The problem with hipsters is that they are too ironic about everything, and aren't then able to show genuine appreciation for anything. Instead they have to be so fucking blase/mocking of stuff, even their favorite bands. It's retarded.

I've been to more than a few shows where, even though the venue is packed with people who clearly like the band, they insist on standing around talking, not looking at the stage, not engaging with the music. Then there are usually like ten of them who dance like crazy, but eight of them would dance with the same fervor if you played a recording of the Facts of Life theme song (because the hipster isn't dancing, the coke is).

/END RANT

The problem with jam-band music is the audience.

I kinda like MMW myself, LT--sorry you had a bad experience.

I like 'em too, Box.

I think they are genuinely original, if occassionally long-winded and drony live. I had never been to a jam-band show before this, really. Caveat emptor.

I caught MMW 6 years ago; it was a great set, and everyone was civil. But I've seen socially inept behavior at other shows, and even "trendy" hangouts in my area. For every high-status dilettante who insists on calling attention to theirself, there'll always be middle-class and bohemian equivalents. The only alternative is in keepin' it real.

A year or two ago a reputable promoter, a buddy of mine here in Houston, booked the Magnetic Fields. They were finishing up a tour and their agent wanted them to play here. It was sort of a last-minute thing and so all of the concert halls were already booked. The promoter put them in a big club that's been around for ages. It's usually sort of a goth/punk dance club, but they do plenty of all sorts of shows and have a good sound system. He rented seating and booked them for two sets in anticipation of a good turnout.

My gf and I headed to the club about halfway through the first set so we could get in line for decent seats. Through my job I get into all of this promoter's shows for free, so he let us in when we got there--no line to be seen. The seats were half full and the staff was obviously on edge. Not only had the show not sold like they were hoping, apparently the band was none to pleased to have been booked at a rock club instead of a concert hall. The tension onstage was very palpable.

The second show was half-full also. The first thing Stephen Merritt did was to tell the crowd that people had been too noisy during the first set and that our silence would be appreciated. Very intense.

After the second song, Merritt put his ukelele down, walked offstage to the back of the club and berated--berated--two girls who had apparently been talking between the first and second songs. Couldn't really make out what he was saying, but it went something like, "mumble mumble mumble angry blah blah AND I WILL GLADLY REFUND YOUR MONEY IF YOU WILL PLEASE. JUST. LEAVE." Uh...woah.

Claudia Gonson, the pianist for the band, tried to explain their request for silence at some point only to be slapped down by Merritt: "No. Don't apologize for that. We have nothing to apologize for." Later she tried to explain their situation thusly: "I mean, it's only been two weeks since we played Carnegie!" How endearing. Towards the end of the set, they actually requested that no one buy any more drinks because the noise from the cash registers was unendurable. I think they asked that the air conditioning be shut off, too. Maybe not.

When the show was over, another friend of mine walked onstage and gave Merritt a dozen roses, which he graciously accepted. The promoter later found them in the garbage can backstage.

Interestingly, I'm now friends with one of the girls Merritt had berated face-to-face. Turns out she was a huge fan of the band, but upon arriving at the show alone she ran into a semi-acquaintance from high school who insisted on cornering her and yapping her ear off. She'd been trying to get away from her and watch the show when Merritt bitched her out. She was greatly relieved when I told her that I hadn't been able to hear them talking at all. She can't listen to Magnetic Fields anymore without feeling terrible.

...and this one of the main reasons why I hate jam bands.

It's too bad all the trustafarians get the really good drugs, though.

The Magnetic Fields story definitely sounds overserious and overintense, and would have put me off, too.

But in this show, it wasn't that the crowd was making some noise that bothered me - it was that the noise was either (a) totally unrelated to the music or (b) a narcissistic bid for attention.

I'm a big music fan and love woo-hooing and hooting and clapping during a good set...If the music and band/audience energy warrants it. The weird thing about last night was that a lot of the audience noise and activity seemed to be totally unrelated to what was going on onstage. It was just bubbling up from their own need to be having a Big Time.

