JON SNELGROVE is a DJ on Radio Fremantle (you can catch his program Beneath the Waves at 5pm on Thursdays) and has recently been voted onto the station’s board. In this week’s THINKING ALLOWED he says the thought of forking out up to $580 to spend the night together with Mick Jagger makes him want to stay at home and crack out the old vinyls.
In the mid 1970s John Lennon was offered the chance to see Elvis Presley perform at Madison Square Garden in New York. Presley was a hero of Lennon’s and had inspired his early work. He declined the invitation, sadly knowing Presley had become a grotesque parody of himself.
Days later Lennon asked his friend about the concert to which his friend replied, “If you closed your eyes, you were right back in 1958 when Presley was at his peak.” Lennon responded he didn’t want anybody closing their eyes at his concerts and that if he wasn’t relevant to the modern day he would give up the business for good.
Reflect the times
Staying relevant to a modern audience is of course a necessity for artists trying to break through into the “big-time”. Popular music must of course be of its time, but more importantly it must reflect the times and the prevailing culture.
This is no easy task and countless previously successful artists choose the easy way out with eternal greatest hits tours. This is usually explained by the artist wishing to stay in touch with “their” audience. It has of course absolutely nothing to do with increasing their ever-expanding bank accounts.
When it comes to the ticket price it’s never “down, down, prices are down”.
In 2011 the average price to see a top contemporary musical act was $110. The price to see a fully-fledged orchestra in the same year was an average of $75. Both are a form of musical entertainment, both utilise the same venues and promotional machines. The main difference is that with an orchestra you are more or less guaranteed to be entertained by talented musicians whose career progression has come via endless hours of practice and self-denial, as opposed to the average pop star whose career progression comes via who their parents were, who they last slept with or, even worse, how well they fared on a mindless TV show.
There is though a bigger price to pay than just the excessive dollars it takes to go and see your favourite act.
The endless round of nostalgia tours means there is less discretionary spending money available for the average person to go and see new and developing acts.
The likes of Elton John, Stevie Nicks and Chris Isaak for instance should at last put up their hands and admit they have nothing new to say. It’s time they stopped stealing the oxygen and funding from newer acts.
High ticket prices could of course be justified by the fact that in this download age, live concerts are the only avenue left for performers to make real money.
However, even the definition of a “live performance” has been blurred since the onset of the digital age. Backing tracks and auto tune are now commonplace and even considered the norm during a “live” gig.
Have you paid a king’s ransom to listen to music and vocals recorded months or years before and sold as a live experience? As Johnny Rotten once asked, “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”.
Tickets for the forthcoming Rolling Stones concert in Perth started at $200 for the worst seats in the house and rose to $580 to be in touching distance of the bad grand-dads of rock and roll. The last original Stones album A Bigger Bang was recorded nearly 10 years ago. In the past quarter-century they have released just four albums of new material. In the same period they have released 20 re-hashed compilations.
Growing up, Jagger and the Stones were my heroes; anti-establishment, dangerous, wild and free, they embodied everything that was great about rock and roll. They even used to perform free concerts to hundreds of thousands of fans in Hyde Park.
My father hated Jagger, which only made me love him more. But the simple inescapable truth is the Rolling Stones are old, in every sense of that word, and rock and roll is a young man’s game. Now when Jagger breaks into Let’s Spend the Night Together for the thousandth time, how many women in the audience will actually think “that’s a good idea?”.
Undoubtedly this will be the final Stones tour, a last chance to see one of the founding bands of rock and roll in the flesh. It is of course also an opportunity for them to say farewell to their fans, who it must be said have made Jagger and Co very very rich indeed.
After 50 years of being in the music business it is such a shame they put the business before the music.
I didn’t even try to buy a ticket for the Stones’ Perth gig, I couldn’t stand the thought of spending two hours with my eyes tightly shut.