Phish

S.P.O.C.K on their first tour

I saw Freelance Whales in a basement with like 20 other people in Ames, that shit slapped

High as a kite at a friends house just hanging out after work. My friend just randomly picks up his acoustic guitar and starts noodling. His roommate comes home, disappears for a bit and comes out with a standup bass. For the next 2 hrs they just smoked and jammed for the love of music.

Me:

Meshuggah’s live sound is earth shattering. And I don’t mean deafening loud. Most club music is probably louder. But theirlive mix is just absolutely heavy. Then you have the synchronized lights and you only see their silhouettes for most of the show.

A group of friends in high school had a band and their final show before splitting up and going all to different colleges was the best live concert ever.

First of all, they were extremely good. I think they could have made it big if they ever took it seriously and sent demos to recording companies.

But second was how they set up the venue. They held it at another friend’s skatepark built into a barn on their property, and the band wanted everyone in the audience to crowd around them as close as possible. I was right up in the singer’s face and it was like the concert was just for me. Just so fucking awesome.

The shitty kicker is… I can not remember what they called themselves at the time. I only remember their original name before they changed it: Kill the Messenger.

A one man play of macbeth done with balloons.

• TOOL
• Roger Waters
• Muse

Neutral Milk Hotel

Lindsey Stirling puts on a pretty great show, lots of acrobatics and fun choreography. Her Christmas show is a TON of fun.

Some highlights for me:

Any Anathallo show I went to

Mineral (both 2019 reunion and 2025 farewell show)

The Decemberists (Hazards of Love tour)

Local Honeymoon (new Philly band)

Future Islands 20th anniversary show in Baltimore

Tor at Shambhala, no comparison

NIN always does a great show, but I think of all of them I liked the Fragility Tour the most (2000). It was so well done.

KMFDM always puts on a hell of a show. I never miss a chance to see them and they always kill it. My favorite show of there’s was the Symbols tour with PIG. They had Ogre from Skinny Puppy touring with them as he was a temporary member for that album. Just so good.

Gwar was always great and fun to see live. They probably still are, but I haven’t been able to see them live in years.

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t like live concerts. They’re too loud, the crowd is too noisy and disruptive, and unless you pay top dollar, you’re not even going to see the band all that well. I don’t get the celebrity worship thing that most people have; celebrities are normal human beings just like the rest of us. The only difference is that a lot of people know who they are because of a thing they did/do.

So I don’t get excited over meeting celebrities in person. I’d much rather listen to their albums at home, where I can hear a high-quality studio recording and really enjoy every bit of sound, every instrument, every enunciation of lyrics. Plus, it’s way cheaper. I can’t believe people shell out hundreds of bucks for what I’d consider an inferior experience.

Regardless, my wife has dozens of bands on her “want to see live” list and she inevitably drags me along with her. And despite not having a good time for most of them, there are a few that stuck out to me as being pretty interesting.

I can’t remember the dates very well, but we saw Papa Roach as one of the openers for Shinedown (the other opener being Asking Alexandria). I think it was around 2016 or 2017 in Nebraska. The other two bands were meh. The music was fine, but they had no stage presence. They just stood there and performed their songs. I might as well have put in my headphones and listened to their albums on my phone.

But Papa Roach was spectacular! They had real stage presence, addressing the audience constantly, and dancing all over the place while jamming. Their visual performance was very entertaining to watch.

And then the lead singer just ran off into the crowd! In the middle of a song, while still singing, he just ran up and down the aisles, shaking hands and high-fiving people. He covered 90% of that stadium over the course of 2 or 3 songs, and it was a pretty big professional basketball court. Dude had some serious energy to burn.

At the end of the night, my wife, who went specifically to see Shinedown and Asking Alexandria, agreed that Papa Roach was the best band that night.

A close second would be The Hu. We saw them at a tiny venue in Maplewood, MN a few years ago (2023 I think?). My wife paid for VIP passes and we actually sat in a room with them for over an hour, listening to them talk about their history, music, and Mongolian culture. More specifically, listening to a translator talking, as they didn’t speak much English. We even got to ask a bunch of questions, which their translator relayed back and forth for us.

At the end of the VIP meet & greet, they did video recordings with everyone. It was a normal photo op, but instead of a photo, they did a quick video with your phone where they did a vocalized grunt along with you. It was pretty unique.

Their concert was fun. Being in a small venue, it was more like a dance club than a giant stadium performance, so it felt more personal. My wife and I claimed a couple seats on a couch and had a blast listening to Mongolian Folk Metal all night.

My wife likes to buy VIP tickets everywhere she can, and no other band has had such a personal meet & greet as The Hu. We’ve gone backstage before and done photo op’s with some bands. But almost none of them spent a whole hour just hanging out and chatting with us. Skillet did an hour-long pre-concert for VIP pass holders when my wife and I saw them around 2020 (right before COVID shut everything down), but it was mostly just them talking a bit on stage, then performing some new songs before doing a photo op.

Taking this in another direction, my wife and I enjoy the stand-up comedian Bert Kreischer. My wife, who escaped from a redneck family and white trailer trash upbringing, especially relates to his brand of comedy. So of course we needed to go to his live shows.

If you thought his Netflix comedy specials were raunchy, his live performances are extremely graphic. He doesn’t have Netflix breathing standards down his neck, so he can really let loose and tell some of the most unhinged and perverse stories to the crowd. And he’s drinking beers the whole time he’s doing his routine, so his stories get crazier the longer he stays up on stage. He even shared some very personal (and embarassing) stories about other celebrities he knows that I haven’t seen told anywhere else. It felt like bonus content that you can’t access unless you attend the live shows.

We’ve seen him live twice, and the second time, he dragged his wife out to the stage to help him re-tell a story because he couldn’t remember the details. Which you could tell was not planned because it took a couple minutes to track her down. He even called her on his phone when she wasn’t responding from backstage.

She was really awkward being on stage, too. She wasn’t used to being a part of his set. But once she got a little more comfortable, she practically took the mic from him because he was messing up all the details of the story. The crowd was rolling every time he started to tell the story and she’d be like, “That’s completely wrong, it went like this…” Then they would argue over telling the “funny story” versus the “real story.” Because his version of events was funnier, but the actual story was kind of boring. Married life, am I right?

He also asked the audience’s opinion on his set, because he prepared a bunch of new material for this tour, but people kept asking for some of his classic stories. He decided that after this event, he was going to try and mix old and new stories into the rest of his tour. So he’s not just working on a strict script; he’s pretty loose and willing to shake things up live.

He also didn’t seem to be tied to a strict timeline for his set. I think we saw him perform on stage for over 3 hours on that second show. He had kind of wrapped his planned material when he asked if we had any favorite stories we wanted to hear, then he went on for another hour or so, retelling classics.

Despite the lengthy show, the place stayed packed until the end. We were all having fun with him; it wasn’t just him talking to an audience, it felt like we were all just having a good time hanging out with a hilarious friend. And this was a massive stadium too, not a small venue! I’ll definitely buy tickets to any Bert Kreischer performances that pass through my area.