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concerts we are ashamed to admit we attended


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Well, my wife and I have seen James Taylor at Tanglewood a couple of times, but I wouldn't say that I'm "ashamed" of the fact. It certainly wasn't my idea and Taylor isn't represented in my personal collection, but I certainly have nothing against the guy. He's a wonderful showman who understands his audience and gives them exactly what they want. Both shows have been very pleasant.

The worst concert I've been to was the Barenaked Ladies. I loved "Gordon," their first album, and a few of their singles thereafter. My wife and I went to see them after their most recent album was released and they played NOTHING but the new material. Since we hadn't heard the album, we didn't know any of it and it didn't hold up on its own merits. We were both bored to tears. Again, I'm not "ashamed" that I went. I just wish they had had the good sense to include some of the material from the first few albums to appease the old fans.

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Here's the tally thus far:

Marcello saw TELLY FUCKIN' SAVALAS LIVE!

Whereas the rest of you saw a pack of losers live.

So, MARCELLO WINS (thus far).

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

:P

Since you're digging this so much Mr. Korean, I'll tell you what I remember:

The show was fun and short. He had a maybe a half a dozen beautiful back up singers/dancers that he made campy fun with while he talked his way through these kind of Las Vegas type disco songs.

Like a lot of these instances here, the woman at the moment was the one who wanted to see the show, and besides, what do you do in Rochester on a Tuesday night ( performers played this dinner theatre for a week or so at a time)?

Because I knew many of the guys in the pit band, we went backstage and were introduced to Telly in his dressing room (what I wouldn't do for sexy woman in those days!). He was very nice and spent most of the short time we were there making sure the girl I was with didn't eat him alive. He seemed like he was enjoying his life.

I guess this was 1974 or '75 now that I think of it because I remember seeing Sarah Vaughan at the same place in '75 there (with Percy Heath and Jimmy Cobb. On the same night at a club on the other side of town, I met Dizzy Gillespie for the first time), also Mel Torme' and the Basie Band after Basie's heart attack with Nat Pierce on piano.

But I guess the most embarrassinglconcert that I can admit to seeing is...Sheena Easton! Again, for a good looking date. That concert made me drop her fast, I shit you not. Ya gotta have standards.

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Kelly Clarkson. It was a nice gesture for the little lady

I can't remember the last time I was that bored. I almost fell asleep standing up.

I thought that stuff these days is loud enough to wake the dead(?). :ph34r:

Anyhow, I've never been to a regrettable concert. I played one, a big band backing Anson Williams, that makes me hang my head in shame....talking about sucked..damn.

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It was pretty loud, but I always take earplugs to shows so that I don't blow out my hearing. That said, I can sleep through loud anything if I'm bored or tired. I've fallen asleep while listening to death metal. I'll probably fall asleep during the nuclear holocaust and the apocalypse, too.

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1. chuck mangione - mid/late '70s (revolving stage in a dinner-theater tent, free tickets)

2. styx - 1980 (i loved my young girlfriend very much)

3. herbie hancock - chicago, august 2007

(if you don't think this was cause for embarrassment, just ask mark, sal, joe segal, or jim "beehive" neumann)

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ELO II :winky:

Michael Flattulence's 'Riverdance' :bad: (a girlfriend talked me into it)

and Gary Glitter !!

i'm sorry to be the one to say it, but going to see the last two is reason enough to pause and seriously question your sexual orientation.

not that there's anything wrong with that! ^_^

p.s. if you ever attended a cher concert, that's the clincher. :P

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ELO II :winky:

Michael Flattulence's 'Riverdance' :bad: (a girlfriend talked me into it)

and Gary Glitter !!

i'm sorry to be the one to say it, but going to see the last two is reason enough to pause and seriously question your sexual orientation.

not that there's anything wrong with that! ^_^

p.s. if you ever attended a cher concert, that's the clincher. :P

The Glitter one can be explained :D . It was a gig - a big band I was in at college did an all-night student event and Glitter's group (with shiny outfits and star guitars) preceded us onto the bandstand. We came on at 4am !

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I was not ashamed to have attended these consecutive concerts, but the experience was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Here's how I related it almost 40 years ago:

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

Down beat - October 30, 1969

New York Jazz Festival

Downing Stadium, Randalls Island, New York City

The 1969 New York Jazz Festival ran for four nights on two consecutive weekends. The following report covers the final two concerts, Aug. 23 and 24, and is intended more as a review of the festival itself than of the “acts.”

