Police in Tulsa took a call on Friday saying someone was going to do great harm to the people at Ella Langley's BOK Center show. They searched the building more than once and found nothing credible, and Langley and the venue called it off anyway. "I was put in charge of a decision for 15,000 people," she said, and "no concert is worth a human life." The next night in Lubbock she nearly cancelled again, then played the show anyway because, in her words, "we are safe, and we can do this show." Usually that call gets made somewhere fans never hear about, and this time the person on the poster made it and told everyone why.
The Long Take
Why queuing early stopped getting fans the best seats
RAYE's team got 1.8 million registrations for about 5,000 Royal Albert Hall seats this week and ended up sorting them by hand, and at no point did anyone suggest the people who'd been waiting longest should go first. On big reserved-seat shows in the US, being early stopped deciding who gets the good seats a long time ago. Since at least the late 1990s, a lot of the best seats have been held back or sold through presales and premium tiers before the public on-sale even opens, and across New York's top-grossing concerts from 2012 to 2015 the public on-sale got only about 46% of the tickets. So whoever is first in the public queue is first in line for what's left.
New York's attorney general said in 1999 that the best seats for events were often withheld from the public, and the office's 2016 Obstructed View report put numbers on it: 38% of tickets went to presales and 16% to holds, and some shows released less than a quarter at the first public sale, including 12% for a 2014 Katy Perry night at Barclays Center.
That changes what a queue is for. Camping out on the sidewalk was a bet you could win by being early. When half the room can be allocated before the on-sale, being first in the public line just gets you first pick of the other half. Slate's Andy Bowers was already telling NPR listeners in 2006 that you could be first in line at the box office and still not get a seat, and that only 10,000 of Madison Square Garden's 20,000 seats went to the public for Coldplay's two shows in 2004.
Ticketmaster describes its Platinum seats as a hand-picked allocation from the most in-demand areas, priced seat by seat, and when Britain's advertising regulator looked at them in 2018 it noted some were among the best seats in the venue. Then the queue itself went online and you could spend your way up it: Taylor Swift's 2017 Verified Fan system gave you boosts for buying merch or pre-ordering the album, which Ticketmaster said "may improve" your spot. None of this looks like anyone cutting in, because all of it happens before the part fans think of as the on-sale.
General admission floors are different. The barrier still goes to the people who queue, and fans spent more than 50 hours on the sidewalk outside Milwaukee's Fiserv Forum for The 1975 in 2023. Bruce Springsteen used numbered wristbands and a random draw for his pit, a system described in 2008 as meant to eliminate the need to camp. So the artist best known for keeping the front for ordinary fans didn't trust the queue to pick them either. The starting number got drawn at 5:15 in the afternoon, by a fan.
This Week in Shows
The Raconteurs are back, for five songs The Raconteurs played together for the first time since October 2019 during Jack White's encore at The Truth in Nashville on Saturday: "Steady, as She Goes," "Hands," "Level," "Broken Boy Soldier" and "Carolina Drama." White had hinted on Instagram that day that Nashville might get a little surprise. That's the night every solo-show ticket holder quietly hopes for.
"Box of Rain" on Jerry's guitar My Morning Jacket closed their seven-night residency at The Fillmore on Sunday with Grahame Lesh, Phil's son. According to Live For Live Music's recap, Jim James played Garcia's "Alligator" guitar on "Sugar Magnolia," then played an acoustic "Box of Rain" with Lesh in the encore on the Martin D-28 Garcia used on American Beauty. Both guitars came through the Grateful Guitars Foundation. Phil's song, played with his son, in that room.
Journey's drum tech finishes the night Deen Castronovo was helped offstage about two songs into Journey's BOK Center show last Thursday with a medical emergency. Jonathan Cain asked the crowd to pray, Neal Schon said the show would go on, and Steve Toomey, Castronovo's longtime drum tech, played the rest of it. Castronovo is doing great and has since returned, per Ultimate Classic Rock.
