As rites of passage go, it’s tough to top your first rock concert. The anticipation as tickets are purchased; the ride to the show; the aurora of sound and color as the band takes the stage — the memory of that first face-to-face encounter with rock ‘n’ roll lingers like a first stolen kiss. Rock became the great populist art form of the last half of the 20th Century, and several generations of Americans turned concertgoing into one of the largest and most lucrative enterprises in entertainment history. Last year alone, the top 50 tours raked in more than 26 million tickets and a record $1.5 billion in revenue.
And why not? There has never been more variety in the types of music available, from all-ages punk shows to classic-rock stadium tours, all-night raves to Saturday afternoon matinees for tots. Rock concerts more often than not start at the time advertised, are safer and better-managed, and generally are more accessible than ever before.
But as concertgoing has become a big business, and as demand for big concerts at big ticket prices has increased, the fans who make this economic engine go aren’t always treated with the respect they deserve. From the moment concertgoers buy a ticket to their departure from the parking lot, sometimes hours after the show has ended, the fans’ patience, endurance and budgets are pushed to their limits, and sometimes beyond. Vast improvements have been made in how concertgoers are treated, but the overwhelming success of the concert industry has made it easier than ever for promoters, bands and managers to take the fans’ pocketbooks, comfort and safety for granted.
“I do feel taken for granted at concerts; teenagers feel taken for granted,” says Zarin Gremmler, 16, of Chicago, who has attended everything from heavy-metal shows at the Riviera to raves in the suburbs. “It’s a big hassle to go to a show — the sound is lousy at a lot of the bigger arenas, and the cost of tickets is getting out of hand. But we keep going because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.”
“We go through the hassles because there’s nothing like going to a concert. It’s an awesome experience,” says Samantha Mysiewicz, 17, of Chicago. “If you buy an artist’s CD and you love it, seeing them in concert makes the experience complete. You can’t really call yourself a fan otherwise.”
Seeing a major band in a stadium can be a thrilling, communal experience as performers such as Bruce Springsteen, Metallica, Phish and U2 have become expert at melding music, passion and spectacle. But fans seeking a relatively hassle-free evening high on musical values inevitably think small. Clubs such as Metro, FitzGerald’s, the Empty Bottle, the Fireside, Schubas, Park West, the Old Town School of Folk Music, the Hothouse and the Double Door shrink the distance between the performers and the audience, and they are often a fraction of the cost of larger venues. Converted theaters such as the Riviera and the Vic, or the House of Blues with its opera-house design, can also make for a relatively intimate experience. The performers who play these venues may not be as well-known as those who play stadiums, but the experience can often be just as satisfying.
“It’s less of a production going to smaller shows, it’s easier to get in and out, and it’s fun to see the bands up close,” says Sean Cunningham, 27, of Chicago. “I like the idea that you can go see a band and not have to plan it weeks ahead of time.”
Hidden costs
Price is also a factor. It’s rare to pay more than $15 for a triple bill of indie-rock bands at the Empty Buttle. But Mysiewicz says she’s often shocked by ticket prices for major concerts. “I feel it’s bad enough paying $30 for a ticket,” she says. “Then to have to pay ridiculously high service fees on top of that is the last thing I need.”
Consider that last year ticket prices for the top 50 North American concerts increased a record 30 percent, to an average of more than $43, according to Pollstar magazine. And that doesn’t take into account service charges, which have continued to rise despite Pearl Jam’s much-publicized but ultimately futile boycott of the nation’s top ticket company, Ticketmaster, in 1994-95. Though Pearl Jam has tried to hold the line on ticket prices, charging a relatively modest $30 for its Oct. 8 concert at Alpine Valley Music Theatre, the actual cost of attending the show was $47.20, an unadvertised 57 percent increase that included Ticketmaster convenience ($7.45) and handling ($3.25) charges, plus a parking fee ($6.50).
Such hidden costs are described by the agency as the price of doing business over the phone and through a vast computer network requiring hundreds of operators, but in Chicago and in many other metropolitan markets, consumers don’t have much choice: It’s either buy a seat through Ticketmaster or find one on the living-room couch the night of the show. In Illinois, would-be concertgoers can also solicit a broker, who often charges double or triple the face value of choice seats for the most in-demand shows. These businessmen are often blamed by promoters for the huge inflation in ticket prices in recent years. In justifying their decision to push ticket prices for their 1990s tours over the $100 barrier, the members of the Eagles reasoned that if fans were willing to pay that kind of money to a broker for a choice seat, why shouldn’t the band get it instead?
