Music has the power to move us. It can speak to our minds and hearts and give us the boost we need to finally clean up our homes or confess our feelings to that special someone. It can also join us in our sorrow and help us process all the overwhelming emotions that catch us off guard on a random rainy Wednesday.
The effects tend to be even stronger during live shows, when the artists fuel the crowd with their energy. Or negligible if they botch it.
A few days ago, Reddit user Pinheadbrigade asked everyone to share the worst concert they’ve been to and what made them so terrible, and people did not hold back. Their stories of drunk bands and failing sound systems highlight how memorable these disappointments truly are.
#1
Coldplay concert. I just went with a girl from work, and the f*****g camera guy just zoomed into us. I just wanted a chill moment and now my wife left me ...
Image credits: Abrical
#2
James Brown was the headliner one night at a festival in the early 2000s.
He was wasted.
Kept singing the same lines over and over.
He introduced the band at least 5 times.
He just laid down on the stage and didn’t sing for a while.
Terrible concert, funny memories.
Image credits: zack_bauer123
#3
I love to tell this one:
Went to see Lightning Hopkins out in the field on a flatbed trailer outside of Fort Worth in 1971. He was so drunk he played three songs, and two of them were the same song.
Image credits: LayneLowe
#4
Oasis early 2000s. They clearly hated each other, played 6 songs, left the stage after 40min.
Edited for typos and also, wow, so many of us out there lol.
Image credits: CariocaInLA
#5
Sir Mix A Lot. The opening act warned us it was going to be terrible, and they were right.
Image credits: Easy_Square_3717
#6
Bob Dylan in 2014 :( I love him but unfortunately he sounded like Cookie Monster. Can’t imagine it’s improved.
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#7
Six Pence None The Richer in nineties in Austin- lead singer had a melt down and ran off stage during ‘kiss me’ … 😒.
Image credits: court_n2000
#8
The Brian Jonestown M******e… holy s**t what a f*****g epic disaster that was. It was like the worst train wreck you’ve never been able to look away from. At one point his whole band left the stage and he started playing all their instruments and saying he could play better than any of them. Rolling a joint on stage, going up to the bar and getting liquor to make his own drink on stage too. It was 3 hours of WHAT THE F**K AM I DOING HERE… oh and it was a Monday night!
Image credits: Flandersar
#9
Aerosmith in 2014ish.
Steven Tyler kept forgetting the words and called our city like 5 different (and all wrong) names during the event.
Image credits: nutria_twiga
#10
Marylin Manson. Was so dr*gged out he was staggering all over the stage, butchering his own lyrics, and sometimes just sat on stage and made weird guttural noises into the mic. Edited to add: Since many have asked I had myself a quick google of when they were in town. I was at the show in 2012. It was the twins of evil tour.
Image credits: WitheringW0nder
#11
Aging myself but sometime in the early 90s I was a huge Guns N' Roses fan and they were touring with Metallica. I ditched a prom to go in full "glam" with my date there instead and GNR was very late to set. When they came out, Axel threw a fit and it ended very quickly. Metallica on the other hand KILLED it, probably to make it up to fans. I had been indifferent to Metallica before but became a huge fan afterwards. I still can't believe the adult temper tantrum that thousands of fans witnessed that night by a musician they paid a lot of money for.
Image credits: Content_Mountain5579
#12
Went to a festival concert put on by our rock station in the late 90s. Most of the concert was great with many of the acts being awesome (Collective Soul and Lenny Kravitz were awesome). One of the acts that day was Smash Mouth. Holy c**p they were terrible. I think the audience was generally in shock at how awful they sounded live vs their albums.
Image credits: Supermac34
#13
They weren’t the headliner but 30 Seconds to Mars was awful to the point where they were nearly booed off the stage. They were the act leading up to Linkin Park and all I remember was their singer kept yapping on and on instead of playing a song. At one point he wanted the crowd to cheer louder before they started their next song and he was either ignored or was booed. Not sure what happened if he was drunk or on d***s or something but this was the only bad performance I’ve been seen by a professional band.
Image credits: maceman10006
#14
Rhianna, loved her up until the concert. Wish I never went! She lip synched the whole entire time. We were so upset we went to an entire pre-recorded concert.
