A Disappointing Night at the Gallivan Center

By sovknight | August 28, 2008

I was so excited for tonight.  Seriously excited.  Why?  Because two of my favorite bands were coming to SLC, and I’d finally get to see them live.  What’s more, I wouldn’t even have to pay.

A local radio station, 97.5 the Blaze, along with about a zillion other partners, sponsored a concert series in the month of August where they brought in a few national-act rock bands for free concerts.  The show took place in the Gallivan Center, which is a plaza smack in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City.  This plaza is a cool place, with lots of shady trees and meeting areas, along with a big pond that freezes in the winter time for ice skating.  In the summer though, it’s a great place for beer drinking and concerts.

My excitement was almost bubbling over.  Headlining the show would be a band called Shinedown.  They’ve been around for a while, and left quite a few hit songs in their wake.  They’re a good solid, hard rocking band.  Opening for Shinedown were Red, and a  just-signed band called Jet Black Stare.  Personally, the band I was most looking forward to was Red.  I’ve been a huge Red fan since they hit it big, and I love their songs.  To see them up close and for free would be spectacular.  I’m also a pretty big Shinedown fan, so I was looking forward to them too.  Never heard of Jet Black Stare before, but I’m always looking for good music and new talent, so throw them in too!  The more the merrier.

Things started out well.  I took TRAX up and got there way super early, so I could scope the place out and find myself a good standing location.  There were a few people there already; die-hard rockers and the like.  I settled onto a bench in the shade and listened to the mic checks and setup.  Things were looking up at that point, although it was all downhill from there.

I got myself right up front, right by the stage.  If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it right.  It concerned me a little bit that the speakers were right at ground level, and very close to the stage, but I’d hoped it wouldn’t be an issue.  After all, I’d heard the sound checks and everything seemed fine.  I was wrong about that one big time.

There’s been a disturbing trend lately in concerts I’ve attended.  I’m sure it’s not limited to just the ones I go to either.  That trend is for the venue or audio techs for bands to say "hell with it!" and grab every single knob on every single piece of equipment and twist it as high as it will go.  This has the effect of boomy bass, distorted highs and mids, and completely washed-out vocals.  In short, it makes everything sound like crap.  Every single gain on every single amp must have been cranked past eleven tonight, basically reducing what should have been a hard-rocking concert into a cacophonous mess of mush and ear-splitting distortion.

Jet Black Stare was probably a good band.  It seemed like they had a good beat, but it was hard to tell over the whine of feedback and static-filled vocals.  By the time they were finished my ears has already started ringing.  I’d hoped it was just inexperienced techies running the boards for an inexperienced band, but no such luck.

Red came on next.  They were even louder and more distortion-filled than JBS, and my hopes of finally getting to see my latest favorite band evaporated into pure noise.  I couldn’t understand a word the singer was singing, couldn’t discern the different guitars from one another, and didn’t hear any of the subtle details of the music that I know had to be there.  It was a loud, ringing mess.  I even left my cherry spot at the front for a walk around the back part of the plaza, thinking I was just too close.  Nope.  Everything was just as muddy everywhere else.  It was absolutely horrifying.

The song directly above is amazing, and one of my very favorites.  Throughout, and at the end especially, there’s a very lovely string part that really makes the song.  I know they had this string part at the concert tonight, set as a drum trigger, because I heard them using it in sound check.  During the song in concert however, I couldn’t make it out at all.  Everything else was so overdriven, it completely drowned out the strings.  Now tell me, what kind of band screws up their own song?

At the end of Red’s set, I started to feel very uncomfortable.  My ears were ringing loudly and the sounds around me all sounded tinny and distant, like a bad phone connection.  Good, clean, quality sound does not have this effect, no matter how loud it is.  Only massive distortions and improper amplification and gain levels do this.  It was bad.  I remember when I was up in the front actually hearing the speakers pop.  These are concert quality venue speakers, capable of outputting hundreds of watts, and they were being so overdriven that they were popping!  It was absolutely insane. 

So what about Shinedown, you ask?  Well, I wish I could tell you, but I left before they even came on.  My ears literally hurt, and I didn’t want my impression of one of my favorite bands to be tainted by bad sound management.  I prefer to listen to the CD, and rock out to my band when I can understand and appreciate them.  It’s a sad day when I actually leave a free concert with one of my favorite bands before I even get to hear them perform.  It’s hard to believe.

I’m sitting here now, at home in front of my computer, and my ears are still ringing.  I feel like I’m under water.  It was a bad night at the Gallivan Center for sure.