Hadn’t gone to a show in a very long time. Pantera tribute and Lamb of God are going to be here in February. I’ve seen Pantera with the brothers 4 times, but my wife has never seen those songs live and I’ve never seen Lamb of God, so why not, I say.

$370 for two lower arena seats. Good seats. But fuck.

Yeah, ticket prices have pretty much hit the point where the band would have to suck my dick to get me to pay. All of them. There's a band coming I used to go see all the time for $20, and the "non-nosebleed" seats for their next show are over $400 a pop. Fuck that noise. I want to support live music, but I think I'll stick to local bands until ticket prices come back down out of the stratosphere. If they don't? Oh well. I guess Slayer was a good band to end my "going to see national touring acts" phase on.

I hear you. It’s batshit. But the way I figure it, this could be the last chance my wife gets to hear those songs live. She’ll never get to see them performed the way we did back in the day, but it’s something. For that alone, it’s worth it. Plus I’d get to see LoG.

I remember paying something like $20 to see the Far Beyond Driven tour with Type O Negative.

My one Pantera show, them opening for Skid Row on the Slave to the Grind tour, was under $30 in a big arena.

Metallica hosting the Iowa Jams outdoors: $40 (Suicidal, Danzig, Metallica's extra-long set, kinda evening with length-ish)

That was in the nineties. I know prices escalate, but my parents talk about going to big ticket concerts for $10-15 back in the day. Doubling by our age made sense. Going ten times as much in the intervening twenty-thirty years? Fuck the fuck off. If I thought most of it was going to the bands I probably wouldn't be so testy about it, but we all know about the Ticketbastard situation. And I'm sure there are plenty of other hands helping ticket prices increase.

Yep. Paid like $120 in “fees”.

I get everything is stupid expensive now and touring costs money, but goddamn.

And those fees are such bullshit bogus nonsense. I remember when they implemented the "convenience" fee for printing your own ticket at home. Like, bitch, we're saving you printing money. Why is that a fee?

I'd be real curious how they justify such a large percentage of tickets being nonsense fees that truly make zero sense. Ticketmaster has to be an easier operation to keep upright now with technology being what it is than it was back in the days where everybody had to hang on the telephone to hope to get tickets.

As an aside, I still have the Pantera shirt that I bought at the show I saw when they opened for Skid Row. It’s still in good enough shape to wear:

Me too. Two of them actually.

Funny story: My dumbass best bud at the time bought the same two shirts I did. One, of course, was the Fucking Hostile shirt. His stupid ass wears it to school on the last day of the year thinking they can't do anything to him. They made him turn it inside out, then stewed on it all summer. When he came back in the fall they booted his ass for the entire first week. Which I found hysterical at the time. He was so pissed off about it too, like he thought somehow they couldn't transfer punishment across the summer.

It was his first lesson in not bucking the system. It didn't take. He's still a dumbass. Granted, at his age now he's fully AWARE he's a dumbass, which is better than he was back then.

Related, my shirt has the image of the VDOP cover on it. Naturally, I wore it to school as a young, proud metalhead does.

Made it an hour and a half before I was pulled into a room with with two teachers and questioned about possible anger issues/predilection for violence, and also had to turn the shirt inside out. That’s as far as it went, though.

Your school system must have been slightly more uptight than ours. I wore that particular shirt several times without incident. The only shirt that ever got a comment was my Testament Greenhouse Effect shirt, with the melting dude on the front of it. My science teacher that day was like, "Is that for Earth Day?" I nodded. He goes, "Nice."

Granted, I know of at least six teachers in that school that hung out in the evenings to smoke weed together, so it wasn't exactly a bastion of purity.

Yeah I grew up in the heavily religious South. A guy getting punched in the face was always going to get me lecture, in hindsight.

The night after I saw Yngwie on the Trilogy tour I wore my concert t-shirt, which said Yngwie Who? Yngwie Fucking Malmsteen, That's Who!

I made it about two minutes into english class before I was told to go to the bathroom and turn it inside out. Instead, I stood up, took my shirt off and turned it inside out right there.

Then I went to the principal's office for a little visit.

I tend to avoid venues much bigger than red rocks but shit really got a lot worse after covid. Most RR tickets were usually $45ish after fees, since covid all shows are closer to $80 after fees

Even local shows around here these days tend to be at least $17.

I played a show back in september that was $45 a ticket, which felt insane for my hack ass (although that venue is a late night spot that you also have to be a "member" of and provides an unlimited open bar til 4am)