I am not sure if this is the right email address for this kind of email... I wanted it to get to the GM, but there was no address listed. I tried to speak to a manager in person but I was herded out in a crowd. Anyhow...
I've been to your venue dozens of times. Lived in Orlando up until last year when I moved to Connecticut. I still received the event calendar emails and always read them just in case. (Don't get many great shows up here in Conn.) So I was excited to see that three of my favorite bands were playing a show together... I was ecstatic. My girlfriend and I planned a trip back to Florida, centered around this very show. Bought plane tickets. Bought tickets to the show.
The show was this past Saturday... the fifth. Bright Eyes, Neva Dinova and Jessie Sykes.
I would have written this email earlier, but didn't fly back home until last night.
Our day started off great. We ate at the HOB restaurant with a group of friends. Jumbalaya and all that good stuff. It was great as always. No complaints. But then we went into the concert...
The concert was a disaster. I'm not sure if you can speak to anyone there that was actually at the show, but if you can... ask them one question... could they even hear the music? Because we couldn't. Neva Dinova and Jessie Sykes were entirely lost amongst the noise of the crowd. It was awful. I felt horrible, especially for Jessie. This poor woman with an acoustic guitar and no one can hear her so no one listens and instead just talk more and more, making the noise louder and everything worse. Bright Eyes had a full band, so it wasn't as bad, but when they stripped down to softer songs they were completely drowned out as well.
Now, I understand that it is impossible to control such a crowd. I wouldn't be writing you this email if I didn't think that part of the situation could have been avoided. I mean, I've been to shows at HOB where I've been kicked in the face by a crowd-surfer and those sort of things are completely unpredictable and we all move on, but... this past Saturday I watched as time after time... waitresses sold drink after drink to people that were clearly drunk. They walked around upselling alcohol, only making a bad situation worse.
Though, most of my visits to HOB have been great, this is not the first time that this has happened and I let it slide before, but I can't again. A few years back, I spent thirty dollars on a ticket to see the Eels open for Fiona Apple. I didn't care to see Apple, was only there for the Eels... was surprised to see that it was only the lead singer and an acoustic guitar doing the tour. That was great, or so I thought. His set lasted all of seventeen minutes and he walked off stage pissed. In between each of the four songs that he played he berated the audience for being too loud and drunk for him to concentrate. And he was right. A month later he did an interview and said that he would never play another HOB again, that he's tired of clubs that are more concerned with the selling of alcohol than the show itself. And he was right again. So, that night when he walked off stage, I walked out as well... like I said, I had paid my thirty dollars only to see his set... all seventeen minutes of it.
So I bit my lip that time, but I refuse to do that again. I would like some compensation for Saturday's show. It's not that the show wasn't worth the money, it's that the show wasn't worth my time OR the money. There was no point in my being there. Straining to hear the music past the crowd was more work than pleasure and I wish I had never gone. I felt stupid for having come all that way, from Connecticut to Florida, just to torture myself in your concert hall.
My Ticketmaster order number was 15-57935/FLO.
The tickets were $53.25 for my girlfriend and I.
Thank you,
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