It’s faultless show-biz logic, but the antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll, which came of age as a conspiracy of like-minded thinkers from the same generation, a sacred pact between a band and its fans, where one would never sell the other out. Pearl Jam is one of the few bands that has actively worked to keep that trust: It sells thousands of choice tickets to its fan-club members over the Internet with no service fees.
“It beats dialing Ticketmaster 1,000 times and getting a busy signal,” says Marcy Donovan, 31, of Avon, Colo., as she picked up her Pearl Jam fan club tickets before the band’s recent Allstate Arena show, “and you’re guaranteed a good seat.”
Traffic jams
But sometimes even holding an expensive front-row ticket is no guarantee of a pleasant concert experience. A performance last summer by ‘N Sync at the Joliet Motor Speedway found thousands of ticketholders stranded in a massive traffic jam miles from the site. Many never made it to their seat.
“I’ll never go back there again,” says Mysiewicz, 16, who spent three hours waiting in traffic and arrived late.
Such tieups have become routine at venues such as Alpine Valley, a 35,000-seat amphitheater in East Troy, Wis., which can be accessed only by a two-lane road. At Woodstock ’94 in Saugerties, N.Y., fans who came without camping gear for the three-day festival were left to forage for shelter in a downpour; only a handful of nightly shuttle buses, which had been promised to transport concertgoers to nearby hotel rooms rented for the weekend, made it through the dense traffic.
Once inside the venue, consumers aren’t guaranteed pristine sound or even a clear view of the performers. Architectural flaws even in major venues expressly designed for concerts such as the New World Music Theatre, with its steel girders and sky boxes, and a stage described as a “black hole” by the former sound engineer of the Grateful Dead, practically ensure that most concerts will be a swirl of sonic mud in the far reaches of the pavilion and on the lawn, unless a band arrives with an excellent sound system and an engineer talented enough to overcome these built-in obstacles.
“Going to a show at the World, you often can’t see or hear the people you paid to go see,” says Megan Sullivan, 17, of Chicago. “When you’re on the lawn, you’d be better off listening to the show on the radio.”
Instead of focusing on the presentation of the music itself and the needs of the fans who have spent good money to hear it, promoters such as the nationwide concert behemoth SFX suggest that they are increasingly preoccupied with investment strategies and revenue streams to satisfy their stockholders. A new era of concert promotion began a few years ago on the inaugural Spice Girls tour of North America, when a concert broke out between commercials. The group’s young fans were enticed into their seats as the volume from the public-address system was raised, apparently signaling the start of the show. Instead, they were subjected to 45 minutes of ads on a huge video screen for skin and hair-care products, then another 30-minute onslaught of promotions at intermission.
At the time, the experience seemed more like an aberration rather than a sign of an industry’s wholesale makeover. After all, corporate sponsor money has been behind major concert tours for the past 20 years, a creeping presence at most major shows but hardly an overwhelming one given most bands’ aversion to “selling out,” as epitomized by Neil Young’s 1980s anthem “This Note’s For You.” But whereas once artists strived to keep the corporate connection in the background for fear of damaging their reputations, ruining their art or offending their fans, now the boundaries between the worlds of music and advertising have been blurred to an extreme, to the point where it’s difficult to determine where one begins and the other ends.
Fans who attended the Faith Hill and Tim McGraw performance over the summer at the United Center were subjected to a series of commercials masquerading as songs, with McGraw doubling as a beer pitchman during his set and Hill shilling for a phone company. At Rockfest at the Cicero Motor Speedway last June, men in gorilla masks tossed a car company’s T-shirts into the audience between sets, setting off a minor controversy when one of the bands dared to mock the sponsor’s tactics from the stage. (That band, Guster, was denied half of its $10,000 performance fee for its lack of corporate diplomacy.)