But the talking thing, as far as I'm concerned, is almost never okay. And I'm not the type to ask people to be quiet, usually - so it wasn't that they were talking, it was that they were talking in full voice and constantly, as though they were watching a DVD with friends at somebody's house rather than watching a live show where bands traveled to play in front of them and charged $38 a seat.

It probably is a jam-band thing, and I haven't been to a jammy show since the late 90s, when I saw this band and Phish a couple times and the Jazz Mandolin Project. But it just seems like things have changed - maybe the drugs have changed. Where those shows always seemed ruled by a stoned, quiet 'It's all Good,' hyperattentive groove - even when there was hippie dancing - this crowd was just plain edgy in a bullish way.

About halfway through the show I had a very large glimmer about why the atmosphere was so weird. A friend had set these tickets aside for us, and when she dropped 'em off to me yesterday, I asked her if there was going to be a good turnout despite that day's big snowstorm. She said "Oh yeah - it was about half sold, but we sold tons of tickets to college students today." I thought nothing of it until I was in the theatre realizing:

1. It's the first night of Spring Break.
2. There was a big snowstorm today.
3. All these kids most likely had plans to either drive up to the mountains for skiing, or to Montreal for drinking, or to get on a plane to go to Florida.
4. These kids were unable to travel tonight due to snow.
5. These kids were probably like "shit, what are we gonna do to celebrate the start of spring break? Hey, there's this show in town."
6. It's likely that most were not MMW fans, but that this ended up being where the party was for kids whose plans had changed.
7. Somehow I doubt that we actually managed to ruin everything.

Re: MMW--I had a similar experience at one of their shows last year. It might be a generational thing: with the MMW and Bad Plus concerts I saw last year, the audience generally acted like the music was just there to color the air for a while; when I saw Herbie Hancock, the audience was deadly silent, with maybe some applause after an exceptional solo, and a standing ovation at the end of the show. I saw all three of these shows in the same hall.

That said, I don't think of MMW as a "jam band" in the way that I'd think of, say, Phish as a jam band, so maybe I'm coming at this from a different angle. To me MMW is a jazz trio that's developed a crossover audience.

Oh--this also reminds me of when I saw Mike Garson (the pianist on probably dozens of David Bowie albums) at the Blue Note last year. He was doing a jazz show (he has a long career outside of being a Bowie session player), but most of the audience was hardcore Bowie fans, and they didn't get what they expected--he was backed only by string bass and drums, and did a lot of long, weird, atonal stuff. Increasing restlessness and chatter ensued, followed by occasional walkouts, except for the people near the front who were trying to record the whole thing with their cellphones and other equally inadequate electronic devices. It's beyond me why you'd pay money to see someone live and then spend your time staring at a cellphone screen instead of the actual musician.

You're right, Prospero, that MMW isn't exactly a jam band. But for whatever reason, they, like Galactic, or the Benevento-Russo Duo, have attracted some of that jam-band fanbase (no malice intended toward anybody).

(Also, there might be a jazz-vs-pop thing going on as well.)

A few months ago my wife and I managed to get 2 awesome single seats in the balcony at Massey Hall for Neil Young. You can imagine how huge and anticipated this show was in Toronto. Our seats were one right behind the other: Row C seat 102 and Row D seat 102. She would sit in front of me for the first (acoustic) half of the show and then we'd switch at intermission. So the show starts and it's completely amazing, but despite several announcements before the show to PLEASE NOT SHOUT REQUESTS OUT because the set list is already decided, people would constantly scream and yell like a bunch of fucking hosers. It would be the most whisper-quiet acoustic song, like Ambulance Blues; you know, the chance of a lifetime to really, intimately hear Neil Young sing this at Massey Hall 37 years after he played that famous show there, and someone would go "WHOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!" or yell out the name of their shitty town. Ugh. What would possess them?

