“It’s not your fault” we were once told by Robin Williams in the excellent Good Will Hunting. The line itself has worked its way from a genuine expression to a meme and back around to a genuine expression. It’s good to remind yourself from time to time that certain things are out of your control, if each shortcoming in life rested squarely on your own shoulders, the weight would quickly crush most people. The same applies to artists. Touring is relentless and difficult, most would crack under the pressure of delivering an excellent show night after night in city after city, some do. But what happens when a show just doesn’t go off, nothing feels right, and everyone, especially the band, leaves dissatisfied? You’ve just gotta remind yourself, “It’s not your fault.”
Stepping into the room, it was apparent that whoever put this whole show together didn’t really grasp the style of music in question. Inherently the theater is tiered into three sections separated by stairs and rails, similar to the setup of the floor at the Wiltern or The Observatory. These venues are always tricky for mosh-centric shows because they naturally inhibit the creation of a decent sized mosh pit. Even taking that obstacle into account, the room setup was baffling, the lowest tier, the one closest to the stage, operated as the dance/mosh area, but the second tier was where things got weird.
Instead of having the second tier operate as an extension of the first, it was loaded with what appeared to be VIP tables for people to sit at, while the third tier was basically a bar only, though the inclusion of ADA seating was a nice touch that every venue should be including these days. Having not performed on a stage outside of high school band, I can’t guarantee that all artists feel this way, but how full a room is, versus how full a room looks has to have a serious impact on your show. So when a show focused on moshing and breakdowns is chock full of chairs and tables, it tends to put a damper on the energy entirely.
As established, the above gripes have little to do with the band themselves. We’ve covered Knocked Loose before and can unequivocally state that given the correct circumstances they kick ass. However, when the crowd isn’t giving you the right vibe and your standard attempts to coax them into a mosh don’t work, laying it on thicker isn’t often the way to do it. The onstage presence of the group vacillated between taunting and furious, with them saying that the audience looked bored, before yelling at them to “stop standing fucking still.” At some point, you just have to cut your losses and skip the encore, and while that eventually did happen, the forty-five-minute set was an awkward affair for all parties.
Being fans of Knocked Loose, this whole show was a sad affair. The setup did them no favors, but they weren’t too keen on doing any for themselves either. So who really was to blame for this faux pas? There’s no need to shy away from saying the real culprit anymore so let’s come clean, the crowd. While none of the above difficulties helped, this was without a doubt one of the worst crowds we’ve seen since we started going to shows. The first tier of the room was at best half full, with an even greater percentage of those small few opting to stand still and film a band whose entire musical persona is “do a lot of breakdowns so people get extremely amped.” At the risk of sounding like an old hypocrite as someone who literally takes notes on their phone during shows, Instagram has almost completely ruined live shows, but really it goes beyond that in this case. This isn’t a bad venue, and a lack of energy hasn’t plagued any show we’ve attended there before. We watched Purity Ring and even their opener HEALTH come out to more energetic crowds, hell, Switchfoot’s crowd in 2005/6 made this crowd seem like they took Ambien before coming out.
Maybe Ventura is washed. Maybe the “death” of Vans Warped Tour, the show that had brought life to the Ventura punk scene for so long, died more because of Ventura, then the other way around. After two punk shows in Ventura that suffered from small crowds and the same terrible, dangerous arm swinging bullshit that keeps moshes from getting big and being fun, it’s time to put the burden on the crowd. The only good thing one could possibly come away with was that the sound was excellent in the room, but everything else led to one of the saddest things we’ve ever seen. This failure belongs to the crowd, they deserve to wallow in it for a moment, as for Knocked Loose “It’s not your fault.”
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