I've been reading a lot of reviews of recent shows where they mention that most of the shows are sparsely attended. I'd like to think that its more the "economy" more than it is the bands drawing power. Lots of people are out of work! My neighbor, who have a small child, BOTH husband & wife got laid off the SAME week! Times are tough! Some people are working TWO jobs just to make ends meet. Pretty tough to go to a concert when you work a job 8 hrs then go home & rest for two hours then go to your OTHER job. This has been going on for quite awhile. Back in 2007, I went to see Heaven and Hell (R.I.P. Ronnie), Alice Cooper & Queensryche. Now, you'd think with a bill like that would be sell outs galore. No, I went to 3 shows & they were nowhere close to being full. As the Queensryche song goes, "A Sign Of The Times".
You're right, times are rough. Truer words never spoken.
Still, $25 is pretty cheap for a concert ticket these days. Consider on top of that the fact that the $25 section was largely empty. I would tend to think that if the sparse attendance was due to the economy, then those cheap seats would have been sold out before any other area of the arena, because that's all concertgoers would have been able to afford. It's a shame that the venue couldn't have offered 2 for the price of 1 ticket deals or something towards the end of ticket sales to try to fill more seats. STP has played to sold out or nearly sold out crowds throughout their career tour stops in the Pacific Northwest, including the shows they did at Key Arena, Mercer Arena, the Gorge, and The Rose Garden in Portland (not counting Bumbershoot because I missed them when they played there in 2008). To see them go from playing in front of 15,000-25,000 people to just over 2 thousand in a half sold arena was a letdown, compared to seeing them in their past glory years. Don't get me wrong, they delivered a blistering, high energy 90 minute show. It's just too bad so many people missed it. It was weird how Weiland didn't really interact with the crowd much like in past shows, either. It was an especially disappointing turnout, considering how this was their first arena show in the area in quite a while.
In the middle of "Down" there was a pretty good fight about 10 rows or so ahead of where I was sitting. I hope the person that videotaped it posts it to Youtube! Some sweaty, shirtless guy got a little too close to one of these 3 highly attractive girls that were dancing and one of the girl's boyfriends started grappling with the guy. It took about a minute for it to get broken up. There were some good punches thrown before the one guy was ejected.
