My concert days are long behind me now, in my town headliners NEVER get on stage until 12:30 and even before I had a kid that was just a no fly for me. The busses stop running before headliners even go on stage, screw that. Went to a tonne of shows back in the day though, mostly underground metal acts that came through Toronto when I lived in Hamilton and then after I moved to Victoria it was mostly indie acts and one band called USS that I saw like six times (and we actually wound up using one of their songs for our first dance when we got married). USS would EASILY be my top show except...
Elton John. I was 13, I saw him at GM Place (now Rogers Arena) in Vancouver. He played all his old shit and he went for three hours straight with no break. Despite the fact that there were nearly 20,000 people there it felt somehow intimate- the man seriously has such a stage presence that he can connect with that many people at once. The crowd sounded like a stampede when it started to cheer and afterwards I was exhausted.
Then, when I was 16, I went to the SARS Benefit Concert in Toronto. A crowd of 500,000 people and The Tea Party, the Eisley Brothers, Rush, Blue Rodeo, Sam Roberts, The Guess Who, AC/DC and The Rolling Stones, amongst others.
It was the first time I saw bare breasts. It was the latest I ever stayed up. It was more people than I'd ever seen in one place. It was AMAZING.
I also gotta tip my hat to Andrew Bird in Atlanta, that was an amazing experience, but it wasn't no boobies.
The worst show I ever saw is also a tie. There was a show in Toronto that had... Nevermore, Children of Bodom, Hypocrisy and Dimmu Borgir. No one had an interesting stage presence, they all just went out, wanked off their guitars and went off. I think I left half way through Dimmu (who were headlining). I wasn't a big fan of any of the bands anyways but it was just so... meh.
The other worst was a band called Johnny Tango that no longer exist. I knew the band, they were local here in Victoria and I'd seen them a few times. They were really good. But then they had a CD release party... they called it that. They called it a CD release party. When we got there, there were no CDs cuz the band hadn't scraped up enough cash to actually get a run printed and they just handed out little cards with PINs on them so that you could go online and download digital copies of the album. They broke up shortly after.
Ive only been to one.... I was arrested.
ahahahaha do tell