Jam Band Under 
One hour, 3 cups of coffee, a half a dozen smokes and still no tickets in hand. Trust me it’s not from a lack of effort. At 12:00 AM EST the first round of Dead tickets went on sale for their spring tour. For the first half hour of this adventure I sat and waited as the ticket server continuously timed out. Again and again I had to refresh the browser only to time out again. Finally at about the 12:30 mark, success! Oh wait, maybe I spoke too soon.
I’m staring at the ticket ordering page and pondering my choices. Floor, Section 200, 300 or 400? Hmmmm… $95.50 + $6.95 service charge, well it’s an easy choice. I’m going to get some floor seats. I click the add to cart and uh oh… The big red message of ticket doom “At this moment there are not enough tickets available to fulfill your request.” How can that be? I’ve been sitting here for 35 minutes now and am just able to get to the ordering page. Are there that many other people ordering tickets for the same venue on the same night who are much more proficient at hitting the refresh button than me? Oh well, I guess I should have stayed in Refresh Button School instead of pursuing my alternative carrier as a trash collector. One can never really be sure of how the choices they make will affect them in the future.
So ok no floor seats. I can deal with that. Let me try the 200 section. Waiting, waiting, waiting……. The red message of ticket death again. 300s? Waiting, waiting, waiting….. Good thing we only collect trash on Mondays and Thursdays… Waiting…. Bingo! Seats in Section 317 have been added to my cart. Where’s that seating chart, let me see what I’m able to score here? Oh wow! 3rd level to the side, almost heading around the back of the stage. 45 minutes in, $95. a seat, and this is the best I come up with? Thanks but no thanks. I send these tickets back to the waiting pool and try my luck again.
Now 1 1/2 hours into my Dead Ticket adventure.
Waiting…. Waiting…. Waiting….
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Skull and Roses Tapestry - $28.99
Well the ticket servers have been cruising at a nice speed for the last hour or so. Wasn’t having much success though and then finally… At the 3 hour and 15 minute mark nice level 200 Dead tickets are in my hand. Persistence and a little help from our good luck charm worked. Now for the second night…
I wasn’t going to buy into the complaining. I feel truly bad for those who can’t go due to the price and believe me, it’s not an easy thing for me to contemplate either. The disastrous online pre-sale did not make me feel any better about things and I don’t have tickets to show for my two hours of trying. I refuse to accept anything other than level 200 for $100.00 plus fees. One of the advantages to Ticketmaster (as much as I hate them) is how easy it is to release tickets and try again. That is not the case w Dead Ticketing. “Trying again” meant starting the whole, slow process from scratch and seeing if you got lucky or got a server error. I am not worried though, since after all, it is only a pre-sale, and TM will have them in a couple of weeks. Mail order? No way am I taking a chance of paying $100 for a shitty seat, no way in hell. And, I noticed the pre-sale today did not even include the lower priced tier, at least for Philly.
When I saw the “VIP packages” today that made me ask not what WE have become, but what THEY have become or who they THINK we have become. Phil’s trustafarian comment feeds into that….maybe they truly believe that we all live in their world, instead of a world with layoffs looming for many, and shitty jobs that barely pay the bills, let alone allow for extras for many more. I think it’s called a recession. I am fortunate, I have a decent job and can afford to go to a couple of these shows. But I’m pretty sure they will be my last ones. With new bands out there playing new music for a quarter of the cost, it doesn’t take much soul searching to see what makes sense, at least for me.
For $100.00 you can buy a ticket to a three day festival, with at least 20 acts, and that includes camping.
I guess most of all I am just sad, sad because this is the band that I used to brag about to friends and family, who treated their fans with respect and would NEVER charge outrageous prices. Because they knew we traveled with them, went to many shows and saved our pennies, or sold food, or t shirts or whatever, in order to do that. They in return, provided some of the most wonderful times of my life. No Phil, I’m not a trustafarian, just someone who was willing to eat PB&Js all the way home from Red Rocks.
I’ll go to Philly if I can score decent tix thru TM. But mostly I’m going to see old friends and meet new ones, celebrate another’s life and acknowledge his death, and well, play in the lot, perhaps one last time, at the venue where it all began for me. The way I am feeling now, this is also where it will all end.
Well yesterday’s Dead ticket quest eventually end up 50/50. I got good seats for the Friday night show at The Spectrum, but was completely shut out of the Saturday night show. After 20 some odd years that is a first for me. I will be waiting patiently for the next round of tickets to become available hoping for much better results.