Buddy's Place
Music Hall Blues
RECEIVED Mon., May 4, 2009
Dear Editor,
While closed for six months in 2007, the Austin Music Hall apparently improved the air conditioning and painted some stuff while making concerted effort to muffle, muddle, and damage the building’s already-poor acoustics.
Friday night’s Death Cab for Cutie show (May 1) was a lot like watching a band on a bad TV with no treble from the back of a bottom bunk.
Bad sight lines, obstructed views all over, bad sound everywhere except the first five rows of the center mezzanine and the first 50 feet of the floor. Yes, all that and more. Badly designed bar lines and intersecting restroom lines, poorly marked entrances and exits, and dozens upon dozens of ignorant, inconsiderate numskulls holding illegal still and video cameras up for entire songs and more, watching a $40 show on a 3-inch screen and blocking the view of all behind them. Security was not in evidence.
If a government committee set out to design a soulless, atmosphereless shit hole of a music venue without regard for the eventual acoustics or, indeed, the concertgoing experience at all, it would be hard-pressed to top this musical disaster area.
I’d be embarrassed if this were the Wichita Falls High School gym. In Austin, it’s incomprehensibly, irredeemably bad.
While closed for six months in 2007, the Austin Music Hall apparently improved the air conditioning and painted some stuff while making concerted effort to muffle, muddle, and damage the building’s already-poor acoustics.
Friday night’s Death Cab for Cutie show (May 1) was a lot like watching a band on a bad TV with no treble from the back of a bottom bunk.
Bad sight lines, obstructed views all over, bad sound everywhere except the first five rows of the center mezzanine and the first 50 feet of the floor. Yes, all that and more. Badly designed bar lines and intersecting restroom lines, poorly marked entrances and exits, and dozens upon dozens of ignorant, inconsiderate numskulls holding illegal still and video cameras up for entire songs and more, watching a $40 show on a 3-inch screen and blocking the view of all behind them. Security was not in evidence.
If a government committee set out to design a soulless, atmosphereless shit hole of a music venue without regard for the eventual acoustics or, indeed, the concertgoing experience at all, it would be hard-pressed to top this musical disaster area.
I’d be embarrassed if this were the Wichita Falls High School gym. In Austin, it’s incomprehensibly, irredeemably bad.
Steve Basile