The Worse Band(s) You've Ever Seen in a Live Environment

[DuchessOfDork]

That being said, it's been my experience that 80% of bands don't even come close to selling the tickets they prebuy, they just get burned and look at it as "paying to play", which is why the shows are still half-empty even though the openers had to pre-buy 250 tickets.

This has been my experience, also.

 

[AMBR]

I'm going to pass on mentioning all the really untalented, boring openers I've seen and just mention some really bad performances.
Strapping Young Lads in like 2003 I think, Asbury Park. DT was D*R*U*N*K. The band would play like 30 seconds of a song then he would stop them and go on a rant about politics, the music industry, and eventually (after some boos) a-hole crowds. This went on for 20 minutes then I think they actually got the boot. It was god-awful. Glad he sobered up.

Children of Bodom. Forget which performance in the Nokia, but it wasn't recent. They looked and sounded like a bunch of guys who were ridiculously hungover and tried to do shots to make up for it. Dreadful.

Metallica, Nassau Coliseum, two years ago, maybe? Totally uninspired show. The stage was this massive long thing with the crowd all around it. The members stood on each side totally separated from one another and the disconnect was obvious. I had just gone to a Slip Knot show for work, and I totally didn't like their music, but was impressed by their performance. Seeing Metallica put on such a lackluster show was a stark contrast.

 

[AngraRULES]

Children of Bodom. Forget which performance in the Nokia, but it wasn't recent. They looked and sounded like a bunch of guys who were ridiculously hungover and tried to do shots to make up for it. Dreadful.

I remember that night, we were all amazed at how bad CoB was. It was the Children of Bodom/Amon Amarth/Gojira tour. CoB sucked. Dreadful. Laiho looked like he really didn't wanna be there that night.

 

[AMBR]

I remember that night, we were all amazed at how bad CoB was. It was the Children of Bodom/Amon Amarth/Gojira tour. CoB sucked. Dreadful. Laiho looked like he really didn't wanna be there that night.

Yup, that was the night. Couldn't remember which one it was. Wasn't that the night Matt lost his glasses and cut his face in the mosh pit? I think I have a photo....

 

[DuchessOfDork]

Strapping Young Lads in like 2003 I think, Asbury Park. DT was D*R*U*N*K. The band would play like 30 seconds of a song then he would stop them and go on a rant about politics, the music industry, and eventually (after some boos) a-hole crowds. This went on for 20 minutes then I think they actually got the boot. It was god-awful. Glad he sobered up.

Reminds me of DOPE. Holy SHIT what a horrible night. I don't even like DOPE, but their lead singer talked for about 20 minutes about nothing in particular, and it was just a mess.

 

[General Zod]

Warrel's voice was shot, but worse than that he was forgetting lyrics, coming in at the wrong times in songs, etc. He had a terrible night. The rest of the band looked like they couldn't wait to get off of the stage.

So here's what I've been able to discern, from conversations I've had with Jim.

New guitar player Atilla arrove in the states, from Hungary, with the flu. Germs being what they are, and tour buses being a confined area, the whole band got pretty sick in due time. In addition, Jim's medication, which he takes to manage the pain for his chronic condition, was confiscated at the Utah airport, because they said he lacked the appropriate paperwork. He then had to wait for new paperwork to arrive in the mail. During this time, he was doing whatever he could to manage the pain. In addition, the boys might have been fighting a bit. As Warrel said on the Nevermore forum, "were a family and families fight". I think it was a perfect storm, for a horrible show.

They were much, much better two nights later in Philly. The toll the flu had taken on Warrel's voice was still very noticeable, but it was an very enjoyable performance none the less.

 

[labrekk]

It seems to me that the fans in your area have an "interesting" taste in live bands...

Powerglove draws a lot (overdrawing Firewind, the headliner), but yet Primal Fear plays for an empty house? What kind of lunatics do that?

I don't understand as well why a killer band like Primal Fear, who finally found their own sound with their last few albums (and stopped sounding like Painkiller-Priest) doesn't draw more audience in North America. A real shame. And they're excellent live performers as well, Scheepers was in full voice the 2 times I saw them, Randy Black is an amazing drummer, the guitarists rule, Mat Sinner doesn't have a "friendly" face but is a metal legend.

