's vocals were objectively horrible the entire set. It was just disappointing on top of being excruciating.

By the end of their performance it felt like there was a man standing behind me and jamming drills with electrified spade bits into both my ears and letting them rip. I dragged myself out of the arena because Queensryche was the final performer of the night and I just couldn't take any fucking more noise. Went directly to the Hard Rock Cafe next door and despite being only 17 at the time the bartender served me everything I asked for - it was clear that he could tell I was miserable and in pain. I proceeded to get positively embalmed on jack and cokes and tequila shots...I think I must have drank 12 and 6 respectively. I have no idea how I got back home but I woke up the next day at five in the afternoon sick as a dog.

I will never forget that horrible night

 

[Spunt]

I took a few friends to see Marilyn Manson in London in about 2015. I don't even like MM that much but one of our group was an MM superfan and it was her birthday so I figured I could tolerate it and he's got some ok songs that might be nostalgic.

Fuck me it was awful. It was the worst-behaved crowd I've ever seen (ahead of even the dangerously overcrowded, drunk, fighty scrum I was caught up in that time I saw Skindred in Birmingham, band sucked too btw, Benji Webbe is too fat to perform these days). There were guys in the aisles groping girls as they went past. The girl whose birthday it was had a spinal condition and couldn't stand for long periods, so I'd got tickets in the seated disabled section at the front of the upper tier. A bunch of assholes decided to stand in front of them at the edge of the balcony. In front of people in fucking wheelchairs. Stewards asked them to move and were told to fuck off and were clearly too intimidated to deal with it, so our friend didn't see anything all night. The pit was full of paralytically drunk assholes who kept throwing things onto the stage, including full plastic cups of beer (at least I HOPE it was beer) right at the guy they'd paid to see. MM threatened to "go down there and bite out your liver" after getting hit square in the chest. These weren't teenagers, they were mostly people in their 30s.

MM himself was as terrible as the crowd. He was incredibly drunk (on a later date in the tour he was so drunk he fell off a set of stilts and broke his leg), slurring his words and openly expressing his disdain for the crowd and repeatedly threatening to walk out. He picked a fight with his percussionist in the middle of a song, kicking his kettle drums all over the stage. A couple of roadies came on to put them back, and their resigned body language was that of a tired parent tidying up the toys their tantruming toddler had thrown out of its pram. He didn't play Rock is Dead, The Fight Song or The Dope Show, which were like 3 of the maybe 5 MM songs that I like, and he didn't play an encore. Fuck me, what a shitshow.

Worst actual musical performance by a professional band was Alestorm, who I saw at a festival a few years back. It looked like they were totally bored of their own pirate gimmick and they were barely trying. Apparently they had been too hungover to soundcheck so everything sounded like total shit. There was weird sub-bass feedback that kept peaking the limiters on the PA, causing the entire live mix to pump in and out, which at concert volumes is actually nauseating. Their guitar tech (who had been AWOL since the night before) finally showed up halfway through the set so they put him on backing vocals. I've never seen a band put in so little effort, it looked like their souls had long left their bodies. I saw them again the following year and they were just as bad, and the sub-bass feedback was back as well. Horrible.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

I went to a concert for a musician who I can’t remember, but the woman next to me was drunk and hugging me and saying “I love you!” over and over again.

 

[TV's Adam West]

I saw Nickelback.

 

[barbieQ]

I took my boyfriend and his dad to see Guns N’ Roses for his birthday. Eddie Van Halen’s son and his band were the opening act and they were fine I guess, but even though Axl looks and sounds better than he did a few years ago, it’s clearly over for him vocally. It wasn’t a horrible crowd experience or anything, but they were disappointed, which made me wish I’d taken them to do something else.

Recently I went to the Eras Tour with a friend, which actually was a horrible crowd experience because the girls behind us would not stop fucking screaming. No matter if it was between “sets” and Taylor wasn’t actually singing or not, they just wouldn’t shut up. I’m also not a huge Taylor Swift fan to begin with, so I was already preparing to just sit with my hands in my pockets all night.

 

[Onni Kalsarikännit]

1) I saw Mgla several times. It was always great besides that one time where they got moved to a smaller venue bc of butthurt people who managed to get their gig at the planed venue cancelled. To be fair it literally happened hours before the gig so finding another venue in that short time was a miracle and it was a lot of chaos. The issue was the new venue has place for like 100 people but there were like 200 people. It sucked so much that I left after two songs. But the evening wasn't really shit bc I just hung around outside in the beergarden of the venue with friends.
2) There is a venue in my town that I totally fucking hate. Only have been there two or three times before I gave up and never went there. It's usually a venue for punk bands or thrash/death metal bands. That they do a black metal concert happens like once every few years. But it's a bigger venue and Gorgoroth played there. Friends opened for them and put me and my group on the guests list so we went there. Half of the crowd was a (black) metal crowd, the rest literally tourists (the venue is a part of the town where lot of younger party tourists hang around). Completely weird atmosphere and at some point people got really aggressive and some fights broke loose. The owner of the venue got pissed and cut the Gorgoroth set short and cut their mics off and shit. After the gig ended the securities started to get everyone out of the venue bc they had a fucking reggae party planned for after the concert so they had to get the metalheads out of there for the new crowd. Securities were fucking aggressive and it led to some more fights and even we got involved in a brawl with security guys bc one of them pushed on of the girls from our group.

3) Saw The Dead South in a venue that was absolutely overcrowded and for some weird reason they had the stage lowered so you couldn't see shit. The beer was shit and expensive, the sound sucked, everything sucked. Left even before The Dead South started.