A theater sings "Paradise" for John Prine "80 Years of John Prine" filled The Chicago Theatre last Thursday, two days before what would have been his 80th birthday. John C. Reilly hosted with Prine's longtime band, Nathaniel Rateliff turned up unannounced to sing "In Spite of Ourselves" with Margo Price, Jeff Tweedy did "Summer's End," Steve Earle played "Sam Stone," and everyone closed on "Paradise".
The Venue Report
Cowboys Dancehall in San Antonio has closed after more than 20 years, and the club says the reason is the road outside. Construction around the property is due to run to about 2028, and Cowboys says it "made extensive efforts to find a solution" but had no "viable path forward." There are no plans to reopen. It isn't rent and it isn't a change in taste. It's roadwork. The same week in Canberra, the owner of Shadows closed his room and blamed construction-cut parking and access too.
Concerts the Flaming Lips played in 24 hours on June 27 and 28, 2012, which took the Guinness record off Jay-Z. The run finished at House of Blues New Orleans.
Then
Twenty-five years ago next Tuesday, on October 20, 2001, Paul McCartney put on the Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden for the firefighters, police and families of September 11. The Who played the set people still talk about, and Roger Daltrey told the crowd, "We could never follow what you did." Firefighter Mike Moran, who lost his brother that day, spoke after them. It was John Entwistle's last US show with the band, and the night raised over $35 million for the Robin Hood Relief Fund.
Fan Debate
Mike Love is 85, and he's back onstage with The Beach Boys: helped on and seated front and center in Cincinnati on October 10, and singing backing vocals at the Ryman the next night. His son Christian put both sides better than anyone: "As a family member, you want him to stay home and get healthy, but as a fan, you want to see him come out and do the music." Al Jardine, who started the band with him, said in a Rolling Stone interview that he was shocked and "really depressed," that Love "just doesn't know how not to do it," and that "the brand will go on and on and on." I don't think the audience gets a veto, and I don't think it's unkind to feel uneasy either. When a legend wants to be up there and you can see what it's costing him, do you want to be in the room?
The Practical Bit
Remaining tickets for RAYE's Royal Albert Hall show on October 23 go on general sale Thursday at 10am BST. The presale took 1.8 million registrations for about 5,000 seats, RAYE blamed scalpers' AI bots for "hundreds of thousands of fake registrations," and organizers scrapped their planned selection process to review applicants by hand.
B-Sides
- David Grisman premiered a song for Billy Strings. Grisman, 81, joined Strings around one mic in Everett, Washington, for the world premiere of "Billy of the Strings" and "Shady Grove."
- Turnstile are playing the National Mall. It's a free benefit show by the Washington Monument on Saturday, October 24, at 3pm, RSVP through Laylo.
- Aerosmith & Friends added Guns N' Roses. The Oct 29 and Nov 1 Hollywood Bowl shows now have GN'R, and Joey Kramer and Brad Whitford weren't confirmed in the announcement.
- Phish will play their 100th Garden show. It's January 2, the last of the Dec 30 to Jan 2 run, with general on-sale Friday.
- Kelly Clarkson stopped "Breakaway" for a fan. At House of Blues Orlando she held the song until medics reached a fan in the aisle, then picked it up at the second chorus.
- Lana Del Rey brought a stove. Her first show in nearly a year, at the Singapore Grand Prix, had a stove onstage as a "special guest," a nod to her still-undated album Stove. Most acts settle for a fog machine.
The Bit
At the L.A. Forum in 1986, on Bob Dylan's tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell reached up to scratch his ear mid-Dylan speech, his strap let go, and his 1962 SG Junior hit the floor and snapped at the neck. Dylan turned around: "What the f--- are you doing back there? I'm trying to talk up here." Campbell tells the story himself.
If you're queueing for a GA barrier this fall, check the venue's line rules before you bring the camping chair.
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