Jump to content

Necromancer23

Members
  • Posts

    18
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation

2 Neutral

Music Fandom

  • Number of Rush Concerts Attended
    10
  • Last Rush Concert Attended
    ACC in Toronto 2007
  • Favorite Rush Song
    ?
  • Favorite Rush Album
    Farewell To Kings
  • Best Rush Experience
    drum solo on Test For Echo tour - amazing!
  • Other Favorite Bands
    U2
  • Musical Instruments You Play
    air guitar
  1. Looking for a single for Hamilton, but realize it'd be better to go in on a pair with someone else - better selection and not many people will sell just a single. Any takers? I'm in Etobicoke and will be driving to Copps. If you are already a pair and want to buy a block of 3 tickets then I'm up for that as well as the third.
  2. Hey guys, I'm still looking for a single VIP ticket for Hamilton. Anyone wanna bail and give it to me?
  3. for me, Alex never looked better than in the Show of Hands video... he was very well dressed and kicking ass on his axe..... I'm a guy, so about how I feel about his physical looks, well, I think at least in this video Alex was in that prime of age which is about 30-35 for men.when men are at their peak both physically, mentally and spirtually.... and I think he looked like a god of rock .... what I DO know 100% is that Alex never kicked so much ass as when he played Spirit of Radio in this video and especially the solo.... clearly, the version of Spirit of Radio on that video was THE BEST version of Spirit of Radio of ALL TIME... as Neil said, for those nights when they played live in England, the gods smiled... and that smile played out in his incredible solo.... ;)
  4. Anyone looking to get out of the deal they got for their Hamilton VIP floor ticket? I don't even want all the swag, you can keep that, just the ticket. Will pay you face value ($300) for it or whatever it is. Any takers? I think this can be done if we work with Ticketmaster to do the transfer over to me. By the way, did anyone else think that Alex's part of the acceptance speech was somewhat retarded? I did find myself laughing quite a bit, but I sorta thought he was thumbing his nose at the whole thing, which it sorta deserves. I mean, I was really hoping he would just stop the BS at some point and start saying something a little more intelligent or whatever. Still, it was a fairly ballsy thing to do. Neil's speech was great - I loved the Bob Dylan reference. And Geddy was cool too, humble yet appreciative as always. But hey the whole thing IS actually kind of a hollow honor at this point, especially when you have RAP groups getting inducted on the very same evening (Flavor Flav in the same class as these guys? Kinda sad actually. Rolling Stone is a garbage magazine). Saw Yes play recently in Toronto, and it was great because we got sick of our shitty, super uncomfortable balcony seats and snuck down to the floor area during the intermission and got unclaimed 3rd row floor seats right near Steve Howe. Yes should certainly be next up as shoo ins to the hall of fame. Enough with the retardedness of putting these fools like Public Enemy and Madonna who have NOTHING to do with Rock and Roll into said hall of fame! It's like putting Elvis into the Hip Hop hall of fame - doesn't make sense. You gotta really respect the Sex Pistols for boycotting the induction ceremony and calling the whole thing a "piss stain" in a scrawled written letter and yet still having them induct you! Brilliant. To me, that's sorta what Alex was indirectly saying, which is cool. Is his bald spot gone now? LOL!
  5. Losing It ... Second Nature ... High Water ... Emotion Detector What say we pick 5 of the most popular songs from this thread, create a poll, and then submit the winner to the band?
  6. Like everyone I too was initially very turned off when checking Buffalo for VIP tickets and seeing they wouldn't reveal what tickets you're getting. But think of it this way. If you were a scalper, would you blindly pay $300 for a ticket, not knowing the location up front? The swag obviously means nothing to them, and judging from the many comments here are about it's mediocre quality, getting this stuff with the ticket would not be much of an incentive to potential buyers in the know. Heck, the scalpers might even try to sell the swag separately. So my theory is Ticketmaster is not revealing the ticket location to freeze out the brokers. We all know Ticketmaster and the band are all making a major pile off of the ticket prices as is. So for them there's no point in helping the brokers make a buck too. In fact, cutting out the third-party brokers makes the show overall more affordable for everyone while still allowing people who want to pay more to get the best seats. This system may be a lot like the Ten club for Pearl Jam fans. For many, many years (even before MP3 file sharing came along), Pearl Jam has offered their fan club members exclusive access to the top 15 or 20 rows on the floor. Like here, you had to order the tickets in advance and you didn't know what you were getting until it arrived in your mailbox. But I know for a fact that Pearl Jam actually walks the walk here and delivers on their promise. On the last tour for Toronto it was almost impossible to even find ANYTHING in the first 20 rows, even from StubHub or eBay. I think I only ever saw 1 or 2 pairs of ANYTHING in the first 20 rows. That proved to me that the first 20 rows all did in fact go directly to fans simply because what fan would want to re-sell their prime ticket?
