Rediscoverin’ arena rockin’

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ Hello, all, and welcome back for yet another year of my inane… ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ Hello, all, and welcome back for yet another year of my inane music column. ‘ ‘ ‘ If you’re a freshman and a first time reader, let me assure you: Unless you love bro-rock (Nickelback, Creed), fourth-rate emo/pop-punk junk (Hawthorne Heights, All Time Low), barely-authentic country (Toby Keith, Kenny Chesney), fake hippie-jam rock (OAR, Guster), brain-dead hip-hop (Soulja Boy, Flo Rida) or complete silence, it’s unlikely that what I write will offend you, and we’ll likely get along just fine. ‘ ‘ ‘ So enough with the precautions, let’s talk music. ‘ ‘ ‘ It was an exciting summer in Pittsburgh this season, as more than a few choice acts decided to stop by and say, ‘Hey, yinz. Let’s play some rock ‘n’ at.’ Some of the best shows included Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Black Crowes, Yonder Mountain String Band and the Foo Fighters, along with the one-two-three punch of The Raconteurs, The Black Keys and Gnarls Barkley, all of whom ripped the SouthSide Works in half as part of the New American Music Union festival. ‘ ‘ ‘ As school ended last April and I sat down to compile the list of shows I wanted to check out for the summer, something seemed a bit odd. Usually a fan of smaller club dates, I noticed that the near-majority of choice concerts were being held at huge venues ‘mdash; from the Post-Gazette Pavilion to the Petersen Events Center and even the classy Byham Theater Downtown. And what do shows at big venues mean? Big record companies. And what do big record companies mean? Expensive tickets. And what do expensive tickets entail? Worst of all, of course, overpriced beer. Paying nearly double digits for a beer? Well, I never! ‘ ‘ ‘ Still, I was excited to see the type of show that I hadn’t been privy to for years. You see, back in elementary school, when my vinyl-spinning, short and moustached father would take me to concerts at the Hersheypark Arena, the spectacle of seeing music played before 30,000 people was all I knew. And I ate it up. ‘ ‘ ‘ Watching Phish play to a sold-out crowd with a veritable mushroom cloud of pot smoke billowing from the audience (‘Dad ‘mdash; what is that smell?’ ‘You’ll learn in a few years, son’) or seeing the near-elderly Aerosmith shimmy and dance all over stage wasn’t just rock ‘n’ roll ‘mdash; it was a spectacle. ‘ ‘ ‘ Fast-forward, say, a dozen years, and I’d lost that magic of the big arena show, the appeal replaced by the draw of a sweaty club show with 300 people, not 30,000. Maybe it’s because my tastes veered to the more obscure, or maybe it’s because I took a vehement stance against corporations like LiveNation, the company that has almost single-handedly taken over the mainstream concert business. ‘ ‘ ‘ Now call me nostalgic or corny (I assure you, I am both), but this summer, covering and writing about shows at Pittsburgh’s biggest venues, I gained back a bit of that rock-spectacle magic I’d been so captivated by as a child. And you know what? It has nothing to do with musical taste. ‘ ‘ ‘ A good example of this magic I experienced was seeing Mr. Jimmy Buffet. I am not a Parrothead (the name of his adoring fans) and I don’t particularly like margaritas, but hot damn the man can entertain. To a sold-out crowd at the Post-Gazette Pavillion (think of your weirdest uncle drunk in a Hawaiian shirt and multiply by several thousand), Buffett’s main attraction was simply the stage he played on. Palm trees, tiki torches and a barefoot little bald man (Buffett) made for a movie set-like stage. ‘ ‘ ‘ Honestly, he could’ve played ‘Margaritaville’ for three hours straight, and it still would’ve been entertaining. ‘ ‘ ‘ And maybe the best arena show of the summer (the indie police might arrest me for this) was, hands down, Slipknot. Picture this: Nine dudes in creepy masks onstage. Two of them have the sole responsibility of playing empty beer kegs with baseball bats. There are huge explosions. The drum kit is on risers that lift it 20 feet up and spin it vertically. The band’s DJ has both legs in a cast, and he climbs the risers and hangs like an escaped convict. Now I don’t particularly like Slipknot, but I do like horror movies, and so the show was insane. Seriously, nuthouse, loony-bin, batshit insane. ‘ ‘ ‘ So as the summer concert season wraps up and I return to smaller clubs around Pittsburgh to get my live music fix, I do so with a newfound respect for the production of huge rock shows … and I just might hate the music a bit less.