Recently, my friend & one of my favorite regional folk singers hired a backing band & borrowed an RV to go out on tour as the opening act for one of my other favorite artists, a truly remarkable songwriter & ace guitarist, with a deep catalog & stable career of countless streams & regularly packed mid-size venues. A few weeks before that, they were opening for an even more successful country star at massive amphitheaters. At some of these shows on both tours, the crowds were disrespectful of my friend, & sometimes my friend would get really rattled by that fact. Their interaction with rude fans made some fans uncomfortable & the topic got some traffic on Instagram, & my friend wrote a reflection on the entire experience for their Patreon.
I doubt I can convince anyone not to talk during the show or to be more respectful of the opening artists, but I want to talk about it. I want to talk about my love & respect for the opening bands who go out on tour as support for the more popular artists.
While it should not matter, because all opening acts deserve respect, love, & good compensation, I should probably name names. With this story, it’s about my friend who performs as Adeem the Artist (they/them), & I should note that they are an openly queer artist. In this instance, they were opening for Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit in Dallas, after an extended western jaunt that included Montana, the PNW, & northern Cali.
I already know from following them on the socials & belonging to their fan group on Facebook that this tour has included multiple vehicle mishaps & emergency repairs. I don’t know how much their monetary take is each night, but since Adeem hired a full band (as opposed to often working solo acoustic), all this affirms my honest guess that Adeem was losing money on this tour. Opening acts obviously understand the transaction that exists for the wider exposure & the hope to make new fans & sell merch.
Here is an extended excerpt of their reflection; I share it all, because it’s important:
“Sure, let’s talk about it. Last night in Dallas after we played middle of a heart, I tried to tell a heartfelt story of a human interaction I’d had last time I was in Dallas. People got louder to speak over me so I stopped the story and played a song instead. How am I going to tell a story if I keep getting interrupted with people chattering at my volume level?
A couple songs later, in the middle of Rotations, the talking and laughter escalated to the point of distraction for even me.
This is a job I like and want to have but it’s taxing. I’m away from my family for almost a month and we’re driving somewhere upwards of 10 hours a day then unloading and setting the stage and checking the sounds and setting up the merch and then the set and then we touch each other and hug and say hi and I write weird little notes on your records.
Sometimes we’re waking up at 5 am after sleeping at 2 am. Again, it’s labor we love to do and it’s a privilege to have the work. However, that’s the condition I’m in last night: road worn, away from my family, feeling the weight of injustice, of political pandering to war criminals juxtaposed against protests in the streets.
So, when people’s volume escalated so far above mine in the midst of a song about my kid who I miss so much it hurts, I snapped. People paid money to be in this theatre. We drove a long way to be here. We have 40 minutes. Please don’t shit on the art for those 40 minutes.
It’s disrespectful to the artist & to the art form & it’s disrespectful to the experience of the other people who also paid their hard earned money to be here and feel all of these feelings and be in the room together in shared space for a moment.”
Reading this story reminded me of another situation with a queer opening artist, thirty years ago. Let’s rewind to Thanksgiving weekend 1994, I was a 27-year-old college senior & local journalist, & found myself backstage in the cavernous catacombs of Cobo Hall. Yes, that Cobo Hall of Detroit Rock City & KISS ALIVE renown. This was one of the many Almost Famous moments I had as a young writer, six years before that film was released.
A gritty pop punk band that had emerged from the East Bay DIY oasis that was the Gilman Street scene in Berkeley was suddenly all over our commercial “alternative” radio 89X in Detroit, & the bleachers were brimming with white teenagers from the suburbs. Not long ago though, Lookout Records was sending me the vinyl of their first record, because I edited a hippypunk fanzine of modest notoriety. Then, they were gigging at our tiny concrete storefront punk clubhouse the 404, a much smaller & scrappier version of Gilman Street. That band, of course, is Green Day.
When the smash album Dookie hit, everything changed. The explosion from underground to ubiquitous was seemingly overnight, & Green Day continues to boast a wildly successful career without compromising the anti-authoritarian values of their earliest days.
I wasn’t at Cobo that night to cover Green Day, though. I had already been writing for our local alt-weekly about the opening band Pansy Division, an unapologetically queer punk group that was part of the fledgling “homocore” movement. I was there to meet & hang out with the singer Jon Ginoli. Their gleeful cover of the Nirvana staple reimagined as “Smells Like Queer Spirit” is catchy & courageous & stands the test of time. I can also hear their song “Femme in a Black Leather Jacket” as fresh as ever.
