Worst Concerts Thread!

What concerts have you been to that should have been really good, but really sucked?

1. Madonna: Saw her in 1984, she sang totally out of tune the whole time. She must lip-synch now.

2. REM: They played the graduation party at Princeton in 1984, right after their first album came out and before they were very well known. Michael Stipe was so paranoid that he stopped dead in the middle of a song to admonish people to back away from the stage. This was in the Princeton gymnasium.

3. The Cars: Saw them on their Heartbeat City tour, they played only songs from that album and went off stage after 40 minutes with no encore, no hits.

4. Prince: Saw him in Philly around 2001, started his show about 2.5 hours late with no opening band!!

5. Van Morrison: My hubby saw him in Florence in 1983, says he opened the show having his band play his hits before he came on stage (no vocal), then he came out and sang from his latest album for 30 minutes, no encore. The Italians booed him fiercely.

6. David Bowie, Go Tour, Munich Germany, 1997: David was fine actually, but this was one of those big outdoor stadium tours. It rained for 3 days and the ground was a 3 foot deep mudpit. German skinheads were starting riots all over the place during some hard core band before Bowie, and I nearly lost my shoes in the mud.

"Hi, we're The Cars."

Then about an hour of songs, with no audience interaction. They looked bored.

"Thanks. Good night."

I could have stayed home, listened to CDs and saved the ticket price.

whatever version of "Jefferson Airplane" was around in the early 1990s, they came and sucked major ass. I think Paul Kantner was like the only original member. They were horrible!!!

It was around the "slippery when wet" era. I don't know, I really like Jon but he really sucked at this particular concert.

Autograph, opening for Heart. They sucked.

And then Heart came out, and totally fucking sucked. Jeez, that was a shitty evening of shit.

And then some other pure shit drek opening bands, including Dokken (what a shit-meister that fucking fuck is!!!!) opening for Dio. Pure shit.

But the worst - the absolutely worst fucking worst of all the shit ass shit bands I've heard, was the Vinnie Vincent Invasion opening for Alice Cooper. WOW - does he ever fucking totally suck. That was unadulterated pure bogus unrelenting unrepentent SHIT.

And some other shitty openers, but I can't remember who they were or for what concerts.

BLAAAHHH.

Does that mean you had to listen to that shitass for many nights? Were you in the road crew? Or working at one particular venue?

I'd hate to think of having to listen to that asshole over and over and over.

to sound mix for Kiss back in the day. He knew all of them and took us to Ace and Vinnie's shows. It was sorta cool for a 15 year-old... I guess. OK, OK - IT SUCKED, IT WAS LAME, HE WAS AN ASS... WOULDN'T SHARE HIS LARGE STASH WITH US!! Thanks for letting me vent.

It was a nightmare. 1976

The Beach Boys. 1967 Santa Barbara. Unbearable live and a bad time for the band.

I guess you can tell I'm closing in on geezer. :eyes:

They just sucked and there were so many people in the audience that were throwing up. This was probably 23 years ago. They were definitely not in their prime.

I'd like to analyze the performance

Big outdooer free concert at crappy corporate concert place,some country stations advertised it as a C&W concert,one station called it rock...I was proud of my daughter and her friend who were 16 at the time,they smelled trouble in the form of bad people drunk on bad 7 $ beers ,heat and a general mistake in advertising.The fights broke out when we walked the 2 miles to the parking lot.We were big Black Crows fans,the whole familly had seen them a bunch of times usually at better venues.
The House of Blues in Hollywood can ruin any musical experience so we never go there after too many bad experiences.

I went to a Stryper concert once in the 80's as a kid. Opening acts were a Japanese metal band called Loudness and another metal band called TNT. That had to be the worst.

Second was the "Rock Never Stops Tour" a few years back. "Stephen Pearcy's Ratt" was dreadfully awful. There were competing Ratt's touring at the time. I think he was the only original member. Other acts were Slaughter and Vince Neil solo. Please guys. Cease and Desist from rocking any further. The rock needs to stop.

Ratt played one of my "guilty pleasure songs" (those that you don't like to admit to) Round and Round, with accompanying really bad MTV video.

Hell, Ratt videos were guaranteed T & A :shrug:

I like stryper and stephen pearcy, although when I saw ratt in the 80's they sucked in concert

The one with just Stephen Pearcy (not in the 80's, this was like 2001-ish when there were two different Ratts touring) was awful and Vince Neil both of them were so out of shape on that "Rock Never Stops" tour they couldn't even get up enough wind to sing half the words. I saw the competing version of Ratt with Warren DiMartini and Jizzy Pearl singing around the same time and they were good.

