An amazing venue if you're interested in paying 100 bucks to see a band playing at 8000 decibels from half a mile away. It's a shame imo when good bands get so huge that they really have little choice but to supersize their concerts like this. I think everything suffers, the music, the production and the fans.
U2 sold
80,000 tickets (in 94 minutes) for the Slane gig in 2001... but I mean hey, if you're on the right drugs, just being part of such a huge crowd can sure be fun. I don't wanna sound antisocial or anything, something to be said for crowd surfing, psychic or physical, but it really hasn't got much to do with the appreciation of music. It's more like going to a huge party where some weird unknown faction has control of the CD player.
I like U2, but after seeing them outdoors in Kansas City in temperatures below 30, with a industrial sized production that looked like a shoebox from my ultra-expensive "cheap seats" and with sound that had about the quality of an air raid siren, it took me a while to grow back into an appreciation of them. Same with the Stones, and even Bowie.
I'm not only a burnout, I'm spoiled.
I now work at a very small venue (capacity 1580 souls) and I find I can't say enough about the extremely gratifying level of music appreciation
and performance possible in the small show. Of course not every artist can condescend to play to 1500 people at a time, though the occasional 'big name' does pass through. Dylan, for instance, started his world tour there last month, and though his show completely sucked imo (especially for the exorbitant price, thank goodness I get in free) it was quite nice for his die-hard fans to get to see him as an actual-size human being as opposed to a millimeter high blob of movement under what might have been a cowboy hat.
Gillian Welch played there a couple of weeks ago and epitomized the "intimate setting;" she and her partner travel with two guitars, a banjo and a harmonica, no strobe lights or fog or giant balloon effigies, and cheerfully did about an hour's worth of 'meet and greet' after the show.
That is something worth paying for imo. Even other bands I don't particularly like much, like Crystal Method or Lyle Lovett or 311 or Skrape etc, etc, have all, I've noticed, given performances greatly enhanced by this small space.
I'm not saying you'd never see me at one of these gargantuan venues, but if you do, you'll know I don't really give a shit about the music... and I'm probably on ecstasy or something...
