Towsman Rick sends in the following report from the recent Newport Folk Festival.
I spent the weekend at the Newport Folk Festival, where they sold beer and wine for the first time. They and the town were nervous, of course, about the potential problems, so they made a beer area way at the end of a pier (the festival is at a Revolutionary War fort on the water). And they charged $6 to $8 for lousy beer.
And people thronged to it. The second they opened the gate, the wait was 20 minutes. By mid-afternoon (the festival went until 7:00 pm; beer closed at 6:00 pm) the wait was about an hour. And people were doing it!
We’ve spoken of beer before, but I don’t recall us actually discussing the appeal. Because I don’t get it at all.
I’m not a big drinker; that might be one thing. But while I drink the occasional beer, neither I or anyone I know would ever wait in line for an hour to pay $8 for a beer in a bar. Does anyone have any idea what it is about being out hearing music that suddenly makes it worth it for so many people?
(It’s even more baffling at sheds: At least at this festival you could still hear one of the three stages; why anyone who has paid $75 to hear one band volunteers to miss 2 to 3 songs for the privilege of paying $8 for a beer is even more alien to me.)
In terms of beer itself, I always thought its main appeal was the ability to get you buzzed in a socially acceptable way. In other words, no one bats an eye if you subtly drink 4 or 5 beers at a party. If, on the other hand, you keep hitting the shots or the scotch and sodas, someone’s bound to notice. I no longer drink, but when I did the taste of most golden-colored beers was a hurdle I had to overcome. Overcome I did, which is part of the reason I no longer drink, but anything but those bitter, stout-type beers were NOT worth standing in even a short line for.
As for how drinking pertains to concerts, I think concerts are one of those public, bacchanalian events that a lot of people depend on. How many people who went to see The Police this summer have gone in hopes of hearing that obscure track from Ghosts in the Machine and how many have gone just to say they were there and got wasted? Reliving one’s youth and all that jazz.
Finally, I think that concerts are always a place for the expression of sexuality, whether of the harmless flirtatious or the more intense trolling variety. A lot of people like to fuel their expressions of sexuality with beer. I hope, for their sake, the hour-long line for beer was worth it.
Come loaded. Come prepared to rock.
Yeah, I would agree that it’s just that drinking is considered so intimately part of “the concert experience.” I mean, especially if your thing isn’t pot or hallucinogens. I would say that not having drinks at a music festival is equivalent to suggesting that you’re there to listen to the music seriously. But if you’re there for fun, line up for that beer. Now, I know that makes no sense. But saying that it makes no sense is equivalent to suggesting that you’re there to listen to the music seriously. If you’re there for fun, what do you care that lining up for beer isn’t really all that fun? You’re there for fun.
And if you want to deconstruct “fun”? You must be there to listen to the music seriously. You must think you’re some kind of “music critic” or something.
If someone tells you when you get in line, “It’s going to be an hour before you get any beer,” you might blow it off. But when you get in a line you usually don’t know that. After 10 or 15 minutes you’re kind of stuck, and you don’t want to hear what your friends have to say when you get back to your seats with nothing but “the line was too long.”
Yeah, but what you’re saying there is that people line up for beer because they line up for beer. I’m trying to get at why.
No; I don’t get that. If you’re there for fun, why do something that’s not fun?
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not the very presence of beer itself. If I could wave my hand and get free beer I’d do it. If I’m in a club and can get a $3 beer in 45 seconds, I’ll sometimes do it. Missing 2-3 songs for an $8 beer is what I’m getting at, and my perplexity at the phenomenon predates my current situation in which it would be a serious breach to do so.
Surely there’s a middle ground, no? One doesn’t have to be a “listening seriously” fun-killer to want to hear the whole show, do they?
Because they’re alcoholics. Not being an alcoholic myself, I neither stand in line longer than a few minutes for a beer, nor will I pay $8 for warm piss in a plastic cup.
