August 17th, 2018.

Tonight was kind of a hard night. It was a great day. A fabulous evening. Things didn’t really go awry till around 9pm, but then… bah.

Bah I say.

That was around the time Patty Griffin hit the stage tonight. Inexcusably bad sound, kind of an obnoxious audience, a frustrating evening. We knew the room could sound nice. The opening act, who literally had me in tears at one point, was crystal clear, audible. Nice sounding guitar, nice sounding vocals. But Patty Griffin and her guitarist were a muddy mash of horribly mixed low mids, over-compression and washes of incomprehensible stock reverbs that eviscerated meaning from the words and body from the instruments, while simultaneous transmitting the low, amorphous sounds picked up by transducer mic pickups and transmitting them noisily to the subs creating uncomfortable thudding sounds whenever her mandolin or his classical guitar was played.

I was worried that I was being overly critical, but no – all our friends had the same comments – I just knew exactly what I was hearing and could voice it, and be additionally disgusted by it because I knew exactly what the sound person was doing wrong – and probably WHY they were doing it – mixing through headphones in the booth rather than listening to the room. I mean honestly, it was surprisingly similar to my mix when I’m having a very, very bad day in a difficult room like Barley and Hops… except I know that it’s off and continue fooling with it till it’s at least passable.

This was not passable. Not at that ticket price.

The audience was a mix of obnoxious too – that difficult in-between place where it seemed like some of them wanted to be at a bar show and half of them wanted to be in a listening room environment but were too transported to maintain it… whooping or clapping seemingly at random. It reminded me of stadium show recordings of Led Zeppelin (an association made perhaps because the only other time I’ve seen Patty Griffin is with Robert Plant – which was a fantastic show) where people sort of scream off in the distance at random – but at a stadium show the volume level’s high enough that that’s kind of… background. Not an absurd interruption to an otherwise sedate room.

It was clearly recognized as inappropriate by the staff and they homed in on a number of perpetrators and chilled them out, but … it just added to my aching disenchantment with the space all night.

But yeah, the opening act was incredible. And before that the drive was easy. And before that the tacos were incredible. And before that so was the margarita and the ceviche. And before that, I really enjoyed the game store and the comic book store and the walk. And before that parking was easy.

Really sound person… why’d you have to go and fuck it up?