  7. Maybe the younger, cloned Alex will abduct Alex a la Ricky from Trailer Park Boys and bring back the synthesizers and concept albums? See the new and improved Alex at: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/ekge45eg/ryan-kavanaugh
  8. I'm looking to go from Toronto to Montreal and spend a few days soaking up this fine city's joie de vivre while attending Wednesday's show with great seats at a reasonable price. This seems far more appealing than taking the Go-Train into post-nuclear-fallout-zone Hamilton, pay large for an ok or worse ticket, and have to scurry on home prematurely and leave Copps by 11:15 and take cab to bus station to catch the last Go Bus to Toronto. So I'm wondering if any of you have tried making a mini-vacation out of seeing a live show in a place far from your local area? In 2007 a buddy and I did a crazy road trip where we saw the Roger Waters Dark Side Of The Moon show 3 times in one week: Quebec City (Monday), Ottawa (Wednesday), and Montreal (Thursday). Needless to say we had a total blast and we both agree the QC show was the BEST CONCERT EVER! We had hardly any time to check out these places (especially Ottawa) and we stayed in motels for QC and Ottawa. Since it was June and university students were off for the summer for Montreal I booked us a 2 bedroom apartment at one of McGill University's off campus residences and it was only about $75 per night for both of us. Unfortunately, I can't do this again as right now students are still doing exams and haven't left the dorms yet. I looked around at a bunch of Montreal hostels on hostels.com and this really seems to be the way to go! Staying in motels and the McGIll residence in 2007 we hardly met anyone along the way, whereas with hostels based on the pictures it looks like you'd meet piles of people from all over the world to hang out, dine and party with! The going rate is you can book a private room at a hostel with a friend for about $50 a night each or take a shared room for about $25-$35 a night. One hostel is about a 10 minute walk max. from the Bell Centre, so I'm gonna do it! My only concern is my snoring. I can and probably usually do snore pretty badly (remember the trembling glass of water in Jurassic Park? Exactly - that was me snoring, not a T-Rex) and I'd hate to disturb others sleeping nearby. A couple of hostel forums suggest at least warning people you snore so they can get earplugs. I say not only warn people but also buy a few sets of earplugs and offer them freely to all nearby people to have bedside in case needed. Furthermore, ask people to be totally honest with you the next day whether you disturbed them much. If the consensus is you're intolerable to sleep near even with earplugs then profusely apologize to all affected, buy them breakfast or lunch and go get a private room for subsequent nights. Anyways, I'm really looking forward to this trip! Has anyone else done any hosteling (especially in conjunction with concerts) and can offer any advice or caveats? Also any pet boarding tips would be much appreciated too!
  9. You're far better off waiting out back of whatever venue to meet them after the show. I doubt there are many people who do this nowadays with Rush. If there are, just wait and be the last person to talk with them which may get you more time than with the other people. Also have something to talk about, not just adulation - that's boring to any famous person. I remember the RTB show in Toronto when we were 16 and we waited after the show to meet them. I had to leave before they came out due to a curfew. So I was green with envy to learn my friend Jeremy met Alex and chatted with him for about 5 minutes and then got his autograph. Around that same time Geddy was interviewed live at Q107 in Toronto and we waited out to meet him after the interview. He finally came out with his wife. He didn't say anything to us, just sort of looked at us blankly and signed our stuff (including my Show Of Hands poster). Having watched the extras on Beyond The Lighted Stage you can see Alex is a golf junkie and loves playing while on tour. I'd send a letter through Ray Daniels perhaps or their tour manager Liam Birt inviting Alex (when the tour passes through your area) for a round of 18 and dinner at the best private members only golf course in the area with the club's golf pro in tow. If you don't write the invitation in too fanboy-ish a fashion he might even accept. He might even welcome the company because he probably does most of his on-tour golf days alone (as he is in the documentary). I've read on this forum that you can get stuff signed by even Neil if you mail it to Liam Birt to the venue they'll be playing at shortly before the concert date.