Image credits: Bamboozle_330
#15
Joe Cocker. He was so drunk he could barely perform and threw up on stage in the middle of a song.
Image credits: Zoraji
#16
Modest mouse. They were wasted. Isaac Brock would flub the lyrics every other song and was basically screaming into the mic.
Image credits: FunctionBuilt
#17
I once saw a triple feature: Cheap Trick, Joan Jett, and Heart.
By God Cheap Trick were bad and their audio mix was even worse. Combine that with 70 year old guys singing about banging young ladies, it just wasn't the vibe for the evening.
Joan Jett was quite good and Heart was phenomenal. Heart ended up bringing out John Bonham's son Jason to play drums for the last half hour of their set so they could do Led Zeppelin covers. I don't think Robert Plant's vocal intensity has held up over the years, but Ann Wilson's voice is so good it was like or better than listening to Plant in his prime.
Image credits: obi-jawn-kenblomi
#18
(ETA: as I was cleaning my garage I found the ticket to this concert! July 15, 1996. Freeman coliseum.)
Oddly, it was the best and worst. It was 97 or 98, White Zombie opened for Pantera, the freeman coliseum(? Oi, almost 30 years). This was just after Phil had ODed. Anyway, white zombie was terrible, the sound, the vocals all sucked but the stage show was cool. It was like a pirate ship if memory serves. A whole lot of props and lighting.
Then, Pantera came on. A wall of speakers and white lights. Thats it. The sound the vocals they were better live than any cd I had heard. They blew me away.
I was a huge white zombie fan so it was a big let down for me.
(ETA: as I was cleaning my garage I found the ticket to this concert!).
#19
My Elementary Band School Concert. I was in the band, we sucked.
Image credits: Constant_Topic_1040
#20
Lauryn Hill the night of Trump’s first election win. Miseducation was/is one of my top 5 favourite albums of all time, and the way she sang every song was so different from the album. It was awful. And she kept gesturing angrily to someone off stage…audio tech? I don’t know but it was super uncomfortable. Top that with the audience constantly checking their phones for election results, it was a pretty s****y night.
Image credits: louiemay99
#21
The worst act I've seen live is Buckcherry. Their radio length songs were what I enjoyed, but their live version of songs just ran on to the point of "this song should have ended 5 minutes ago.".
Every other artist that I've seen live has been good to great.
Image credits: sasksasquatch
#22
Jerry Lee Lewis. 3 hours late, so drunk he could barely stay on the piano bench. Played 3 songs, slurred his way through ‘em, then got up and walked off stage.
#23
I went to see Soulja Boy a couple years back because it was 2 tickets for $15 each (so $30 total) and I expected it to be funny.
Soulja himself was fine as were the second and third openers (some local no name rappers). The first opener however... I'm just gonna copy-paste what I wrote at the time, actually
> I've seen over 1200 artists live, and few stuck out as much as this for high levels of SUCK.
> I saw a BOGO deal for a Soulja Boy concert which made it 2 tickets for ~$30 and hopped on it. The Soulja Boy part was what you'd expect, the openers were not publicly listed before the show, so imagine my shock when the first performers I see on stage aren't even human, but instead two holograms of NFT apes. When they came on, they moved in the same looping GIF for the next 45ish minutes and bass-heavy club mixes of top 40 songs from this millennium blared. It was soulless, poorly mixed, poorly sequenced and just plain BAD. Once the t*****e was over and the GIFs were no longer looping, I actually started screaming "THANK GOD! That was horrible!" and variations repeatedly.
> Even a bad band on stage whom I think is truly awful has a certain charm to it almost always, like just seeing your fellow man get up on stage and blare out their soul through their songs is an admirable feat to me. There's a clear human element I can usually feel to a sincere performance even if the music isn't for me. So I've seen bands play that were probably less technically proficient than those stupid NFT monkeys but none filled me with such a sense of disdain and woe.
Image credits: rayword45
#24
Oasis. Very early 2000s.
Stood there and joylessly banged out their songs, barely spoke except to heckle the audience for being too excited (jumping, iirc...but maybe someone also tried to crowd surf?)..."It's a f*****g rock show, not a circus!"
