Mathematically speaking...

...there is a thirty percent chance that my drunk-ass will get rained on before I get to the Electric Factory for the Umphrey's McGee show tonight. Math, as we know, is absolute - which is why I'm drinking Southern Comfort.

"Why aren't you driving?" you ask. I never drive to the city. The Electric Factory is near 6th and Callowhill, so I'll take the Speed Line to 8th and Market and start looking for bars. Any old port in the storm.

A full report will be filed tomorrow - but not too early.

I do know this: It won't be "lame", like Police drummer Stewart Copeland called their Vancouver show the other night.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The singer in the Police jumps like a "petulant pansy," the drummer is making a "complete hash," and who knows what the guitarist is doing? "This is unbelievably lame," Copeland wrote of Wednesday's show at the GM Place arena. "We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea." "The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock," Copeland reported. "And so it goes, for song after song," he wrote, with tunes such as "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" and "Don't Stand So Close To Me" reduced to ruin.
"It usually takes about four or five shows in a tour before you get to the disaster gig. But we're The Police so we are a little ahead of schedule," he said.
Fortunately, no fists flew backstage as they did back in the Police's heyday. The threesome fell into each other's arms laughing hysterically, Copeland said.
"Screw it, it's only music. What are you gonna do? But maybe it's time to get out of Vancouver."

Sure, screw it. Meanwhile, the $400 ticket holders have no recourse, when they would probably like to ram a drumstick up your ass or ... at the very least ... squeeze a lemon in your eye.

I can be reasonably sure that the Umphrey's McGee show will not be lame, which is why I don't go in for stadium rock or over-hyped nonsense passing itself off as entertainment. It's also why I don't attend these reunion shows.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer was undoubtedly my favorite band as a youngster. When they re-united I wasn't going anywhere near the Mann Center. I preferred to be alone with my memories of great music. For those too young to remember or those who wished they had gone in the 70s, they have free will. For me, I will not sully the memory of a great band with a money-grab show made for industry, with ticket prices twenty times what we would have paid when the band was actually worth seeing.

The McGee ticket cost me $22, and I would see them twenty times before I'd see those grubbing geezers once. Good luck to you, if you're going.

Truth Hits Everybody

I know you. You thought, "Oh, there goes Anthony, off on another one of his 'twisted society' rants." That's OK. I understand. Sometimes I get a little ... aaaarrrrgggh ... about it all and it seems that maybe I go overboard in my pursuit of an angle for one of these posts.

I understand.

Every once in a while, though, I'm not all that far off on the old Twisted Society bit.
Take those Police tickets I was ranting about before. Pretty expensive, huh? And that's just the regular price. I think I used the term "three times value" when I talked about buying them from ticket sellers.

One of those ticket brokers stopped by the blog on Friday. Ticket Solutions, which seems to be another sort of oxymoron, or at the very least a contradiction in terms. The Solution for getting floor seats at Giants Stadium is to cough up $2,875 each for them.
Uh Huh.

You can click on that image to enlarge it, but make sure you have a full stomach and are seated in an upright position.
And, in case you were worried, they sell their tickets with a 200% guarantee. So, if you get there and the ticket is a copy, you can get double your money back, which doesn't match the 1200% mark-up on the tickets, but it's a nice gesture.

Over at good old Citizen's Bank Ballpark, where tickets aren't even on sale yet, the duckets will set you back $950 for the good spots, and $120 for Section 420 (a.k.a. Mount Everest). I guess they clogged up the pre-sale to get those.
At Fenway Park in Boston, they are charging Giants Stadium prices, with field-level seats at $2,875.
The Canadians aren't quite so ga-ga over the Police. A show at the Air Canada Center in Toronto will set you back from $850 to $115. Probably an exchange-rate deal.
Anyway, there are plenty more, but I think you get the point. If you want to see what's going on in or near your home town, click here and check the mortgage payment prices for one ticket to see 60-year old rock stars.