So that sucked a bit, but then when the second or third song ended, they let a bunch of late people in and this kinda stoned-looking guy squeezes past me and sits next to me, a seat that is directly behind a pole. So he's bummed out about that, but manages to deal with it by leaning on me a bit. Fine. Then he notices that periodically between songs I exchange comments with my wife in front of me, so he asks if she wants to switch seats with him so we can sit together. We say thanks, it's okay, we like our seats. "No really, I don't mind," he says again, (since he's behind a POLE), but we decline. Then he introduces himself and shakes my hand and I shake his, hoping he's not going to want to talk to me all night. So the set progresses, the concert's great, the guy isn't too obnoxious, he does some cell phone action once in a while but nothing too bad. First set ends and there's a 20 minute intermission until the electric set.

My wife and I switch seats so I'm in front now, and the guy (who will now be sitting beside her) has gone out for the intermission. The second set starts with "The Loner" which rocks. Then "Dirty Old Man." When that ends, our buddy comes back to his seat, late again, smelling beery. This time he sees my wife there and says to her, "You're in my seat." And she says, "uh...no, I'm not." Then he goes, "Ya, you're in my seat, move." The band starts playing "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere," which I love so much, but I notice there's some commotion behind me. I turn around and the guy is saying "Move your ass!" to my wife and I have that feeling like I'm starting to shake, I can feel this scary anger kind of bubbling up. I'm kind of a wimpy, non-confrontational guy but it felt like bad things were very possible. So the guy goes, "Look, I was nice before, but I'm not sitting behind that fucking pole again." And we're yelling back at him to check his ticket and look at the number on his seat, his seat is 103...and he goes, counting each chair from the aisle in, "Ya, ONE, TWO, THREE!" And then me and a few other people in the aisle go, kind of slowly but loudly, "No, seat 100 seat 101, seat 102, SEAT 103." So he finally sat down but he was right behind my head, and right beside my wife, and I just couldn't relax and enjoy the show for a long time, I felt like my ears were hot or something. My wife and I kept giving each "what the fuck?" looks, like did he really think we stole his seat? Why did he sit there for the first half, then? So weird. Like it's our fault he spent so much money on a seat behind a pole? We just didn't get it.
Things like that can just make you so tense and wreck your evening, it was all I could do to just relax and let it go. Maybe the guy realized what a moron he was because when I turned around at the end of the show he was gone. And it was still a fantastic show. Two encores.

I saw Emm Gryner (folk-pop) at a small club in Cambridge. It was just her and a keyboard, and it was certainly easy to hear her but it wasn't exactly blow-your-ears-off loud. Early on, she stopped halfway through one of her songs, looked disapprovingly back at the people standing at the bar (which was only about 30 feet away from the performance area) and said, in a very polite Canadian way, "I'm sorry, you must not have been here before. People come here to listen to the music, so you need to stop talking. Thank you."

It was done politely and firmly, and it worked. I loved it.

(And I've never understood people who go to bars/clubs with live music that they weren't expecting and then think, "Oh, well, we'll just ignore it and have the conversation we were going to have, anyway." GO SOMEPLACE ELSE WHERE YOU'RE NOT BOTHERING OTHER PEOPLE. Live music is not background music. (Well, at least most of the time. I'll allow talking over harp music at brunch, that sort of thing. But only because I'm a nice person.))

A few weeks ago I went to a show and the last band had to deal with a big crowd of very chatty people who didn't really seem to notice there was a band playing. So they stopped midway through their third song (this is a very theatrical band, btw), set their instruments aside, and sat in a circle huddled together on the stage. After about a half of a song length, they stood back up, shook hands and the lead singer goes, "Oh hey guys, we had a band meeting, and we went ahead and decided to keep playing for you."

The funniest part was that a week later I was with a few friends who had been there, and I brought it up, and two of my friends were like, "What? I didn't notice that..I was talking to so-and-so." Heh, I guess this iPod generation is damned.

And I've never understood people who go to bars/clubs with live music that they weren't expecting and then think, "Oh, well, we'll just ignore it and have the conversation we were going to have, anyway."