  10. Anyone else notice this is the first Hamilton show since 1991? In 1991 the Hamilton gig was the first show of the RTB tour, I was 17 then and my buddies and I bought great lower stands tickets off scalpers at the venue for close to face value (probably $40-$50 each ... *SIGH*). I cheered so much during the show I lost my voice and sounded like Bob Dylan afterward! I tried the Thursday 10AM Live Nation pre-sale through TicketMaster, looking for a single ticket. As anticipated, nothing too spectacular came up, so I didn't buy today. The best I saw was row 17 floor, that and row 31 floor came up again and again. I checked the VIP $300 tickets at this time (between 10:00-10:20 AM Thursday) and a floor row 10 single came up. Just checked for the same single VIP ticket at 10:40PM Thursday night on Ticketmaster and floor row 14 came up. The extras you get with the VIP package are not bad, so if on Friday morning I can get within 5 rows of the stage I'll take this package. Otherwise, I'll "roll the bones" and see what I can get floorwise for $100 on Friday morning. Having seen them on the Snakes/Arrows tour from 2nd row dead centre floor in London, Ontario I know how much of a difference a few rows makes (having seen them several times from 12th row floor or so in Toronto). Row 1-3 - they're playing in your living room Row 4-beyond - they're not playing in your living room
  11. Saw both Toronto shows. Was really drunk for the Amphitheatre Show, but really wondered why the next day I couldn't remember anything for the show except Time Stand Still. I was more sober for the 2nd show but I realized then why I didn't remember most of the first show - the first set is totally forgettable. This was my 8th tour and (aside from the Moving Pictures set) for me this was the only tour where a large portion of the show's set list was quite noticeably sub par. Let's review: - The Spirit of Radio - with concerts, I love surprises. I don't want to know anything about a concert before I go to it! I love the thrill of hearing a totally unexpected old classic and then getting right into the groove (Digital Man was like that for me on the last tour). Spirit Of Radio is such an obvious, hackneyed opener. Playing this first is totally blowing your wad in the first 30 seconds. It's opened their shows before, and there was no surprise at all here, considering that unfunny, overlong intro film alluded to it so heavily. (BTW: best concert intro ever - the Thus Spake Zarathustra 2001-ish intro on the Counterparts tour. Spectacular start to a show for a great album!) - Time Stand Still - aRgH! Hold Your Fire would be an unblemished masterpiece were it not for this turkey and Mission, yet we've had to endure BOTH songs on the past 2 tours. Whereas total masterpieces from HYF like Second Nature and High Water have NEVER been played live EVER! - Presto - the one shining star in the pre-intermission first set. Although I wish Alex had been swapping between the Ovation acoustic and the electric guitar as he did in Closer To The Heart during ASOH instead of playing faux acoustic on his electric. I think it would have sounded quite a bit better. Stick It Out - I know where they should stick this one... Workin' Them Angels - of all the songs you could play ... on a retrospective tour ... and they chose THIS????? This song just plain sucks. Can anyone tell really tell me they're still listening to S&A with any regularity since it came out?? Leave That Thing Alone - I wish they HAD left it alone. For me, the least interesting Rush instrumental ever. Faithless - exactly how I was feeling at this point in the show BU2B - not bad - but again .... of all the songs you COULD play .... ??????? Freewill - way too overplayed on too many tours (plus overplayed on the radio)! Marathon - very nice to hear again - but what about all these other gems from PW very few of us have ever heard live? Such as Grand Designs or Middletown Dreams ... if they had done Emotion Detector I would have gone into orbit! Subdivisions - way too overplayed on too many tours! The thing that really disappointed me about this show was how many albums were not represented at all in the entire show, and yet this is a "Time Machine tour" where we're hearing 3 songs from S&A and 2 new singles! That's a full 20% of the entire concert from the 2 newest studio albums of 20 studio albums total! Yet ZERO songs from GUP, TFE or RTB, only tired old Subdivisions from Signals, and only tired old Closer To the Heart from AFTK (even the band said they stopped playing it because they got "sick of it"), We can all argue endlessly about what they should or shouldn't play, and to each his own, but I think I can say one thing for sure: not much imagination went into the song choices. There are SO many songs little or never played live from all previous albums, most any of which would have (if nothing else) piqued my interest for being novel due to being played and heard live for the first time. That's the sort of thing that's sustained my interest at Rush shows over the years - Circumstances did that especially on the last tour. To me, that's a real trip down memory lane - THAT is a time machine. PS What happened to Jacob's Ladder? Was really looking forward to that one!