Travis opened for them and came with 10x more energy. It was all downhill from there. Lots left during the encore, us included. We all left as Travis fans.
Image credits: HomeboyGR
#25
My old band Set on Edge. I'm not kidding. We replaced Sixpence None the Richer at the very last minute because their whole band caught pneumonia, and the show was outside (well, in an enormous barn - basically outside) in late October near Chicago so it was COLDCOLDCOLD and there were 3000+ kids there and we COULD NOT KEEP OUR INSTRUMENTS IN TUNE (or feel our fingers) for the whole set. I have video proof. We stepped off stage - four adults - and cried. Wow, that was bad!
Image credits: SaintLewisMusic73
#26
DJ KHALED. If I wanted to watch a guy sweat 5litres in 30 minutes I’d just watch p**nhub.
Image credits: james-HIMself
#27
I saw Deep Purple once and the singer didnt realize his mic was off for half the set.
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#28
Alien Ant Farm. They played Smooth Criminal about 4 times and the entire show was just awful.
Image credits: dtrain85
#29
Mudvayve (opened for Rob Zombie & Ozzy). I swear all four members were playing four different songs. Nothing sounded together. Brutally bad.
#30
Metallica/Guns N' Roses (plus Faith No More) in Montreal's Olympic Stadium in August 1992, the concert where James Hetfield got burned by pyrotechnics and then Axl Rose had laryngitis and quit after just six songs, leading to a small riot.
I was only 17 and had a long commute home so I left before things got too rowdy.
#31
Bob Dylan. he played all his hits in big band style. awful.
#32
Meatloaf followed by counting crows.
#33
Looong time ago, in 1984, went to see Elton John. The man was obviously not happy to be there or to perform. Absolutely no interaction with the crowd, came on stage, performed his songs and went off. No greetings, no eying the crowd, no smiles even. Miserable as hell. No charisma or even acknowledgement at all. May as well have listened to him at home.
#34
I’ve worked in a concert venue for the past 20 ish years and have seen almost everyone at least once. Black eyed peas were atrocious, like the truck with their auto tune got lost on the way. Tone deaf.
Image credits: SousVideAndSmoke
#35
Someone got me lil xan tickets for my birthday and it was the worst thing ever.
Image credits: 0ldrazzledazzle
#36
Honestly the worst show I ever saw was Sublime. It was their last show. The singer was an absolute high mess. He overdosed the following day or something. .
Image credits: shuasensei
#37
2009 American idol runner up tour at Wolf trap. I won tickets and thought "what the hell?"
I wonder if any of them remember me, I was the only one there.
Image credits: Highfivebuddha
#38
I was at that Jane’s A*******n show in Boston where dude got so drunk he attempted to fight the band and they broke up.
Perry Ferrell sounded like a*s the whole night and it was more unpleasant than literal noise shows I’ve gone too.
#39
Cake. The first 2/3 of the show was weather delayed and they only had an hour left once the thunder stopped. not their fault obviously. But instead of playing that entire remaining hour, McCrea spent half the time doing some dumb bit about a bonzai tree with the audience. Like if this is part of your act normally, fine. But have just a tiny bit of situational awareness.
#40
I am currently at an Alex G concert with my daughter and this dude cannot sing for S**T. He sounds like f*****g Kermit the frog singing at the end of the Muppet Christmas Carol. .
#41
Milli Vanilli….i was like 8 but was wondering they could barely speak English but their singing was perfect English.
#42
I saw the Goo Goo Dolls a few years back. They were kinda old and didn't have great energy but the show was fine.
Then, I guess one of the other band members wanted HIS turn to sing. I called him Pink Hair Guy. Pink Hair Guy sang like he smoked two packs a day. The crowd hated him. Nothing ever sucked the buzz of concert excitement out of me faster than Pink Hair Guy. They let HIM sing their most popular song, Iris. I left mid song.
#43
Probably Smashing Pumpkins in the late 90’s. They weren’t bad, but probably the worst of the ones I have seen. Pearl Jam in 95 was the best for me and I enjoyed Bon Jovi in 93 too even though I had to be dragged there.