Now, a baseball game, I will generally have a beer or two, but that’s because baseball games are leisurely paced enough that you can slip out during a pitching change and usually get back to your seat having missed only one batter at most. Plus baseball stadiums usually have more beer stands than concert sheds do, making the lines at each shorter. (The last game I was at, seeing the St. Paul Saints play Iowa City at home about three weeks ago, had a Leinenkugel stand approximately every 10 yards behind the bleacher seats.) And the beer tends to be cheaper, more like $3 for a pint and $5 for a 22-ouncer.
So, for various reasons: beer and concerts bad, beer and baseball good.
When I’m out I like to have a drink, but I won’t go waiting on a long line for it unless it’s a point where I don’t care about seeing the performance. It’s awkward to clap for the band with a pint glass in your armpit, nevermind trying to set it anywhere.
I’ve gotten used to missing a few batters to get a better beer at ballgames, and I would chance missing the stage moves on a song I don’t like so much for one at a show, but not much further than that. If I spent a lot of money or needed to see it all, I certainly wouldn’t bother with beer.
The people waiting in that long line are less into the music than the fact they are there. Probably if you are willing to have to either hold it for over an hour or wait on another line for the bathroom, you really need that beer for a reason. Perhaps they can forget the crush of sweaty assholes, lousy sound, boring presentation, and the pancaked old farts toiling above them years after their prime for the huge ticket price and exorbitant processing fees if they take another one up the ass and pay four times what they should for near beer. Any guy who CAN get drunk on that stuff is already a doofus. But, hey, you can’t bring your own.
Maybe it’s like coffee and cigarettes, sex and cigarettes, seeing a band and cigarettes. When you are already smoking I suppose you don’t care much about taste.
48, I was typing more than I needed to I see. Say what you like about the Yankees and their staff, but I don’t see anything near the Pilsner Urquell their vendors come around with at RFK.
I was thinking that. I would have thought that ticket prices would pare the crowd down to serious fans, but I guess the reverse is true.
Absolutely. Same with sporting events. All the pricier tickets go to folks who are there to be seen with the other folks who have pricier tickets. Many of them have drinks and eat with the game as a kind of background ambiance.
Again, I would say because it’s an expected part of the experience. The issue is what fun’s supposed to be, not what fun is–it’s the image of fun that people are often having. I mean, come on now. Parties are supposed to be fun, and most of them are not. How many parties have you gone to anyway?
So Mwall, is participation on this list done for fun itself or the perception of having fun?
So far, in this thread, I’m thankful that a beer-snob discussion has not broken out. I feared people would start comparing hops and grains and microbrews.
You’ve got to be kidding, Mr. Mod. Anybody hanging out on this list probably lost out in the game of perception long ago.
Look, I’m not saying that they’re saying to themselves “I need to stand in line to get this beer so that I look like I’m having fun,” although the equivalent of that sure is what happens in those corporate Skyboxes at ballgames. I’m saying that the idea of having fun at concerts involves drinking beer, and so that’s what a lot of people do. Otherwise, they’d have to say to themselves, “Standing in this line kind of sucks.” And then they’d get out of the line. And then they’d have to say later, “Yeah, I went to the concert and it kind of sucked. I couldn’t even buy a beer.” Instead, what they will say: “Oh, the music was fucking great. And I drank a lot of beer, man.”
I can’t speak for Newport, but as you well know, Mr. Mod, ballparks started catering to beer snobs quite a few years ago.
I like beer snobs. They’re fun to hang out with. Standing in a beer line is kind of fun sometimes. I’ve found the best after show joints to hang that way, and even got a seat at a table because someone remembered me when I walked in said after show joint.
No one LIKES to pay eight bucks for a beer, but I’m not going to a show where I can’t have some beers. I kind of just did at a show at a skatepark (those kids are NUTS!), and I wound up missing most of the headliner I really wanted to see because we were drinking beer behind the park with the opening band.
Having only one beer stand is stupid. If you don’t want people that drink beer at the show, then don’t serve it. If you want their ticket money, parking money, hot dog money and whatnot money, then make sure there’s a few stands. People like beer. People like music. People like to do both at the same time. Let ’em have some fun.