The Bay Area had a queer punk scene, & we had developed our own solidarity with that at 404, then the Trumbull Theater (later known as the Trumbullplex). About 5 years before that night, I spent about a month living in the aforementioned East Bay, & one day we headed over to the city for an all day punk show sponsored by the Homocore fanzine. It was headlined by Fugazi, but the second act on the bill was Operation Ivy. The live sets were beyond thrilling & mesmerizing. It was pure punk rock bliss. Down the card, Dave Dictor of MDC did an acoustic set in drag as Box Car Darla. The sense of community at that show, like at many of our 404 shows, was more than welcoming & affirming, it was the new inclusive utopia that we were fighting for in the rest of the world.
The LGBTQ rights movements of the early 90s felt so vital & visionary & real. The sacrifices & activism of the Gay community during AIDS, despite tragic inaction from too many sectors, wrought a fierce militancy & loving community. It’s not like homophobia wasn’t real & murderous but the movement seemed so determined & so hopeful. Because I believed in the moral arc of the universe trending towards justice, I really couldn’t have imagined that 30 years later, we would be experiencing another anti-queer panic, the bigoted backlash that we continue to see to this day.
I say all this to give added context to the shockingly awful reaction that Pansy Division received at Cobo Hall that night.
Years later, frontperson Ginoli remembers: “Actually, when we started out, we were well accepted in our native San Francisco. Up until we started getting in front of mainstream audiences. It wasn't until we got the tour with Green Day that things got weird. They gave us such an opportunity to play in front of big crowds. But their audiences weren't as accepting as ours were. We came to play Detroit, in a big arena. Now, there was always a mixed reaction when we opened for them. But that night, everybody turned on us. There was constant booing and throwing things.”
Billy Joe Armstrong was aware of all that. Check out this bit from The Advocate in 1995: "I think Pansy Division is the kind of band that saves people's lives, "Armstrong says matter-of-factly. "They're catchy, and they're really educational. They're honest about their sexuality, and that saves lives. Sometimes it gets kind of ugly because there are a lot of ignorant dorks out in the audience, and they start throwing shit at Pansy Division," he continues, discussing the tour. "I was kind of discouraged watching the audience flip them off. I kept thinking, Shit, these people are the people who are here to see us?"
Later that cool November night in Detroit, Pansy Division parked their rented U-Haul box truck at the Trumbullplex where a bunch of us lived. This gritty DIY anarcho-punk counter-institution has been a part of the Detroit scene for decades. We lived there, we booked shows there, we had vegetarian potlucks there, my kid took their first steps there, we had a massive ‘zine library there. It was part of a national movement of community centers & autonomous zones & underground venues that were all across the continent.
Hanging with Ginoli, he shared that Pansy Division only got $500 per night on that tour. No wonder they wanted to stay at the punk house instead of a motel. No idea how much of that 500 went into food, gas, & the rental truck but it wasn’t free. No idea what the receipts for Cobo would be back then or what Green Day’s cut was, but then as now, the opening band position can be a kind of internship, with all the economic realities that this implies. When we see even modestly successful artists, I think we might have the idea they have it made in the shade, as far as finances go. But for upstart acts in all sectors of the scene, the struggle & hustle are real.
Rude audience behavior traverses every genre, age group, demographic. But I do want to note, though, that hearing of Adeem’s experiences opening for Isbell, it immediately made me think of Pansy Division opening for Green Day, different generations of queer artists abiding their visibility & values no matter the cisgender heteronormative realities we might encounter out on the road.
But with folkies talking sensitive truths between songs, it only becomes more obvious. Loud music might drown out the defiantly oblivious, who have to shout into their friends’ ears to be heard over the din.
When I was only in middle school, I saw the Rolling Stones at the Richfield Coliseum near Cleveland. Etta James opened the show. I was not the only white suburban teenager in attendance who did not understand the importance of the Stones bringing Black blues artists out on tour with them. Now even after decades of studying this stuff as a fan & even scholar, the relationships remain problematic. The Stones should be required to pay some kind of reparations in their choice of opening acts, but not unlike with Pansy Division’s paltry cut opening for Green Day, the Stones were reputed to never pay their openers very well at all.
But in a very different way, the Stones were the interns to the likes of Etta James, not the other way around. Issues of gender, race, class, & economic exploitation are always there, whether or not we want to see them. These days, after the passing of Charlie Watts, the Stones hired a Black drummer in Steve Jordan. But they call him the “touring drummer” & exclude him from band photos.
I find talkers at shows to be the worst, not just for the artists, but for my experience of the show as a fellow fan. We all have our unique triggers & pet peeves, because cell phone use, for example, doesn’t trigger me like the jabbering does. But for the low pay that many opening acts earn & the extra hacks & hustles they endure to make it work, the very least that audiences could do is shut up & listen & buy some of the openers’ merch if it is in the personal budget.
Hope this meditation & rant isn’t too provocative, keeping in mind that it’s just from one superfan’s perspective, a fan & part-time rarely-paid music journalist who breaks the Almost Famous code & tries to make friends with the band, at least the opening band.
Andrew/Sunfrog
August 2024
