Yeah, I know Full Circle is the name of a song by Vegas rockers Otherwise, and beyond that, Otherwise has nothing to do with this post.

But last week, I felt like I’d come full circle.

It has been ten, nine, maybe eight years since I last saw a band play live. Disturbed. A tour sponsored by Jagermeister. In Cleveland’s House of Blues.

Last week, it was the Carnival of Madness tour. We as Human, In This Moment, Papa Roach, Skillet, Shinedown.

You CAN go home again, folks.

Oh, lots has changed. I bought three tickets for $75. And spent another $45 in service fees. What the FUCK? I think Eddie Vedder had it right when he tried to take on Ticketmaster. He saw where things were headed.

And people wonder why no one goes to shows anymore.

On top of that, such a large bill meant an early start time: 5PM. I left my house around 2:30, expecting traffic (but see above about no one going to shows anymore. Wasn’t a problem). That’s a long day and night — and meant dinner for me and the concert buddies had to be bought on-site.

Bye bye to another $40.

I’ve now spent more in ancillary items than I did on the tickets. So I am pretty confident when I say that, at least in this case, ticket prices weren’t the reason for the crummy attendance. There’s a vowel for you Live Nation, Ticketmaster, huge corporate promotions folks, and Vanna didn’t even need to sell it to you. Don’t bleed your customer base dry while giving us all patronizing pats on the heads and whining about how low ticket prices are.

Of course, crummy attendance wound up meaning we got a free seat upgrade so that the people with lawn tickets could sit where we’d been supposed to. Move ’em forward, don’t make the bands look past rows of empty seats in order to find their real fans. Works for me, and not just because I got better seats out of it. I have yet to meet a band who plays better to an empty house than to a full one.

That’s the rant part of the concert experience post. I’ll be back with thoughts of the bands and general impressions of the show. Once I got past the exorbitant food prices and service charges, there wasn’t much else to rant about.

Thankfully. The point of live music is to feel alive, to feed your soul. Not to bleed your bank account dry.