Has an artist's live performance ever turned you off of them?

Yes, but not permanently. I saw Bad Religion a couple of times in the ‘00s, and it was just kind of “meh” for me. People who had seen them were surprised to hear me say that at the time, so I could have caught lackluster nights, or something. But it made me indifferent about anything they did after that, until they released their Christmas album several years ago. And I think that Christmas album is actually my favorite of theirs.

 

Not exact to the OPs specs because I had seen Wilco twice during the AM tour and they were amazing.

Then… the Being There tour at the El Rey Theater. Sullen angry Jeff baiting the crowd.

No bueno. Didn’t see them again until Ghost Is Born tour and by then all was forgiven

but that El Rey show was a drag. And very disappointing.

 

Saw Love around 1970 I think, it was post Forever Changes version of Love.
Arthur came on stage and said "if anybody is here to hear Forever Changes you might as well leave now" (I think there was an F word in there)
They started playing this distorted heavy, out of tune crap, Arthur was high, or drunk.
It was awful, half the crowd left, one guy found a small rubbish bin, walk up to the stage and threw the contents at Arthur.
I went right off them but eventually still found my love for their music.

Van Morrison was just plain boring
Bob Dylan never said 1 word, and changed all the melodies. Walked out feeling like I'd been ripped off. It's not just the cost of tickets, it's the prep, travelling, car parking, getting ripped for food and drink, lining up for a pee, fighting to get out of the car park for 1.5 hours post show, and Uncle Bob couldn't even say "thanks"

Saw America about 3 years ago, they have lost the ability to sing I'm afraid. They had some young band member sing Sister Golden Hair so sounded more like a tribute band. Absolute waste of time, money and energy.

 

To each their own, but that's one of the things I love about Dylan. He's not afraid to completely rearrange his songs. Not everybody can pull that off, but his songs are so strong that they work in a variety of arrangements.

 

The classic for me was The Fixx. I had bought "Shuttered Room" and liked it well enough. Then "Reach The Beach" came out and they broke big. "One Thing Leads To Another" came out and was played to death. I neither liked nor hated it, but had the occasion to see The Fixx 2nd on a stadium bill that began with The Animals and ended with The Police ["Synchronicity" tour, and I hated that album]. It probably didn't help that this was my 3rd concert ever and my only stadium show. I despised the 12 hours trapped with all of these people throwing beer/food/anything not nailed down, smoking cigs and dope. Cy Curnin was so pretentious onstage with his art poses that I was turned off forever on The Fixx. The repugnance of the day in the stadium [I had to write a paper on this event for a college class I was taking at the time] has stuck with me like glue, and I would never see a band in a stadium again for all the money in the world. None of the bands were any good that day, but it was the Tangerine Bowl. How could it have been good?

 

Neil Young and Crazy Horse. It was the most self-indulgent w-ank fest I’ve seen.
I haven’t been able to listen to NY since. After the concert I also gave away or sold all my NY LPs and CDs and the Buffalo Springfield box set. He left quite a big impression on me.

 

Yea, we were Michell Shocked fans (wayyy before "THAT"). Last time we saw her she had two young ladies opening for her and occasionally singing backup. Her temper was flashing on these poor girls. She had to call her boyfriend from the stage. Now, admittedly she's bi-polar, but I guess we had always seen her when the drugs evened her out and when she had a band she could deliver one helluva show (this time was just her). Now, of course, she can't get arrested. No more for us, even before 'that'.

 

I actually came in here to mention Bad Religion. I had seen them a couple times in the 90s and it was decent. Then I saw them in 01 and it was brutal. They sounded so lifeless and they played for two hours. Hearing that much Bad Religion in a row really made me focus on how much the songs all sound alike. It was rough. It was years before I put their records on again

 

I kinda liked what I had heard from Muse before I saw them in 2004. Their live show completely turned me off of them. It felt so overblown and obnoxious.

 

It took me two or three years to get over a Todd Rundgren solo show around the time of that “with a twist” thing. He lost me when he pulled out an MP3 player and started singing along with it. For about a third of the show.

I’m back to being a fan, and have seen him before and since. He’s always been one of my favorite artists. But man. That show was not good and made me feel like he really had some bills to pay…

 

at least he could talk. I knew someone who went to see him many times 70's/80's. One night he described Arthur walking on stage and just spoke gibberish into the mike. People thought it was a joke, but he kept going, even when he sang. He was so messed up he just mumbled and said indecipherable crap. By 5 songs, the place was almost empty.

 

It didn't really turn me off them, but Pavement on an off night was a very dispiriting experience

 

Saw the White Stripes at the tail end of their existence. It was a lot of Jack White posing for the 12 year old girls in the audience.