At least, in Montreal, Powerglove didn't get a bigger crowd than the headliner Firewind...

 

[Metal_Camden]

To shed a little light on the "shitty deathcore bands on legit metal shows" discussion. Based on my ~5 years experience doing shows in my own band, this is how it works:

If a headlining band wants a $5,000 guarantee, rather than actually do any work to promote the show, or at least test the market for interest to see that the headliners are even capable of drawing enough to make sure the show won't bomb, the promoters will let 5 local bands buy onto the show, prebuying 50 tickets at $20 apiece ($1,000 apiece, so 5 grand total). That way, no matter what happens, the show won't bomb and everyone will make their money.

That being said, it's been my experience that 80% of bands don't even come close to selling the tickets they prebuy, the just get burned and look at it as "paying to play", which is why the shows are still half-empty even though the openers had to pre-buy 250 tickets.

The whole show I saw in Montreal was "big" hardcore bands, all of them in busses. So each of them had to be making at least $1700ish a day.

And yes thats the way shows are down here. Survival of the fittest! Ive had to pay to play or at least sell tickets for 80% of the shows we've played to get on the decent ones.

 

[Metal_Camden]

Yup, a horribly sleezy promoter tactic to cover his ass so he doesn't lose money on poor ticket sales. Local bands should NEVER support these practices.

I highly dissagree.

If promoters kept loosing money from bands that were lazy then they would cease to exist, which would in turn then be followed by the venues. It would be so easy to get booked and not have to do any work if your in the band.

There is a fine line between doing it wrong and doing it right. Start with the first band on the bill, you have never worked with them and you want them to "prove" their work ethic. The more i work with my local bands the more i start helping them out. I like seeing them work a bit as all of us in the Florida scene have done. I always pay my bands a percentage on the tickets they sold, and they are always happy... long story you make money and get further if you work for it, and also have a promoter that will let you do so instead of just sticking them with the opening slot every time. Suck it up and sell your tickets. ITs better for you in the long run. You then build a relationship with whoever is booking you and eventually you will be their golden egg.

Otherwise, sadly, go try to play your own show with a headliner that you put on and you will end up using this formula after you loose a bunch of money.

 

[DuchessOfDork]

I personally don't blame promoters for making bands sell tickets. Bands should have the ability to sell tickets. I don't complain about selling tickets, becuase if I want to play, I need to give the venue a reason to have me play, and that reason is people showing up to see me. What annoys me is when bands buy tickets and do nothing with them. No promoting, no flyers, no work. Just buy tickets, show up, play and leave. All this does is hurt the venue, and it's annoying.

 

[Force10]

The worst live performance I have ever seen was from MSG. I have no idea if their performance is always poor though.

I saw MSG open for Rush way back in late '87 and they were not very memorable at all.

 

[TwizstedJesus]

Worst live band ever...Ratt circa 1984. They were so boring I had to get stoned to enjoy the rest of the night.

There were many ProgPower bands that I didn't like, but none of them fit the bill of bad live acts. Secret Sphere might have been one of the more odd ones. The singer tried so hard he just made the show slightly unpleasant. But they were pretty good, so...

 

[AeonicSlumber]

I highly dissagree.

If promoters kept loosing money from bands that were lazy then they would cease to exist, which would in turn then be followed by the venues. It would be so easy to get booked and not have to do any work if your in the band.

There is a fine line between doing it wrong and doing it right. Start with the first band on the bill, you have never worked with them and you want them to "prove" their work ethic. The more i work with my local bands the more i start helping them out. I like seeing them work a bit as all of us in the Florida scene have done. I always pay my bands a percentage on the tickets they sold, and they are always happy... long story you make money and get further if you work for it, and also have a promoter that will let you do so instead of just sticking them with the opening slot every time. Suck it up and sell your tickets. ITs better for you in the long run. You then build a relationship with whoever is booking you and eventually you will be their golden egg.

Otherwise, sadly, go try to play your own show with a headliner that you put on and you will end up using this formula after you loose a bunch of money.

I'm not really going to comment on this post anymore than to say we're going to have to agree to disagree, but we really shouldn't turn this into a music business discussion.