February '97. Played for about 45 minutes and then left, didn't even play 'beautiful people' - which was their big hit at the time.

always terrible

Oh it was absurd! My sister and I were both at our parent's for Thanksgiving (or Christmas) a couple years ago and we have a tradition of seeing bands together - kind of our common ground. She found out these 2 bands were touring together so she got tickets for me, her & my bro-in-law. It was hilarious! I don't know much about the bandmembers - how many were original members or anything. Psychedelic Furs were awful - Richard Butler seemed like he was an actor playing Richard Butler. Ian McCulloch was alright, but it was such a wierd nostalgia kinda thing, and everyone there reminded my of my friends from 10th grade but as if they hadn't bought a new pair of shoes since then - we were among very few people not wearing black.
I don't mean to put these bands down, back in the day I was too young to go to their shows but I would have loved to then.

i went to the show because slayer was opening for slipknot. how the fuck does SLAYER open for SLIPKNOT? (slayer was awesome, of course)


the only phish show (first night SPAC 04) i ever saw was really disappointing, compared to what my friends say about them, what i had heard of them before, and what i had seen at the simulcast only days before. (first night of the tour)

Summer 1997-Tupelo MS
1) Mountain cancelled, and they replaced them with a bar band. The bar band was the best thing that night too.
2) Black Oak Arkansas had they soundboards off so much that there wasn't ANYTHING that was more than a garbled mess.
3) Iron Butterfly comes out and starts their "new stuff" (!), spends an hour playing literal crap that sounds like they put several songs from different groups in a blender, FINALLY plays "Ina-godda-da-vita" which is why everyone is there, and in the middle of the drum solo the guitarist comes out and starts playing an entirely different song! Then he looks around confused, unplugs and walks off! The only group that really has the right to play that song, the only song they ever really had, and they screwed it up!

at the SARS concert in Toronto. Terrible, but it's not like they were alone on that one - the Stones? eek.

get this... a plethora of talent. It was an all-day show with:
Was Not Was
Information Society
Paula Abdul
Milli Vanilli and... headlining
Tone Loc!!

I saw them in 1988 or so at the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill. The only thing I remember from the concert is Michael Stipe telling some person in the audience "we don't take requests."

But I've seen some other pretty bad ones, 'cause I had season passes to the area mega-amphitheatre thingie one summer in high school. Eddie Money. The Steve Miller Band. Some really, really bad stuff.

This was the 'Use Your Illusion' tour with Metallica. G&R took to the stage 2 hours late and then Axel had the nerve to chastise the audience for being less than enthusiastic. A total bomb. Metallica, on the other hand, was pretty good. If you like that kind of stuff. This concert was a birthday present from my little brother. It was on about the same level with Homer buying Marge a bowling ball for her birthday.

The Cars were probably the worst. Might as well have put on the album and looked at the album cover. They were THAT exciting. I only went to make my girlfriend happy anyway.

David Bowie on the Young Americans tour at Radio City. Embarassing. This white coke freak fronting a HUGE black band with a dozen background singers. It was the most patronizing thing I ever saw. Particularly when it turned out he was paying them about $300 a week. And trying to turn songs like Suffragette City into soul songs...echh.

Bowie again on the Glass Spiders tour. It was in Giants Stadium, so no way it could have been good, but it was AWFUL. I swore off stadiums at that moment and have never been to one since.

Then there are the shows that just miss expectations by a LOT. Manic Street Preachers, Soft Boys and Interpol are three fairly recent examples.

i like the cars, the older stuff, i think the biggest problem for them live is that they are more of a studio recording type of band, lots of electronics and the like. Anyway, the show was truly sucktastic. the only upside was that we got the tickets for free because my friends dad was the music columnist for a local paper.

Joe got a bunch of his friends together and Paul and continued as The Clash. Eventually, the friends sort of learned to play, and they made "Cut the Crap," not exactly "London Calling" but not the worst thing ever waxed either. However, before that, they made a record that CBS would never release, and took it out on tour to such prepossessing venues as the Township Auditorium in Columbia SC. I'm sure Joe and the boys were ready to swallow shotguns for having sunk this low. I vividly remember Joe dedicating one from the new album to "Margaret 'Billygoat' Thatcher!" The singing and playing pretty much rose to that level as well. They did play out on the hits, though, to be fair.