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It's Alright Ma, They're Only Bleeding... Us
da Flower Punk - April 11, 1999 <tlynch@socrates.berkeley.edu>Bob Dylan has created some marvelous concert bills in recent years.
Ever since his commercial stock again rose with the release of a classic CD, "Time Out Of Mind," Dylan has toured with Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and Lucinda Williams in various combinations. These were bills created from the wet dreams of lovers of great songwriters.
Yet tickets for these concerts were ridiculously priced. They often ranged as high as $70 a seat.
Now he has done it again. It is hard to imagine a more appealing concert billing than Dylan and Paul Simon together on one stage. Simon is an amazing, if somewhat under-rated songwriter and performer, one of the greats of his generation in fact. He only rarely tours, however, making the opportunity to see him live, on the same stage with Dylan especially, a very appealing prospect. Until one gets a look at the ticket prices that is.
Dylan and Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden in New York City costs a whopping $122 per person for good seats. With the obligatory TicketBastard "service charge" that means it actually will set attendees back $153.50 a piece to see this one concert.
Sure, there are cheaper seats available. You can sit up in the second tiers for a mere $80-something (plus service charges), or you can sit in the clouds, some eleven stories up above the stage, for a price of $50-something per ducat (before the service charges).
Simply put, these prices are obscene.
It all started when the Eagles got back together several years ago. They raised the bar to the hundred dollar ticket, and many people paid that. Lately it has been the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and now Dylan and Simon, that are trying to get a hundred bucks a head or more from fans.
Well of course they are trying to charge these outrageous amounts. People are paying it.
Do the numbers, it is ridiculous to pay that much. Let's be conservative. Let's use the $80 per seat as an average, and estimate that 15,000 people can fit into Madison Square Garden. That means the one show, if it sold out, would generate $1.2 million! Dylan and Simon are masters at what they do, don't get me wrong. But a million dollars a night? Puhlease. They are not that good. No one is.
Next, realize that many fans of these artists will not be able to attend these shows because of the cost. These are the same artists that made their names posing as outsiders years ago. Now they are the establishment, and apparently the lessons they learned were only this: if you get big enough you can leave today's outsiders outside. This one's for the SUV crowd only, thank you very much.
They don't have to charge that much. Even with affordable ticket prices, bands like the Dave Matthews Band and Phish do quite well for themselves. DMB grossed some $44 million last year in ticket sales; Phish did about half that. That's still a lot of money. And because ticket prices were not top dollar, no one begrudges them those earnings. The Dead were exemplary in this regard. They tended to keep their ticket prices slightly below the going market rate, and because of this, not in spite of it, they were always among the top grossing acts in terms of ticket sales year after year.
Do some comparison shopping. For $80-$120 bucks (depending on how far in advance one buys the ticket) one can get *four days* of music at the High Sierra Music Festival in Bear Valley, Ca. Four days of music featuring some of the finest acts on the American road today, like String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, Widespread Panic, Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, and many, many more. The ticket price includes camping on a beautiful plot of land at 7,000'. (For info. on this, one of the truly great festivals in the West, check out http://hsmusic.net ).
For just slightly more than that one could attend other great multi-day festivals, like Telluride or the Strawberry Music Festival in Camp Mather, Ca.; again camping in wonderful settings included in the price. On the East Coast there is MerleFest, and the WinterHawk Bluegrass Festival, and scores of others that provide days and days worth of great music and camping for similar prices -- or less. The kind of money Dylan, Simon, Young, the Stones and others are charging for a few short hours of music would go a long way at something like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, as well.
Along similar lines, think of how many fine bands one could see all year long for just the $153.50 that one good ticket to Dylan and Simon would cost. I recently saw one of the finest song-writers in America, a man named Tom Russell, play in a small bar for $7 a person. String Cheese Incident -- as good a bunch of musicians as you'll find anywhere -- plays for anywhere between $10 and $20 a head most nights of the year. Which means you could see artists like Russell (or any number of wonderful but lesser known songwriters) 21 times for the price of seeing Dylan and Simon once. One could see SCI 7-15 times for the same money. P-Funk, which gets like $35 bucks a piece at a place like the Warfield, puts on a four hour show that is different all the time; you could see them at least four times for the same money. Or you could buy 15 or more CDs, or a couple of box sets, or a decent musical instrument to play for yourself....
Literally *thousands* of other bands and artists charge so little yet give so much. They really deserve you to spread your concert going money around. They provide at least as much entertainment as Dylan and Simon will, without the hype, without the crowds, and without raping their audience financially.
And this is all true before the tension that will inevitably emerge within the halls during these Dylan & Simon concerts is factored in to the equation. That tension will happen when folks get up to dance as Dylan plays a rocker like "Sylvio," and the people behind them say "sit down." "I paid $153.50 to be in this spot," both will exclaim, exasperated, "and I want to [sit & see / dance]." That's when the ushers will show up and insist everybody sit, opera house style. Some way to see a rock concert.
Don't expect your mainstream media outlets to bring any of this up, however. There is simply too much money at stake.
Dylan and Simon will play for the huge music monopoly, SFX. SFX owns stakes in most of the venues the tour will play in. SFX has tremendous stakes in radio stations in most markets as well. Those stations depend on the advertising for SFX shows, and will do all kinds of promotional tie-ins to build the hype.
And of course SFX has an "exclusivity clause" with TicketBastard, so no one else can sell tickets to these things and get a piece of those $20-plus "service charges." SFX not only won't complain when TicketBastard gets such usurious "service charges" on each and every ticket sold, SFX profits from it all. Part of the exclusivity clause means that TicketBastard pays SFX a portion of each "service charge" under the guise of it being "quantity discounts."
In these days of mergers and consolidation that is how it is done, some will say. But what are "rebates" and "discounts" when mega-corporations and monopolists like SFX and TicketBastard do it are called "kickbacks," "payola," and "restraints of free trade" when small, independent companies do it.
The whole thing is fucked from head to toe, in other words.
Don't go to rock concerts that charge opera house prices in hockey rink settings.
It might be different if these same artists were playing in smaller, more intimate settings. That might justify higher prices, because the quality of the experience is better. This is what Neil Young is doing, for example, and many people report being very happy with his solo acoustic, Bridge Benefit shows in theaters of late. (By contrast, the Simon shows are a benefit only for Simon, who may have incurred some big losses when his Broadway musical, "Capeman," never got off the ground.) But a hockey rink is still a hockey rink no matter who you put inside, or how much it costs to get in.
Hundreds of thousands of people will probably still go to see Dylan and Simon together in spite of all this. Too many rock audiences, like too many American consumers and constituencies, have no idea of what their own personal and collective interests even are, much less how to try and make them manifest.
_______flowerpunkprods______ Da Flower Punk is a historian, music journalist and freek living in Berkeley, Ca. If you're interested in more of what he has to say check out http://pauserecord.com .
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS: Last month I told you about Day By The River releasing a four hour live set in MP3 format. What I did not make clear is that this release, called "Watermarks," is on a CD that you can play on your computer. The release includes the MP3 player software you need. Plus, it only costs ten bucks. For more information check out http://www.daybytheriver.com.
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