 

[DTJeff]

The way a lot of shows around here USED TO work was much better than the way it is now. For example, when my band opened for Doro/Chris Caffery back in 2007, we didn't "buy on", we were just given 100 tickets and told to sell as many of them as we could at face value, since we had worked with the venue before and they knew we weren't gonna take on that challenge and only sell 5 tickets. We wound up selling about 70 I believe, and the whole thing went really, really well. We also made like a dollar or two per ticket back, plus some money for selling merch, so we made out pretty well, especially for getting the exposure. But the whole "give us $2,000 up front" thing is ridiculous. To promoters expect a band member to remortgage their house to open shows?

And ultimately, none of this would even be necessary if local promoters (I know not are all like this, but around here, they are) knew how to do their fucking jobs and either promote shows or just book them in a smarter fashion.

 

[BlackRoseMetalHeart]

It seems to me that the fans in your area have an "interesting" taste in live bands...

Powerglove draws a lot (overdrawing Firewind, the headliner), but yet Primal Fear plays for an empty house? What kind of lunatics do that?

The kind of morons who books metal shows at Jaxx and then do absolutely nothing to promote the show except for listing it on the calendar of their website. They don't even allow the locals to hang up posters or have a place for them to leave fliers advertising the show anymore since they "remodeled." They purely rely on their local bands (and/or whatever label put the tour together) to make sure people know about the show. The venue itself does next to nothing to actually promote their own shows. Epic promotional fail!

If a headlining band wants a $5,000 guarantee, rather than actually do any work to promote the show, or at least test the market for interest to see that the headliners are even capable of drawing enough to make sure the show won't bomb, the promoters will let 5 local bands buy onto the show, prebuying 50 tickets at $20 apiece ($1,000 apiece, so 5 grand total). That way, no matter what happens, the show won't bomb and everyone will make their money.

That being said, it's been my experience that 80% of bands don't even come close to selling the tickets they prebuy, the just get burned and look at it as "paying to play", which is why the shows are still half-empty even though the openers had to pre-buy 250 tickets.

Yup, a horribly sleezy promoter tactic to cover his ass so he doesn't lose money on poor ticket sales. Local bands should NEVER support these practices.

I can see both sides of the coin in this argument. A promoter friend of mine (and also a pretty well-known attendee at ProgPower and forum member) once said to me, "If you're in a band and you can't sell 50 tickets, if you don't have 50 friends who are willing to come see you play, you don't have any business making music."

To a certain point, I agree with him. If you can't convince people to come to your shows, what's the point of playing live? There are ways to compromise on this sort of pay-to-play model that can end up benefiting both the bands and the promoters, rather than just one taking advantage of the other. In order for any show to have a good attendance both the promoter/venue and the all bands on the bill have to work together and not just rely on the other to do all the work/promoting.



Back on the topic of worst bands you've ever seen in a live environment:


Opeth

Hands-down THE ABSOLUTE WORST live band I have ever seen. Granted, progressive death metal is not always my thing, but concerning this genre it is usually the band's live show that wins me over. While this band may be technically amazing and their song-writing brilliant to the hard-core progressive death metal fans, this band's performance has been awful every time I have seen them live. I actually feel asleep standing up at the 9:30 Club once when they were playing.

I have actually seen Opeth multiple times, never on purpose, only because there was another band on the bill I was there to see, and it has always been the same thing. The band members did not move on stage. They did not look happy or excited to be there. They did not look at or engage with the audience in anyway. They barely looked at or engaged with each other on stage. There was very little (if anything) said between songs by the singer/growler (or any of their members) from what I recall. Maybe they play their songs perfectly (I'm not enough of a fan to discern this), but they have absolutely THE WORST stage presence of any band I have seen live EVER!

 

[DTJeff]

Well, I think the real trouble is this:

Even if you are a great band and people like you, if you're strictly local and playing local, eventually you just get to banging your head against a wall in terms of people coming to see you. No matter how good you are, people aren't exactly gonna be jumping at paying $15 a ticket to see you play a half hour set once a month, or even just every couple of weeks. The only way to draw well is to play less often, play more time, and play places that book overall good bills and don't charge that much to get in.

The practice of "Let's have a local show where admission is $12 to see 7 completely different bands play a half hour apiece" is so incredibly fucking stupid. Sure, when you're young and first starting out, there's a certain buzz about the band and it's easy to convince your dumb friends in high school to pay $12 to see your band play 6 songs and then leave. But once you move past that stage, you have to start being a helluva lot smarter and be wary of people who have absolutely no idea what you're doing.