Really? I'd certainly never talk over music that other people had paid to see or if it were the primary draw, but if I'm out with my friends just having dinner and drinks and John Q. Troubadour starts up without warning? Then I'm just going to continue to have a good time with my friends. At least until we can finish the pitcher and get out before he sings Brown Eyed Girl (and they always sing Brown Eyed Girl).

I had a bad experience similar to this several years ago at a Godspeed You Black Emperor show. Something about instrumental music makes certain cretinous types think there's no reason not to chatter and guffaw drunkenly throughout the whole damn show. ARGH.

Really? I'd certainly never talk over music that other people had paid to see or if it were the primary draw, but if I'm out with my friends just having dinner and drinks and John Q. Troubadour starts up without warning?

I guess I'm mostly thinking of places that have bars, but which are primarily live-music venues, and which charge a cover for the music. I've paid for a lot of shows at places like that and seen groups of five or six friends come in, look around, loudly yell, "I GUESS THERE'S MUSIC TONIGHT, DO Y'ALL MIND THAT IT'S SO LOUD?", and, despite the fact that everyone else in the bar is trying to listen to the music, proceed to (loudly) order pitchers of beer and (loudly) tell stories from their college days.

*That* annoys me. And a part of me realizes that yeah, this is what happens when you go listen to music in bars rather than concert houses, but it's just the stunning lack of awareness that bothers me.

The only thing I can add to this thread is:

Holy cow, 2or3whiskeysodas, Numbers night club is still around?

I grew up in Houston, and as a teenager, I got a fake ID specifically for getting in to see bands in the grown-up bars.

Yeah, I'm not much on modern jam bands, but I like MM&W.

I think the meeting ground between occhiblu's and jrossi's points have to do with the norms of the place. Some places are really music focused; others offer music as a draw for the bar. Some places are like the beach-bar where the classic rock guy expects to play favorites you've heard 1000 times and be half-ignored; some are hushed coffeehouses where every word of the songwriter's oeuvre is to be appreciated. There are big warehouse venues with dancing where people stand along the sidelines and shout at one another to be heard, and then there are 1900-era concert halls with velvet seats and gilt ceilings where people pay extra money to be in a nice environment with good acoustics and to pay attention. It's when people act however the hell they want without reference to the cues and norms of the place that they are so damn grating.

The Neil Young story made me particularly sad, chococat. And I know what you mean about all the terrible biochemicals that start flooding you when you have to speak up to a stranger who is somewhat aggressive.

A final note: my parents took me to a few concerts when I was a kid, and one was Paul Simon, circa 1982. He played the first song or two, and then someone in the audience shouted out: "How about Sounds of Silence?" and Paul Simon responded immediately, without looking up "How about I pick the songs?" He got a round of applause and that was the last of the shouted requests.

Shouted requests are kind of lousy. Chances all we all have a favorite song we are really hoping to hear - but the magic of a live show is that it's the artist's unique performance. They're not jukeboxes. If you let them pick the program you're likely to get a better setlist than if they just slog their way through all the radio hits or stuff from old albums.

There is a special circle of hell for people who shout inanities over Margo Timmins singing "Misguided Angel".

I've stopped going to live concerts because of the audience members. However, I'd go again if the venues would hire Ninjas to swiftly and silently remove the inconsiderate meatbags from the audience. That'd be awesome.

Elsa: yep, still around! Every few years a rumor that it's closing will circulate, and I understand that they just had their rent tripled. Oh, and a goth guy stabbed another goth guy to death in the bathroom a couple of years back (dying on the bathroom floor of Number's is now my official #1 least desired way to go out). So how the hell they've managed to stay open is mysterious and impressive, but they have.

For that matter, Fitzgerald's is still around, too, although they don't do nearly as many punk shows as they used to and have gotten themselves a terrible reputation for ripping bands off.

I think the meeting ground between occhiblu's and jrossi's points have to do with the norms of the place. Some places are really music focused; others offer music as a draw for the bar.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Big rowdy places with crappy musicians: Talk away! Small upscale-ish places with prominently displayed music listings and performers who are actually up-and-coming where everyone's listening to the music: Stop talking!