It's all perfectly legal, gang. At least they claim it is. The reality of the situation is that concert and big event tickets are Big Business. A racket in its purest form. Fans can see their favorite bands, but at a price. And while it might seem that I am picking on Ticket Solutions, they really aren't any different than any other ticket broker in the country. Find one, search their web site and you'll see the same thing.

Citizen's Bank Ballpark probably holds about 55,ooo for a concert. They set up a stage in center field, shit up the grass and rake it in - the money. The grass they leave. For the rest of the season, the Phillies play on an outfield with little square brown spots where the stage was.
Much like the fans, who sit with little brown spots in their pants when it comes time to pay for the privilege of seeing a band that you may have some personal connection with, and would like to re-unite yourself with over the summer. Go ahead, but the nostalgia will cost you dearly.
You have a fat rats ass of a chance to score tickets the regular way. Out of those 55,000 maybe 10,000 will get to real people who will pay face value. The rest go to Ticket Solutions and their ilk.

I scratch my head and wonder how or why it can be legal. I hate to say it, but I think it is way past time for our government to get involved in this ticket scalping practice. At the field is one thing. The real police can and do arrest scalpers. Why, then, is it legal to sell them off-site? I can understand a little profit for the effort, but Jesus!

I'm sure the Ticket Solutions web stalker will return to read this.
He's probably up all night. I would be. If I was in the business of legally raping people for money, I couldn't sleep either.

Someone Call a Cop

THE NEWS:

The Police are set to embark on their first tour in 23 years! To celebrate their 30th anniversary, Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland will trek through arenas and stadiums across North America this summer.

I checked my thesaurus to see what words were synonyms for "trek", since it's an odd descriptive for anyone not traveling by foot. I found hike, tramp, slog, trail and trudge. That sounds like a lot of work. I sure hope they're being amply compensated.

So, there I go, over to the Ticketmaster site (Circle 4 of The Nine Circles of Hell) to check out the ticket prices, to let me know how much celebrating I can do. Plus, I figure if the boys are going to trudge all over the United States, they had better be making enough money to afford gorp.

At the aptly named Palace at Auburn Hills, the geezers are accepting $227, $92 and $82. That should be enough to keep them waist-deep in gorp, even at New York prices. At the Madison Square, the tickets start at $254. The seats in New York must be closer.

There's even a Gold Hot Seat Package for $405. I can only imagine. First of all, a gold hot seat sounds like something that happens to people with urinary difficulties. I'm not sure I want to sit in a gold seat - especially if it's warm.

Who would chunk down $405 to see this?

The joint will be filled with power-buyers. Big corporate jerks who never really dug the band, but "grew to love" them once they found out that their CEO was giving them tickets. The CEO bought them from a ticket broker who got in on the pre-sale and jammed up the Internet with hundreds of workers buying thousands of tickets. It'll be harder to get a ticket for this than it was for George W. Bush to learn to say Barack Obama without giggling.

By the time the real "since Fall Out and Roxanne" fan gets a shot, the choices will be (a) A "cheap" seat in the Mount Everest section or (b) Pay a broker three times value. Include me out.

I think The Police are betting that their audience has now become nouveau riche middle-management types and can fork up the money and barely miss a mortgage payment. I think they figured right.

Whatever, it's big-time production Music-as-Business and I consider it to be at the basement of everything that myself and my family hold dear. It isn't the function of entertainers (especially artists and musicians) to build a stage that could contain a cruise ship and run ticket prices through the roof. The art should be above that, but I'm not naive enough to think that they aren't in it for the cash. It's a money grab, plain and simple.

In 1978, you could have paid 5 bucks to see the young, energetic Police, not this current bunch of Stung, Jerry Springer and Harpo Marx.
Could they charge half of what they do and sell the place out? You bet. But, they can also charge what they are and still sell it out.

What Would Jesus Do?

It should be illegal, but it is subsidized and encouraged.

Go figure.