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

Turns out this show is on YouTube - and she played some acoustic as well as playing electric. I may have been over-estimating saying the closest audience members were 3 feet away.

She doesn't sound any more in tune viewed on video ~28 years later

 

After having seen an excellent full-band show in 1996 (or so) at Irving Plaza, World Party as a duo at City Winery about 20 years later was a massive bummer - I felt that lineup just didn't do the material any favors. Never really dove back into the catalog after that.

By contrast, I saw a terrible Rickie Lee Jones show a few years ago in Edinburgh and the effect there was I went right back to the records.

 

Having seen Beck a handful of times over the years, he's really at his best with props / things going on around him. The puppet band shows were pretty surreal, utilizing The Flaming Lips as a backing band really lightened up his Sea Change material and even the disco speakers / oversized boombox turned his Odelay show into an all out party FWIW. I can see where the (solo) acoustic shows could be an acquired taste but they can be just as much fun for their intimacy / improvisational nature. Beck has enough diverse material that it can't be easy to meld them all together into a coherent setlist tour after tour without some of it coming off as self-parody (doing some electric songs acoustically or acoustic songs electronically to fit the flow of the concert doesn't always work IMO) but I can't say I've ever been disappointed by one of his shows.

 

I saw him live twice a few years apart, and both times he came on stage, played his set, and left. He and his musicians played well enough, but you'd never guess he was even aware of the audience.

 

A compelling analysis from someone who never misses a chance to post an out of tune vocal performance.

 

Saw Rayland Baxter (indie folk guy) a while back opening for a band I liked. I had listened to him a bit to figure out what I’d be getting into and enjoyed it well enough. At the show he was absolutely gone, plastered. Played badly and his banter was completely shocking — particularly the part where he spoke about killing his pet dog. So absolutely disgusting that I couldn’t even consider listening to him again.

 

The bummer part for me is that I dig the instrumental part of the songs, the extended solos and all that. It's just the ever-changing vocal lines I didn't like.

The OTHER bummer is that I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go see them in September with my wife, and it's going to irritate me all over again.

 

I saw a particular Rolling Stones show in Dallas in the early 2000's sometime, when Ronnie Wood was freebasing, they were all wearing really weird clothes, and it was just generally not the best or most stellar moment in their career. I remember being really turned off by the whole show, disappointed, after it was over, the next day, a week later, etc.

I distinctly remember Charlie Watts being great, and I remember he got a particularly huge roar from the crowd during the band introductions, but I also remember Ron Wood being especially bad, running around, clowning around, and playing various painful clunkers every time he stepped up to take a guitar solo. To me the overall band sound was biting, too loud, too painfully trebly, too jacked up -- in hindsight it just screamed coke or freebasing or whatever. And VERY sloppy. Not "ancient art of weaving" sloppy, just, "we haven't rehearsed enough and we're all ****ed up and we don't really give a ****" type of sloppy.

Saw them earlier than that, in '81, '94, and several times in the sort of No Security-ish era, around ''98 or '99, and that was all really great. Saw them again later in the post-2012 era, and that was great as well. But that interim period in the early 'oughts, was just sorta not one of their best, and I kinda soured on the Stones, for a good long while after that, before eventually coming around again. I mean we drove a long way for that concert and Ron Wood basically stunk up the joint, what else can I say.

I might be being a bit overly melodramatic, but to me it was kind of a slow motion train wreck of decline for the band, from '98, '99 up to the "coconut tree" incident. Then they got it back together again, after a while off the road, thank goodness.

 

I saw The Mars Volta when they opened for System of a Down in the mid to late 00's. They were the reason for my attendance. Unfortunately, their hour set was overstuffed with long instrumental jams/improvisations. I know they're a prog band but as a first time attendee, I was unaware of how heavy they'd lean into the progressive aspect.

 

I really feel Bob Dylan is the ultimate worst live act.
First of all, i have to say that i am mostly a Dylan fan.
But sixty years of indulgence from a fanatic part of his audience did not help the man getting better…or at least seem interested in the act of playing live.

Yes he did and still do a lot of shows and i understand that should excuse the poor treatment he inflict to his repertoire, but when i had the real live « Dylan » experience i just felt cheated.

The new interpretations of all the oldest songs were not improvement over the originals. Just a proof that a great composer can also be a bad performer.

The « neverending tour » is a cash grab and a narcissist daily fix of adulation.

 

Technical difficulties can happen to the best of them. But go ahead and assume the worst of a person, that’s cool.

 

He was wiped out on heroin at the time.

 

A number of years ago I saw Hornsby/Noisemakers in Atlantic City. It was an off night for him - an all request show which I really think is a horrible concept pulling requests out of punch bowl and deciding yea or nay; as though the artist is too lazy or uninspired to craft a set. Pacing was horrible and his demeanor put me off of listening to him or seeing him live for years. Eventually I came back.

 

Gary Clark. I thought he was very derivative and the songs meh. Everyone acted he was the new hot pizza and I sort of cringed and left early.

 

Men At Work. They were huge in Canada off of one album. (we seem to like any music from any country in the Commonwealth) Stevie Ray Vaughn was the opener and he was fantastic which is why a friend and I went. I wasn't a big fan of MAW and as soon as they came on stage it all seemed to go south. After the first song they didn't like the response and became arrogant. Three songs in they started demanding for the crowd to get off their feet and clap when they wanted. I turned to my friend and with one look we walked out.

 

I don't want to say who but in the 90s I saw two of my favorite death metal bands in a small club (separate shows) and they were snorting on stage. It immediately made the velocity of the music much less impressive. I'd seen bands play way faster on nothing but cheap dirt weed and Bud Light.

 

Van Morrison at Kulttuuritalo, Helsinki, Finland, 1986. We were very exited to see the legend live. The artist was sulky, bored and hostile. It was very clear he was not interested. ****ing princess. It was painful to watch and listen. Van, if you are reading this, you owe me the price of the ticket and an apology.

 

Yeah, he had a lot of problems going on around that time that I wasn't initially aware of. It was probably for the best that he didn't perform but I remember being pretty put off when he canceled for the 2nd time and all the owner could say was he never left his house for the gig. I'm just glad he figured things out and got himself clean TBH.

 

This piques my curiosity. When was it, and what happened?

 

Yes, but it only turned me off to seeing them live again. I still like the records.

 

As for me, the closest I can think of is seeing Phish around 2013. It was fine for what it was, but it really brought home that the Phish I wanted is the 1989-1992 Phish, and that's never coming back, so...

 

That is exactly how I felt when seeing Nathaniel Rateliff.

 

Any "artist" that thinks they have to touch their private areas while on stage never sees any of my $.

 

I’ve been lucky I guess and have never been turned off by a live performance apart from a few times when I’ve had to sit through an opening act I already had no use for (I’m looking at you, terminally anemic 10,000 Maniacs).

I don’t care how big an act you are, it takes courage to get up in front of an audience and create music — that always moves me. I’ve never seen an artist just phoning it in but I imagine it’s bad.

 

No, if I liked the artist I would still listen to their albums. I just probably wouldn't go to anymore of their concerts.