  12. Yes, Rogers Waters is not Pink Floyd without Gilmour, but anyone who is carping about this fact hasn't seen Roger Waters do the Dark Side Of The Moon show as I did in 2007-2008. This show was THE BEST show I've ever seen. I've seen over 200 concerts including Rush on every tour since Presto and this one topped them all! A buddy of mine was so enthusiastic about this Dark Side show that he wanted to see the show again after he'd seen it in Toronto the first time around (he wound up seeing the show 10 TIMES in various places). So we went on a wild trip to see the Dark Side show 3 times in one week - in Quebec City (THE *BEST* SHOW BOTH OF US HAVE EVER SEEN - the crowd was SO into it and it really egged the banded on for a pristine performance - the roar of the crowd was deafening plus we were on pot, mushrooms + alcohol :>). We also saw the show in Ottawa and Montreal the same week. For Quebec City we had 6th row floor centre seats, for Ottawa we had 2nd row floor DEAD centre seats, and Montreal 7th row floor off centre. We got all these seats through eBay at face value at $150 a pop which was face value at the time. The Waters Dark Side show was ***SO*** great visually and musically. I saw Pink Floyd back in 1994 and I can tell you this Waters Dark Side show TOPPED it in terms of visuals, and it's a TALL order to top a Pink Floyd show for visuals/pyrotechnics. It's not a big deal that Gilmour or Wright aren't there for the Waters shows - Jon Carin was on this Dark Side tour, as he most likely will for this Wall tour, and Carin can sing much like Gilmour. Jon Carin has toured with both Floyd and Waters before the Dark Side tour, most notably on Floyd's 1987-1989 tour immortalized on Delicate Sound Of Thunder live album, one of my fave live albums of all time. In fact, Delicate + Show Of Hands were the first CDs I ever bought. All of the ticket brokers selling for the Toronto have a super hard on for the Wall show. They are now trying to get $3000-$4500 for a pair of the top seats on eBay. What a bunch of goddamn greedy scumbags! They're not going to be able to get anywhere near those prices because a) there are 3 Wall shows booked in Toronto at an 18000 capacity arena and (more importantly) it's Roger Waters, not Pink Floyd. Floyd is a much better selling brand than Waters. The most I've seen tickets sold for on eBay to date for this show is $400 a ticket for about row 20 or seats in the close stands. So just wait to buy tickets for this show, wherever you are. Do like I did and keep checking the eBay listings 1-3 weeks before the show and (at least for Ottawa and Quebec) you'll get top seats for a sane price. I bought the 2nd row dead centre floor seats for the Ottawa Dark Side show about a week before the show along with the other top notch seats I got through eBay. With all that said, I'm sure The Wall will be a great show, whatever seat you have! Be sure to check it out, even if you have to shell out a couple hundred bucks per seat!
  13. Forget the meet and greets! Just find out where the band will be exiting the venue and wait for them after the show. It might take 1-3 hours for this to happen, but they have to come out eventually. I've done this with several artists. Truly enterprising fans could go down to the venue in the afternoon on the day of the show and try to meet them before soundcheck. My friends and I waited for them after the show on the RTB tour in Toronto. I had to leave before they came out (I had curfew - I was 16 at the time) but my friend (a guitarist and a huge fan) met Alex and talked guitar with him for quite a while if I remember + got the autograph. Few people take this approach, especially if it's cold outside. The trick is to be the last one to approach them. That was you may get the most time of anyone to talk with them if everyone else has had their moment. We also met Geddy once after he did an interview at Q107 in Toronto. His wife just kept smiling, but he was pretty distant. Don't recall him saying a word, he just sorta stared at us, signed our stuff and left. I think if you're a musician and can talk about equipment with them you'll probably get a much more interesting, longer conversation than if you just gush and tell them how much you love them. They've heard that a million times, but if you were to ask Alex or Geddy something like "how did you get that effect on X song on Y album?" or "I found out about this new pedal you've got to check out! It does X, Y and Z" or any sort of questions about their equipment I'm betting they'd tell you everything you want to know. And hey, and if you're one of the ladies, who knows, they might even go out with you for a drink (especially if they're not in Toronto)! If you're REALLY hardcore, you could always regularly stake out the Orbit Room in Toronto, the bar Alex owns. Might be a good place to go after the Toronto shows, no?
