Come on guys, really?

As a watcher, I wanna say, I've seen some dumb stuff.  Stuff that'll make me cock my head to the side and say "Come on guys, really?" This probably isn't one of my most inspired blog posts, but sometimes you just gotta call them out.

You plus-one more people than you draw to a show... I mean, really guys?

I went to a concert a while back, where Come What May was playing on tour.  The headliner at the show was a band called Wysteria.  I had heard of them before, but didn't think they were all that.  I didn't think they were a joke, but I sure wasn't into them.  The show was at a good-sized venue, one of my favorite venues, in fact: H2O in Orlando, FL.  It's actually a huge venue, and has great lights and audio.  I think it would be an ideal location for a music video shoot and I'm told that a lot of people shoot live videos there.

A band that shoots a music video at their live show would hype it, right?  Bring out as many people as they possibly can, so the video can have crowd shots and the like, right?  When I think of a live promo, I think of something like this:

... but Wysteria must have had another idea in mind. There were fewer than 10 people in the audience of this 300 capacity venue. There were people there to see the other bands on the bill, but they had all scurried off to the lounge areas, instead leaving the stage more crowded than the floor.

So many camera people that I couldn't even get all of them in one shot.

4 full stacks were brought out to amplify the one guitarist, 2 8x10 cabs for the terrible bassist (all of which, we discovered, was rented just for the show) and 4 camera people were there on stage, blocking the view and catching all of the "action."

Their set was garbage and sloppy and it was clear that they were playing for the cameras and not the 3 people paying attention, but after filming the entire set, the videographers were able to put together 1 whole minute of footage for the Wysteria Live Promo and it looks really good. The Result:

I remember in high school watching a video about Coheed and Cambria and hearing them talk about playing shows where there were more people on the stage than there were in the crowd.  They said that even though that's a disheartening experience, they would play as hard as they could, so that those 3 people watching would be able to go home having seen a great performance... or something like that.  I don't think that this was what they meant though.  I don't think I'll ever be able to take Wysteria seriously.