Saturday night’s proceedings were scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. By 7:30, no announcements had been made and only an occasional glimpse of pianist Les McCann wandering around the bandstand indicated that there might be some music in the offing. That hint grew somewhat stronger at 7:40, when the piano was delivered. Ten minutes later, an emcee calling himself "Sad Sam" waddled on stage and proceeded with strained joviality to hurl inanities at the remarkably patient audience.

It was 8 o’clock before McCann (With Leroy Vinnegar, bass; Donald Dean, drums; Buck Clarke, conga) was able to start. No sooner had the quartet begun the second chorus of
Sunny
than pandemonium broke loose. In a mad scramble, the $4.50 to $8 ticket holders descended on the $10 “VIP” Section, stepping on the toes of those legitimately there and, in many cases, securing better seats.

As soon as calm had been restored, McCann and Co. tackled
Sunny
anew, but it was a fruitless effort. Now the competition came in the form of microphone feedback. There followed a ten-minute audio maintenance delay and a second invasion of the VIP section. This time the invaders, folding chairs in hand, filled up the aisles and all other open space in the higher-priced section. This incursion took place without any form of intervention from the festival’s officials or security guards.

Finally, at 8:20, McCann was able to bring
Sunny
to a natural conclusion. The sanctified beat continued with
Burnin’ That Coal
and led to
With These Hands
, a ballad on which the pianist also sang. The set ended with McCann the Soul singer doing a social commentary song entitled
Compared To What
.

A young singer “all the way from Long Island” was next. Todd Finkel no more belongs in a jazz festival then does Liberace, but then, this was a jazz festival in name only. Even at this early stage, the unintended comic relief provided by Finkel was actually welcome. I daresay that Finkel might do well at the resorts or on the Ed Sullivan Show, but the stadium crowd was not ready for his gyration-accompanied
Light My Fire
. The nervous laughter which this brought on had not yet subsided when, in the desperate voice of one who knows he’s bombing out, Finkel bravely announced “a tribute to that great lady whom we all loved so much, Billie Holiday.”

Considering the soul-forsaken rendition of
God Bless the Child
that followed, and the mood of the predominantly black crowd, it is quite possible that a passing airship spared Finkel from even greater embarrassment than what he did suffer. The airship, hovering majestically above the stadium, slightly behind the bandstand, was one of those flying billboards. As soon as the crowd, inattentive to the performance on stage, spotted the ever-changing, flashing, multi-colored messages that moved from the airship’s bow to stern, they became a modern-day Greek chorus, their voices rising in perfect unison. E-N-J-O-Y Y-O-U-R V-AC-A-T-I-O-N ... each letter punctuated and held until the next one appeared ... D-R-I-V-E S-A-F-E-L-Y-the messages kept coming while Finkel’s voice occasionally emerged from the poorly lit stage, “Mama may have, papa may have ...” A paper cup flew toward the singer as the crowd continued its incongruous chant. It missed, and the bewildered performer continued until, as if by design, his voice mike went dead.

The circus continued with Hugh Masekela. Clad in a Texas-cum-mod outfit, he received a tumultuous welcome from his dashiki-sporting fans. I won’t go into the music any more than I would review an art exhibit in the dark. As a matter of fact, the metaphor can be taken literally, since, sound system aside, Masekela and his men almost did perform in the dark. One of the spotlights that constituted the stage lighting seemed to be out. However, it was discovered that both spotlights were indeed on—one of the operators simply had a poor aim and was missing the stage!

Throughout both nights, a soloist would often find himself in total darkness while a stagehand was bathed in light. Add to that the thoroughly inadequate sound system, and you can imagine what a nightmare it all must have been for the performers.

Comedian Redd Foxx entertained while the stage was being set for the Basie band. His opening promise, “I swear to God and three other white men, you’re gonna have some fun now” was fulfilled, but his was the only act of the evening that came off without technical mishap. As far as I could determine, Basie’s band played well and drummer Harold Jones propelled it along nicely. There were excellent solos by tenor-saxophonist Lockjaw Davis (especially on
Cherokee
), Eric Dixon, and trombonist Frank Hoods, and all 12 microphones seemed to be working, albeit somewhat off balance.

More insipid small-talk from increasingly sad Sam and, like the three witches in Macbeth, the Delfonics (the King Sisters of Soul) romped on stage, spouting a deluge of wildly animated r&b hits while a large segment of the audience showed where it was really at.