  14. QUOTE (ashpkt @ Apr 28 2010, 09:43 AM) I've come to the firm conclusion that there were very limited VIP tix released. I had a seat chart in hand and I circled every group that popped up. Seems to me that these early presales are nothing more than a way to generate a sense of urgency to ill-prepared fans who panic as they see their selections getting farther and farther away from stage/center. So basically the venue still has in their hand good seats to release to the public. It's all a pretty sneeky way of off-loading tickets that might otherwise not sell. I agree with these comments about the pre-sales. I think the pre-sales are a racket to sell mediocre, high priced tickets. Obviously the biggest fans are going to be trying to buy through pre-sales first, thinking the best seats are going to be sold at this time. Obviously that isn't the case for the most part. I've only seen one guy here posting he got in the first 10 rows from the pre-sale. So most of these fans eagerly snap up all these mediocre tickets. Then, when the public onsales come later, the less hardcore fans see better tickets available than the pre-sale and are therefore more inclined to buy than if only mediocre, expensive tickets were available. The "best seats for the best dollars" philosophy has almost completely taken over these days, it's obvious. Before the internet became a popular way of buying tickets, here in Canada (and probably the US too) the Ticketmaster retail outlets had a direct non-internet based connection to the main Ticketmaster computer. This main computer allocated the tickets instantly and in a more sophisticated fashion than the internet method does. For instance, you could even tell it "I want a seat in this particular section" and if it was available, it was yours. The retail PCs' connection was through a direct, fast, private network of some kind, probably the same type that banks used in those days and may still use today. Those retail outlet computers really did try and get you the very best tickets instantly, and there were usually lots of great tickets available at onsale time (even in the first few rows) although they always went VERY fast. If you weren't first in line or first in on the phone you simply wouldn't get great tickets. When those retail computers were used I personally was able to get top tickets in the first 5 rows for big shows like U2 or Rolling Stones by being first in line or getting first crack right at 10AM over the phone. The internet has completely leveled the playing field for ticket buying, for better or worse. I was at a retail outlet last week for the Rush Toronto onsale and it was obvious the retail outlets' computers are now using the internet, not the private network any longer. I was first in line, yet even though I got first crack right at 10 on the dot, the first grab was about 70 rows back! I refused to buy them and let the other 2 guys in line buy next. We tried a few more times afterward with the retail PC to see what seats would come up. I wound up getting a single in section 118 row 24 at the ACC in Toronto which is the section right beside the stage. The guy third in line got a single 15th row floor after many tries. So these are pretty decent seats. In the past lining up at the retail outlet and being first was the VERY BEST way to buy tickets. But there was no advantage at all to lining up at the retail outlet last week. I would have been far better off just trying to grab seats at home as I've done for years via the internet or phone. I've been able to get 14th row floor and 12th row floor several times (which is more like 2nd row at the far left at this venue) using the web for past Rush tours. Persistence is key here. As with today's retail outlet, experience has shown the best seats almost NEVER come up in the first 2 or 3 attempts through the internet. The best seats may come at 10:05 or 10:10 or even 10:15. By 10:25 the best seats always seem to be gone. You just have to keep trying and trying until then. As to the guy who has a client who gets access to top tickets but refuses to divulge his methods, take it from someone like me who used to scalp and do really well at it: he's got an inside source somewhere who's getting paid off. It could be at Ticketmaster, or with a promoter, or even the venue itself. Almost all the old methods of getting top seats don't work anymore. I don't think paying off a retail outlet would be effective anymore. If it was the venue it would have to be a senior person, definitley not someone who works events in a 'line' capacity. I used to bartend at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto and we only had very limited access to tickets in advance of the public, and I don't think they were much (if any) better than what the public could get. In a sense, I can understand why ticket prices in general have gotten so high and why all this scalping/auction stuff happens. The artists really don't have nearly as much money coming in from music sales with all the file sharing going on. Before file sharing happened you never saw Rush touring unless they had a new album out. Post-file sharing, we've seen several Rush tours where they had little or no new material to promote (eg. Feedback tour), and the S&A tour was their longest tour since Hemispheres with 113 shows total. This is no coincidence! Do you really think the boys wanted to do that many shows with mostly the same set list? Maybe they did when they were 25 years old and still trying to 'make it big'. But I doubt that's the case now! There would have to be some serious 'malignant narcicissm' happening for them to want to do that just for the sake of playing the same songs over and over and over again. Twas funny, heard the following lyrics from Anthem while writing this: Well, I know they've always told you selfishness is wrong Yet it was for me, not you, I came to write this song This seems pretty hypocritical in light of the $350 VIP packages and $500 seats.
×
×
  • Create New...