All It Takes Are Two Stupid Drunk People

All it takes are two stupid drunk people to ruin a great show. Actually, it probably only takes one drunk person - but in this case, there were two. I went to the Ray LaMontagne show at the Masonic Temple - it was in the Scottish Rite Cathedral part of the theater. I had never been to a show here before, and the short story is that I'll never go to a show there again, and if I ever go see Ray again, I'll see him in Chicago. The show was great, but the crowd was awful. This was the worst crowd I have ever been at a concert with. Not only was the crowd bad, the people working at the venue were horrible.

To begin with, they let people in the doors at 6, possibly earlier, when Ray didn't come on until nearly 8:45. So generally, everyone was drunk by the time he sang. When it was time to open the doors of the theater - several people, including my friend and I, walked right in a side door without presenting our ticket or being searched. Everyone who entered the right way got their purse searched and were checked with a wand. This seems safe. It's actually funny that Ray's opener posted on her blog that Ray was scared of the venue and scared to play there. As he obviously should have been. Anyway, the show started off great, until the two stupid drunk people went down in front of the stage and flailed their arms wildly in a hideous display of what was supposed to be dancing. Soon after, the two drunk idiots were joined by a third, and then it was all over.

People flooded the stage, stood in the aisle way, stood right in front of the front row. Then the inevitable happened. Row one stood up and row two couldn't see. Row two stood up and row three couldn't see. And so on. We were in row 4 and had great seats, until everyone stood up in front of us. Soon we were all standing. This just wasn't the type of venue for this or the type of show. And there was nothing the venue staff could have done about it - they clearly had no control as we entered from the side to begin with.

Up above our heads a few more drunk people sat on the ledge of a balcony and at one point, one person needed out of our row and in the process, we knocked the row of seats over onto the people behind us, because obviously these seats were not bolted to the floor. As lame as this is - all I could think was - this is one great big huge LIABILITY. It screams of liability. Just imagine if one of those drunk people fell off of the balcony and landed on ME, crushing the people behind as the row of seats fell over. They would be sorry if I were the one they landed on. I half feel like calling them and complaining. One time, I was going to call up the electric company and bitch them out for my brother because he had no electricity in the dead of winter for 3 days. I'm good at this kind of thing - not that I should be proud of that.

I hope Ray never plays in Detroit again.

Anyway, the drunk people stood in the way and yelled and screamed stupid shit to Ray through the entire show. He barely said a word, other than thank you. And at the end he expressed his gratitude in such a nice way that I thought - you dumb fucking assholes. Then, on the way out - all the stupid drunk people just stood there and looked at the revolving door whirl by - too drunk probably to figure out how to get in it. Ah well, no one got hurt and fun was had by all and he sounded phenomenal. And at the end of the night, what a great reminder of why I want to be sober.