 

No argument, and to be clear, I'm fine with bands rearranging a song, as well as loosening it up with a lot of improv. Live isn't studio and to some extent, re-interpretation is expected. What bothered me in both cases I mentioned was just the feeling that the artist was bored with their own material, and fiddling around with it in realtime just to stave off further boredom. It's one thing to change or replace a familiar melody; it's another to replace melody entirely with notes pulled at random from the song's key. I think the especially musically gifted (which includes Tori) can be guilty of this, because their brains intuitively understand how music is just scaffolding on which you can build almost anything, melodically and rhythmically. So they may tend to experiment on top of that scaffolding in real time. But I don't find it enjoyable to listen to when it's the singer doing it, and with words I know by heart. It's weirdly... stressful. If you want to do that all the time, go play jazz.

 

I saw them in Toronto a couple months before your show. The Fixx, James Brown, Peter Tosh, King Sunny Ade and Blue Peter opened for The Police. It was the first day-long outing with my new girlfriend (we've been married 37 years). To be honest, I don't really remember a damn thing about The Fixx's performance. The Police were quite good.

 

I saw Elliott Smith on what I think was his first solo tour, mostly because I had been a big Heatmiser fan. There were maybe 7 or 8 of us in the audience, and he was visibly and audibly drunk and aggressively berating us for...I don't know what, not being more people than we were? What were WE supposed to do about him not being able to attract a crowd on a Wednesday night in a college town years before Good Will Hunting?

He was so completely obnoxious that I went into permanent **** That Guy mode. I even acknowledge that I would probably like his solo records if I hadn't had that experience, but I can't even listen to them even decades after his suicide.

 

No

 

I saw Gary Duncan's solo version of Quicksilver in 2007 - without David Freiberg. He played absolutely nothing from the Quicksilver Messenger Service albums. Just uninspired stuff from the very mediocre Peace by Piece and Shape Shifter albums. It certainly turned me off from buying any of his new material. It was beyond disappointing since I had seen Quicksilver twice in the early 70s and they were fantastic.

 

BB King. Love him until I paid big bucks to see him at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Opening band played for 2 hours before he came on. He finally showed up at about 11:00 and play maybe three songs the most and that was it. Nothing special about how he played pretty much what you can hear on the radio. He talked about Lucille for about 2 or 3-minutes so that was the extent of it. Very disappointed I don't listen to much of his music anymore. Pretty canned

 

That’s a shame. You caught him on a very bad night. I’ve seen him multiple times over the years and he always put on a fantastic show.

 

I'm a big fan of the Guess Who. In 1972, I went to see them mainly to see Burton Cummings whom I greatly admired as a singer, songwriter, piano and flute player. Musically, they were at the top of their game with Kurt Winter, Don MacDougal, Bill Wallace, Garry Peterson, and Cummings, but unfortunately, Cummings cast a pall over the concert with his nasty attitude, foul language and lewd gestures, and general unpleasantness. He was stoned and burned out on the road, and decided to take it out on the audience. They were previewing songs from their unreleased (at the time) Artificial Paradise album, and I really liked the songs. The audience respectfully applauded all of them, but didn't go crazy. Cummings stepped up to the mic and said, "Since you don't seem to know what's going on here, we've just written a bunch of new tunes and we'd like to do 'em for you, as long as you don't hurt yourselves yelling like that." Some of the audience members who were fans of "These Eyes" and "Laughing" didn't quite know how to process the blatantly pro-drug "Truckin' Off Across the Sky." At the time, I only had 2 of their albums and after that concert, it was a long time before I bought any others. I now have every album they made on RCA, but I got most of them in cut-out bins. Burton said in an interview years later that he would never forgive the music business for "making me an old man at 25." That's how old he was at this concert. Since then, he has matured a lot and has learned how to properly treat an audience. My son and his wife recently saw the Bachman/Cummings Tour in Ontario and said it was great.

 

Zappa in the mid 1980s. As much as I like a LOT of his records, his stage banter and between-songs interaction with the audience came across as condescending and bored. At one point they played about the first 10 seconds of a song, (long enough for the audience to recognize it and get excited) and Frank abruptly halted the band and said something like "You didn't really think we were going to play THAT did you?"

The band was fine (Wackerman, Vai, Mars) but his been-there/done-that attitude seemed like it rubbed off on them and they weren't playing (to my ears) with much fire.

 

Interesting thread! I know some threads here get the “just being negative” label, but often there is a disconnect between the expectation and live experience. Most of the posts here seem to highlight surprising behavior or attitude from the performers?

I have seen a lot of shows. The one show that left me totally surprised and quite bummed was Yes. Not talking about 2022 “only one real member left” Yes but the full band in the mid late 1980s at Madison Square Garden. I had HUGE respect for the talent in this group, especially Chris Squire. But I was so bored with the show! It just seemed to drag on endlessly and seemed so overly bloated and tired. I stopped listening.

Lately I have returned to enjoying the early albums. Fun to stream. Strange how the passage of time changes one’s tastes…

 

Yes probably quite a few.

Black Mountain comes to mind

 

Was it just her and an electric guitar at your show too?