#44
Journey. It was in the late 2000’s when they put out a few new albums. They only played the new stuff the entire show, and broke out their hits during the encore. It was boring, they weren’t engaging - and it was like 95* and a thunderstorm was brewing. All in all pretty miserable experience.
#45
I think her singing has improved since then, but the summer I Kissed A Girl was super popular, Katy Perry performed at Warped Tour. I was working at the venue at the time and heard it, but couldn’t see it. Her voice was AWFUL. I saw her perform on TRL later and it was just as bad.
#46
Kid Rock opening for Metallica. Snoresville.
#47
Weezer, about 2008 or 2009!? NYC. They sucked a*s so bad and one of their encores was a repeated song. So f****n lame.
#48
Whitney Houston near the end.
Still glad to have seen her live, see her as an icon, but holy s**t "Here's my brother to sing for a while" while she went off stage for a bump was not what I paid for.
How to insult even your rusted on fans who are wanting to see you succeed.
#49
At a festival. Die antword. Sounded like babies on fire.
#50
MF DOOM and Mos Def
Show was supposed to start at 8PM, the local opener played, Mos Def didn’t make it across the border, DOOM didn’t show up until 1AM, too bad we had already left half an hour earlier since we had been standing around listening to a DJ for 4 hours at that point.
Since DOOM did eventually show up and play we didn’t get a refund.
The worst.
#51
Queens of the Stone Age, Wisconsin, somewhere around 2019
Outdoor at a soccer field, fine, but came out drunk, proceeded to get worse, talking about partying there decades ago, walked off the stage after a relatively short show, everyone thought encore?
Lights on, crew breaking down set, game over.
Just Meh and kinda crappy experience.
#52
Nelly. Almost two hours late. Came out for all of like 30 minutes once he DID show up. Barely really did his songs just did a lot of ad libbing over the backing track. There was also speculation after that it wasn’t actually him up there.
#53
Got dragged to a high school basketball gymnasium to watch Dwight Yoakam. Dwight wasn’t bad, it was the sound. Cranked up Dwight Yoakam inside a gym is what I’m pretty sure the CIA used to get Al Quaeda terrorists to talk.
#54
Okay it was only half bad. Saw Counting Crows and MatchBox Twenty. Counting Crows were first up and my god not good at all. Also they refused to do Mr. Jones. Matchbox Twenty made up for it though. Rob Thomas is the real deal live.
#55
Bad in a good way, maybe? Saw Weird Al with my step dad for a stool performance. He told the crowd that he’d found a list of all his songs ranked worst to best, and thought he’d go with the worst ones. Only did a bit of his big hits as a polka at the end. It was both nothing like the previous concert I’d been to of his (went completely all out, full costume changes to reenact the music videos, etc..) when I was little, and also weirdly on brand for him. .
#56
Was at one of Elliot Smiths last shows. Started and stopped several songs, and kept saying he couldn’t feel his hands.
A*******n sucks.
#57
Wiz Khalifa. It was free, and I found out why.
#58
Kanye in the early 2000s. He was booked for a local festival here in NC (given this is when he was blowing up after college dropout and booked the gig before it dropped). But he showed up almost 2 hours late and then once on stage he stopped the show several times to yell at the lighting guy. I left after the 2nd time he stopped the show. It was the worst concert experience by far I’ve ever endured.
Close 2nd - Lil Wayne was supposed to do a small show in our same town and he sold a bunch of tickets came in his bus, sat back stage, had a bunch of small time rappers perform as well as anti d**g speakers and he never came out - took everyone’s money and left. That also sucked. F both of them.
#59
Jack White, shockingly enough. Boring as hell, backing band was a*s, and he didn't say a single word to the crowd. The guy's an absolute rock legend, but when I saw him on stage, there was zero magic. Really sad.
#60
Ryan Adams just a few months ago. The music was great but there was maybe an hour of that in a three hour show. Incredibly annoying guy, very obvious why he got cancelled.
#61
Lana Del Rey in 2014. Absolutely awful performer. And yet, such a feral crowd, just shoving and fighting to get to the front. For what, I have no idea.