Woody Herman’s band followed and was sadly disappointing, but the prevailing circumstances handicapped every artist--it was a well-attended nightmare. Furthermore, in all fairness to Herman, it was now past midnight and the audience, not having been granted the scheduled intermission, had spent at least five hours in sedentary discomfort while its ears had withstood a solid four hours of abuse.

Clearly, the main attraction of the evening was singer Dionne Warwick--otherwise, the stadium would have emptied out long before she came on, close to 12:30 a.m. Preceded by a male vocal trio, the Constellations, Miss Warwick made a rather stagy entrance, using most of the Herman band and the vocal trio to start things off. She began her opening number,
Aquarius
, from backstage, but no sooner had she appeared than the Constellations’ mike went dead and we were again listening to half a performance. After three of Miss Warwick’s rather uninspired past hits, I’d had more than enough. Just before exiting, I looked back at the audience, which now seemed to be awake. Its rears and ears surely sore, it attentively accepted the acoustically garbled sounds of an idol.

Sunday night’s event began 75 minutes late with a very good set by the Lou Donaldson Quintet. Trumpeter Gary Chandler provided one of the highlights of the evening with his obbligato work behind a Donaldson blues vocal. The sound system worked reasonably well (all the instruments could be heard) and the set was marred only by Donaldson’s use of the Varitone, particularly his application of strong reverb in the second chorus of the above-mentioned blues.

Sad Sam was back, but he hadn’t improved (where do producers dig up these emcees? Surely in New York…). He repeated some of his bad jokes of the previous night as he introducing the next act, a vocal quartet called the Friends of Distinction. They turned out to be a cross between the Hi Lo’s and the Fifth Dimension, but I don’t believe they are any match for either group. I may be wrong, for a bad sound system can be as deceiving as a funhouse mirror, and unless the female half of the group turned to mime in mid-song, those mikes were dying again. During this set, a repeat of Saturday night’s invasion of the VIP section took place.

Chico Hamilton, sporting a small pigtail, did much to save the evening. His sextet (two trombones, two saxes, bass and drums) gave this concert its most musically exciting performance, with much credit due bass trombonist Jimmy Cheatham. His arrangements cleverly and most pleasantly combine the humor of jazz past with the seriousness of jazz present. I was also impressed with altoist Steve Potts.

After a hilarious set of her routines, Jackie (Moms) Mabley announced that she was going to “step out of character” to sing her latest hit,
Abraham, Martin and John
. The audience loved it, but I found it rather maudlin and Miss Mabley’s many plugs for the record (“It’s number two now... buy it, Moms needs the money,” etc.) diluted her tears with incongruity. Again, the scheduled intermission was skipped (without a word of explanation) and the program continued with a long but far from dull set by the Unifics. This singing group (four young men) whips around the stage, eight hands gloved in white, creating movements that would make a Siamese temple dancer envious. It’s a Soul group that relates to its audience in much the same way that Bessie Smith and her colleagues must have back in those tent show days. Their choreography was imaginative and their voices good. During a falsetto solo in the group’s second number, a girl in front of me fainted from excitement, and the stadium filled with orgiastic shrieks each time the group struck a suggestive pose.

Hordes of teenagers could be seen exiting the stadium as Lou Rawls stepped in front of a big band and tried to revive a dead mike. It was too far gone; he had to borrow a live one from the sax section. After a good set, Rawls turned the stage over to Sarah Vaughan. “I brought the Mafia with me,” she said laughingly after introducing the members of her trio, all bearing Italian names, “and I’m the moll.” What she was was a reminder of how truly cool a seasoned jazz pro can be.

With regal majesty, she held the stage and gave a performance that commanded attention from even the rowdiest drinkers in the audience. With a smile she sang an ad-lib comment on the piano: ”The worst I’ve ever worked with.” Some of the keys didn’t function and it was out of tune, but, remarkably, the divine one ignored that handicap and effortlessly breezed through a well-chosen program.

It is hard to say who suffered most from this badly planned, incompetently produced New York Jazz Festival. Surely the performers experienced a nightmare and the serious jazz listeners felt somewhat short-changed. Perhaps the sponsors, Schaefer Beer, suffered a different kind of pain at the sight of a competitive brew being sold at the official stands and by wandering vendors, but ultimately it is jazz itself that must pay the long-term dues for this kind of circus. Producer Teddy Powell should go back to his record hops until he is ready for the big leagues.

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