Product endorsements are now proudly embraced, from Elton John raising a can of his “favorite” soft drink during breaks between songs to Britney Spears shrouding her stage in a curtain depicting herself touting a dairy product. In the era of the $35 souvenir T-shirt and the $125 “golden-circle” seat, these corporate impositions go with the territory, and audiences now seem numb to their ubiquity. It can’t help but diminish the experience for everyone involved, and occasionally fans have rebelled.
`We felt ripped off’
The numbskull behavior that ended Woodstock ’99 in an orgy of arson and looting hardly qualifies as a rational audience response to greedy promoters. But fans interviewed after the three-day festival reported that the promoters in many ways got what they deserved for their indifference to the fans’ needs.
“The looting was the most organized part of the show,” says Brian Gallagher, 15, of Chicago, who attended the festival. “It seems the promoters aren’t in it for the music. They couldn’t care less whether it’s Neil Diamond or the Rolling Stones on stage. The promoters were there to exploit us.”
“We felt ripped off,” says another Woodstockgoer, John Blatt, 21, of Chicago. “This was not the peace-loving, good-time infomercial the promoters were making it out to be ahead of time.”
After buying tickets for $150, concertgoers were subjected to overflowing toilets and trash cans, erratic water supplies, $5 bottles of water, $10 burritos and a lack of shade on one of the summer’s hottest weekends. The violence that erupted on the festival’s last day prompted an explosion of media coverage about unfocused “rage.” Certainly, there is no excuse for certain fans’ behavior at the event. But Woodstock ’99 also could be viewed as a wake-up call for a concert industry that doesn’t always live up to its obligations to the fans.
One of the central premises of that obligation is safety. Most concerts come off without a hitch, but occasionally the world is reminded that of all the art forms that depend on live performance, rock concerts are the most volatile. Last summer, 11 fans died at a Pearl Jam concert at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, the latest in a series of concert incidents in which poor planning, inadequate security, rowdy fans and bad luck conspired to create a tragedy.
The Pearl Jam concert was an aberration, but it was also a shocking reminder that the rock-concert experience is like no other because it gathers large groups of young people in an environment that strongly suggests to them that anything can happen, and sometimes does. Band members dive into the audience, fans routinely surf the crowd on a sea of clutching arms or stand shoulder to shoulder jumping, swaying and bumping in time to the music. It is part of the allure of the experience, and also its Achilles’ heel. Concert security agencies are more sensitive and sophisticated than ever — we’ve come a long way since the Hell’s Angels cracked heads with pool cues and even stabbed a man at Altamont in 1969 in the name of keeping “order”– but fans don’t go to shows to sit still, and the challenge (for security, fans and band members alike) is to draw the line between having fun and doing harm.
“It’s the rush, the kick they go for,” said the promoter of the Roskilde Festival of fans crushing against the stage, quoted in a Danish publication, Politiken Sondag, which chronicled the Pearl Jam concert tragedy. And it’s the rush, the kick that keeps them coming back in greater numbers than ever to rock concerts worldwide. To be a young music fan verges on obsession, and fans are willing to put up with almost anything to attend concerts because nothing — not the radio, not the CD, not the band Web site, not even MTV, not an MP3 download — compares to seeing their heroes in the flesh.
“Tickets are too expensive, parking is $10, the beer is $5 — but if it’s a band I really want to see, I’m going to go,” said Jayne Ciepierski, 21, of Hinsdale, just before Pearl Jam performed at Allstate Arena. “Even if ticket prices keep going up, I’d probably get a second job before I stopped going.”
The concert industry counts on that loyalty to sustain itself, and for the last 30 years bands and promoters have made a good living because of the fans’ die-hard dedication. But Woodstock and Roskilde are reminders that it’s more than just an economic relationship that is at stake every time the lights flash, the guitars come to life and the audience’s anticipation rises to a roar.
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Oct. 15
WHO IS THE AUDIENCE?
Mark Caro reports on how the movie industry masters its market.
This week
HOW ARE AUDIENCES TREATED?
Greg Kot analyzes whether rock fans get the respect they deserve.
Oct. 29
WHAT DO ARTISTS WANT FROM AUDIENCES?
Local artists explore the special bond.
Nov. 5
HOW DO AUDIENCES ACT AS CITIZENS?
WHAT DO AUDIENCES WANT FROM ARTISTS?
Blair Kamin reports on how audience members can become part of the action–and help transform the outcome. And, a readers’ forum.