For example, my band used to play like once a month around here, and occasionally do shows further away (New York, New Jersey). When we were doing mostly local shows like I described at the same places around here every couple of weeks, we never could draw a good crowd. And that's not our fault for "not being good enough", that's our fault for not being smart. But now we're only playing once every couple of months. Actually we're not planning on playing at all until May 21st of this year, but having our own headlining show where we're debuting like 35 minutes of new music in an 80 minute set. We alone will draw ~100 people for this show.

 

[dcowboys311]

The practice of "Let's have a local show where admission is $12 to see 7 completely different bands play a half hour apiece" is so incredibly fucking stupid.

This practice rules when you have a good scene and a good DIY venue.

 

[Diabolik]

This practice rules when you have a good scene and a good DIY venue.

very true....in Chicago we have The Red Line Tap. It is a total D.I.Y. place that does metal shows the last saturday of the month. 5 bucks for 4 bands. This past year Superchrist, Deceased, Ignitor, High Spirits, Zuul, and many others have played. This March is Dawnbringers first show in 12 years. The guy who books mainly gets locals and bands from around the area. The place at most holds 100 and the sound is really good. Most locals who go to metal shows here have zero clue about it or even go support it since our metal scene is very much divided into genre cliques.

 

[AeonicSlumber]

I personally don't blame promoters for making bands sell tickets. Bands should have the ability to sell tickets. I don't complain about selling tickets, becuase if I want to play, I need to give the venue a reason to have me play, and that reason is people showing up to see me. What annoys me is when bands buy tickets and do nothing with them. No promoting, no flyers, no work. Just buy tickets, show up, play and leave. All this does is hurt the venue, and it's annoying.

I can see both sides of the coin in this argument. A promoter friend of mine (and also a pretty well-known attendee at ProgPower and forum member) once said to me, "If you're in a band and you can't sell 50 tickets, if you don't have 50 friends who are willing to come see you play, you don't have any business making music."

To a certain point, I agree with him. If you can't convince people to come to your shows, what's the point of playing live? There are ways to compromise on this sort of pay-to-play model that can end up benefiting both the bands and the promoters, rather than just one taking advantage of the other. In order for any show to have a good attendance both the promoter/venue and the all bands on the bill have to work together and not just rely on the other to do all the work/promoting.

It's not the band's job to promote the show (although it is in the band's best interest to do so), it is the promoter's (hence the title).

There is a big difference between a promoter who gives bands tickets to sell and then some of those earnings are shared between the bands and the promoter (if the band cannot meet a certain criteria of tickets sold then the band can't play the show), and a promoter who forces a band to spend 2,000 bucks just to cover is ass and the band gets the "honor" of opening up a larger act. That is a terrible practice that nobody should support. If the promoter does not have enough money to put on a show, don't put it on. Don't prey on smaller bands' hopes and dreams of becoming successful by financially ruining them.

If I was in a band and we had enough money to buy on to shows like that, it would make far more sense to just rent a van and tour DIY playing dives, people's basements, whatever while hiring a publicist to spread the word as best he or she can. Labels couldn't care less if you've done one or two shows opening for some larger act. That's not enough exposure to sell a CD to them. Showing that your band is able to be proactive and able to tour and do the necessary things to get the name out there (as well as be smart with money) is what a label looks for. I don't think I have heard of a single "successful" band that had ever bought onto shows like that. It's just a trap for bad promoters.

There's also a staunch difference from buying onto a tour and buying onto a show. When a band buys onto a tour, that money goes to the headliner's guarantee per night,your band's bus share, backline, food, hotel, etc etc. Only a small % of that goes to the booking agent. When you pay a promoter an exorbitant amount of money to play a show, all of that money just goes to the promoter's pocket so he can make extra profit, or to cover his booty from losing money and not having to do any work to promote the show.

 

[AeonicSlumber]

This practice rules when you have a good scene and a good DIY venue.

I don't know. It depends on the show/venue/crowd. Sometimes a big package can be cool, but alot of times it's just a waste. I saw 6 bands open for Carcass and it was just too much. Should've just been like 2 or 3 tops. Opeth/Enslaved was so refreshing because I had been sick to death of these 5-6 band packages at that point.