Went to a Matchbox Twenty concert earlier with a slice of college-age and suburban North Carolina life. I had free tickets, and nothing better to do on a Saturday night, so I went. It was about as good as I expected. American Hi-Fi and Sugar Ray opened. American Hi-Fi was decent, genuine, but Sugar Ray was pretty bad, to the point of having their stage props resemble a Mexican bar, complete with bar and real bartender serving the band drinks while they were playing. It was more than a little tacky. It was apparently ’80s night for the tour, though, so all three bands played covers of selected ’80s songs throughout the night. American Hi-Fi played a Night Ranger song, Sugar Ray played a cover of “Fight for Your Right to Party” (incidentally the highlight of their set), and Matchbox Twenty played a couple, Simple Minds “Don’t You Forget About Me,” (pretty good) and U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” (not U2, but good taste nonetheless).<\/p>\n
Tough crowd. Everybody was resolutely sitting down until halfway through the headliner’s set (except for Sugar Ray’s Beastie Boys cover). A local radio station, G105, was handing out free sampler cds at the concert, and walking in I was accosted by an employee of the station and handed a rather heavy box of the samplers to do with as I liked, since apparently they just had to get rid of them. I continued walking in with the box for a while, then realized what I was doing, and deposited it on a nearby bench, suspicious-looking as it was.<\/p>\n
There was a great fireworks show immediately after the concert as well. So I didn’t go a whole fourth of July weekend without seeing fireworks, which was good. If I sound apathetic about the whole experience, it’s partly because it was pretty mediocre overall, minus the time I got to spend with my friends, and partly because I’m dead tired. Need sleep.<\/p>\n
I think I like small, more humble bands, and local, more intimate concerts better. And now to go listen to some U2. Just savor the irony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Went to a Matchbox Twenty concert earlier with a slice of college-age and suburban North Carolina life. I had free tickets, and nothing better to do on a Saturday night, so I went. It was about as good as I expected. American Hi-Fi and Sugar Ray opened. American Hi-Fi was decent, genuine, but Sugar Ray […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}