Seeing as today is two days before the show that I’m writing about, I don’t think I have to tell you that I haven’t gone to this event, and I’m not going to—seeing a decrepit Dan Aykroyd try to resurrect his Blues Brothers schtick that wasn’t that cool in the first place isn’t something I want to do while I still have all my hair, a normal height/weight ratio, and am still welcome at the sperm bank.
Nonetheless, though there are only a handful of (legal and physically painless) activities I’d want to be doing less on a Saturday night than seeing the Blues Brothers, this may very well be the most important event that I write about all year. This show marks the official grand opening of Boston’s very own House of Blues, the nationwide chain of concert hall/restaurants and the holders of the dubious trademarked motto “inspiration of music for the soul.”
Aside from their horribly trite trademark, people take issue with a great deal of the HOB operating model. Owned and operated by the dreaded Live Nation—owners of more than 70 of the country’s best venues, several of the world’s highest grossing musicians, and currently in a battle with Congress to own the leading ticketing business in the US (Ticketmaster)—many rightly claim that HOB is part of a greedy, profit-hungry monopoly more interested in ripping people off than putting on good shows.
With the Boston-area return of HOB, whose flagship complex opened in Harvard Square in 1992, many fans expect to pay asinine ticketing fees and high prices at the bar. My roommates are all gearing up to stand in big, anonymous, alienating crowds to see Bloc Party, The National, and Tom Jones (they’re hoping for some free panties, and I certainly can’t judge) in a faceless room, and I’m limbering up to wrestle the aggressive Cro-Magnon bouncers at the Disco Biscuits show later this month. These realities are almost as much a trademark of the HOB experience as the aforementioned motto, and in many ways it objectively sucks that if we want to see our favorite bands in our home city, we’re going to have to learn to negotiate these pitfalls.
Nonetheless, as a Bostonian concertgoer, I am actually ecstatic that HOB is coming to Landsdowne Street. Being a monopoly means having a lot of money, but HOB and Live Nation overall have a pretty impressive national record of investing their staggering profits in the production end of their venues, something that I think the consumer greatly benefits from.
While high prices, big, awkward crowds, and ‘roid-raging security personnel are part-and-parcel of the HOB empire, so too are some of the best sightlines and soundsystems in the country. HOB’s in places like Cleveland, Chicago, and New Orleans, consistently pull in rave reviews from people—like me—who hate supporting monopolies, like the community of small crowds, and look forward to appropriately priced drinks at concerts.
All of these things are important, and I wouldn’t be writing a live music column if I didn’t derive some pretty lofty metaphysical or phenomenological benefits from seeing shows in environments diametrically opposed to the corporate one that HOB epitomizes. Ultimately, though, beyond the ethical concerns I have with supporting Live Nation and the House of Blues, as a fan of music, I want to be able to clearly see the band and I want them to sound as good as they possibly can. I haven’t been to Boston HOB yet, but based on the Cleveland, Chicago, and NOLA incantations, I’m confident that our newest venue will be able to meet these needs in ways that cozy independent places like The Middle East can’t. As long as I don’t have to read their motto, color me excited
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