#62
Marc Anthony. Dude seemed high af .
#63
We went to a Shawn Colvin (she sings Sunny Came Home) show after a 2 year delay due to Covid and she didn't play Sunny Came Home, her only hit. She ended the show and people just stood there. .
#64
I'll preface this by saying it was a corporate party and not a concert just for fans, but I was unimpressed by Dua Lipa. The stage was only her and her dancers, not sure where the actual instrumentalists were or if it was totally pre-recorded.
#65
Meatloaf at Rocktales and Cocktails in Vegas in 2013.
His backup singer sang most of the songs. He just huffed and puffed his way across the stage and showed photos on a big screen.
When he did sing, he hit maybe 20% of the notes.
It was sad. I've never been a huge fan, but he embarrassed himself. Only die hard fans "liked" it, and their reviews even made excuse after excuse or qualified their positive reviews with "for a guy his age".
#66
Hall and Oates for sure. They were horrible and I was so looking forward to them.
Lauryn Hill too. She sang like she just DGAF anymore. That was the only concert where I walked out mid show.
#67
Neutral Milk Hotel.
A band I really enjoy and never imagined I'd get to see live. Maybe my expectations were high, but there was a weird mood in the air and it seemed like they didn't want to be there and maybe just needed the money.
#68
Afroman about 8 years ago.. s****y small town dive bar.. he played “because I got high” as the first song, and forgot half the lyrics.. I think 50% of the 30 person crowd left right after that song.
#69
Haha I actually just went to see Creed on their reunion tour like 3 weeks ago. Let me just say that the tickets were free and it was a team building activity for work and I’m not a fan at all. I had super low expectations and was really just going for a laugh.
I made the poor decision to get blazed as f**k before the show and while in my past experiences d***s usually accentuate and enhance your enjoyment of music, in this case it made a laughable concert even worse. Scott Stapp has to be one of the most talentless f*****g frontmen in all of rock music. If one of their songs started out with a half way enjoyable groove or riff, as soon as Scott opened his mouth that song absolutely died right then and there. He dressed like a 50 year old reject from the Black Parade. At one point he told us he was going to ‘take us on a journey through the human experience’. Completely unironically. The drummer was so vanilla it was painful. Tremoni’s guitar tone was so f*****g obnoxious it was like sledgehammer of tedium. Their multimedia show that played on the screen behind them looked like the media player effects that came with windows 2000.
Good on them for selling out arenas on the back of their 30 year old terrible music and Scott looks like he’s in pretty good shape now despite his troubled past, but man did they suck.
#70
Third eye blind, who knew they have 3 hours of songs i dont wanna hear.
#71
The group Boston. Their equipment wasn't working right and the microphones made everything unintelligible. You couldn't even understand "More Than a Feeling".
#72
Meatloaf in Vegas in 2014. I s**t you not that the interlude portion of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” was about 15 minutes of nonsense—complete aural jibberish. My mom, who had been a pretty big Meatloaf fan to that point, at one point leaned over to ask if I thought we were being pranked. .
#73
It was 100% Danzig.
#74
JOJI. I think that guy just has too much anxiety to do live shows. That, combined with him half-way pandering to people who wanted Filthy Frank, made for a very weird and confusing show. He locked in for Slow Dancing in the Dark and it was honestly incredible. The rest of his show involved him leaving that stage and it playing a sound of somebody pissing for four minutes, him playing Smash Brothers with one of his openers (who did terrible adlibs for JOJI during the show), and other really cringe jokes and segments. Kenny Beats did a DJ set before him that was really great though, I was stoked for that.
#75
I have four that stand out:
Puddle of Mudd - Sounded fine, but had absolutely zero energy on stage. Literally no one moved from their initial spot.
Busta Rhymes - Showed up late, then expected the crowd to sing his songs for him
Marshall Tucker Band - Lead singer needed to retire like ten years before the concert. Just did not remotely sound even decent.
Counting Crows - I agree with him politically but dude, I paid (granted they were an opener) to hear you sing your songs, not to go on long rants over your music.
