Yesterday I attended a music festival. Ten hours long, maybe a dozen or so acts.
When the next to the last act appeared, James McMurtry, the son of writer Larry McMurtry and a hell of a songwriter/musician, his fans were invited to "dance in front of the stage and in the aisles." No one was allowed to do this during any other act. Well, this was an under-the-tent event with about 500 people there. It was also pouring rain outside, the temp was in the 50s, and everyone was crowded under the tents.
What resulted was that about 30 people - at MOST - got to actually "see" McMurtry perform, while the rest of us might as well have been sitting at home in comfort listening to his CDs, instead of staring at the asses of the 70 folks crowded in front of the stage blocking our views. At one point between songs some idiot in the audience - me - yelled - "You guys aren't dancing, you're STANDING!! Sit down!!" And the few that actually WERE dancing? Well, it was mostly just terribly embarrasing.
Am I wrong to think that this is incredibly rude? This was definitely not a punk rock crowd - there was no moshpit and no crowd surfing. Hell, anyone would have been hardpressed to lift any of the obese, middle-aged fat asses we ended up staring at for an hour and a half. Most couples at this show would have spent over $100 for tickets, food and drink at this festival. A lot of them, including myself, are huge McMurtry fans, but we were completely cheated from actually seeing him play. If you were lucky, you got to see his hat floating above the crowd "dancers." I had comp tickets, but I would have demanded a refund if I'd paid for those suckers.
I'm a newspaper editor, and I want to put a piece in tomorrow's edition that just lambasts this sort of shit. Am I way out of line in my thinking on this? I've been told that if you buy a ticket to a concert you can stand or sit - no matter how it affects anyone around you. I think that's bullshit. I went to a Dylan concert two years ago where the people in the first eight rows stood the whole time, blocking the view of hundreds, if not thousands of others. LOTS of people were really pissed off about it. I took all the change I had, plus all the change of everyone around me, and pinged if off the back of the heads of all the people standing in front of me. Didn't make everyone sit, but they paid a price for being assholes!
A ranting S4