#76
Ghost face killah with del the funky homosapien and badbadnotgood. Ghostface never showed up. The worst part was they kept announcing things like "he's still coming" and "he'll be here in 30 minutes!" Might not have been del, but the other two were on the bill for sure. Bbng at least played their original stuff to fill the time.
#77
Steve Winwood. First, his opening act was his daughter - she just plain old sucks. He basically played two songs in an endless jam session for two hours. It was like he was practicing in his garage. Terrible.
#78
Avril Lavigne. She just was kind of unenthusiastic and it was boring to watch. Doesn't have great stage presence.
#79
This thing at the Royal Albert Hall that was meant to be an anniversary show for a big countercultural "happening"-type thing that had packed the place out decades ago. The organizer was one of those artsy eccentrics who didn't really live in everyone else's world, and it had been spottily promoted... so we got there, and there were maybe 200 people there, if that. In the Royal Albert Hall.
It was a mix of spoken word and music, and one of the spoken word guys was someone who clearly used to be an engaging performer but had been ravaged by life's pleasures over time and was sloshed... everyone else performed for ten or twenty minutes, apart from Pete Townshend who got a longer set at the end, but this chap mumbled on for a good half an hour, and by the end of it I wanted to pull my own head off.
A very strange day.
#80
Ray Lamontagne.
My ex dragged me to see him. Dude has a nice voice, but absolutely no stage presence. I was so bored, I started falling asleep in the grass (outdoor concert).
#81
Journey tribute band…named Arrival. They forgot the lyrics to Don’t Stop Believing.
#82
Morrisey, with F*****G Interpol as the opener. Portland, 2018.
I had earplugs pushed in so far that my fingers touched.
I’ve had tinnitus ever since.
If we have smoking ordinances, I don’t know why we don’t have decibel ordinances.
#83
I saw The Fratellis when they were in NYC a few years ago, and for some reason they made the bizarre decision to play almost all of their (uptempo, energetic rock) music as slowed-down acoustic covers. Jon Fratelli also kept speaking in a southern twang, which was wild because I kept thinking "Dude, I know you're Scottish".
Thankfully the one and only song I remember being played normally was their closer/most famous song, Chelsea Dagger.
#84
I went to a Roger Waters concert with my dad a few years ago. Music was alright, but god he's insufferable .
#85
I’m gonna get downvoted but Miley Cyrus sucked. You could just tell she didn’t want to be there.
#86
Lady Antebellum. Holy s**t that was a snore fest.
#87
Honestly, so hard to say this. But Peaches. I've seen her multiple times but this was in LA. I literally had to push people's phones out of my face and was met with casual "what the f**k, I'm filming for my ig" most people left before the encode. She was great. The crowd was classic LA dogwater people only there for one song for their tiktok or Instagram. Peaches was clearly disappointed in the crowd too which made the performance worse as well.
#88
Dave Matthews c. 2005. Sooo boring. Every song was like a 20 minute s****y jam session with a fiddle. It was awful. I fell asleep.
#89
Years ago I went to see an avenged sevenfold concert that honestly had on paper a very stacked lineup. Black veil brides were the openers which I honestly weren’t a fan of prior, but god they sounded exactly like their recording. Really impressive. Next up… asking Alexandria. I was very excited for them. Holy f**k they were BAD. The lead singer was plastered drunk. Asked a couple times if we wanted him to take his d**k out which got either a resounding no or an awkward silence. They ended up getting rid of the singer last I heard. Hollywood undead went up next and they were stunningly good. Avenged sevenfold was amazing and honestly put on a very good production.
#90
Went to see Snoop Dogg in early 2000s in Dallas
He was an hour late then brought iut 3LW and said "listen to my bitches rap"
And it became a 3Lw concert
Everyone left and got their money back.
#91
Five Finger Death Punch. Holy s**t they were bad.
#92
Drake in 2012. My girlfriend wanted to go. He never did a whole song and played on his phone the whole time. Almost got in a fight because I accidentally stepped on some guys shoe.
#93
Bob Dylan. Awful, awful performer. Elvis Costello was his opener and he was excellent, but Bob sucked so much that we left early.
#94
Taking Back Sunday. It was almost as if it was a parody of the actual band.
