Concert Experiment Fail

I went to see Adam Lambert in concert on Friday night at a Musikfest put on by the city of Bethlehem, PA. Bethlehem is a smallish town north of Philly, a little bit east of Allentown (made famous in a Billy Joel song). Every year it holds this two week Musikfest, which is like a county fair with booths of food, drink, games, shopping and about five or six stages for musical performers. All of the performances are free except for the big main stage at the "RiverPlace," which turns out is simply a island in the middle of the river next to the town where they set up a stage and folding chairs.

While I loved Adam's performance, I was not happy at all with the venue. Had I known he was going to have another date near Philly (which was the night before in Upper Darby, 5 miles from my house, /sob), I would have waited to buy tickets there, as the temporary RiverPlace was a hassle to get to (normally its about an hours drive, but Friday night traffic to the Poconos, plus the concert traffic made the drive 2 hours), the venue is not a real good place to see the stage if your seats were back beyond the first section, not to mention the nightmare of parking (or I should really say, getting back to my car after the concert - that took longer than Adam's concert). But the Musikfest tickets went on sale a month or so before the Tower Theater performance was announced, so I thought it was my only chance to see him (and money is tight enough that I couldn't justify two concerts in two nights). I have to wonder if that was intended, in order to up the attendance at Musikfest, since it was a much larger venue (about 6,500 seats, plus lawn seating, compared to the Tower Theater at about 2,500 seats).

And waiting nearly an hour after opening act Orianthi for his less than a hour performance was annoying as well. I don't know who's fault that was. The stage appeared to have been done in 20 minutes, so why was there a delay? The delay also caused concerns getting back to our car, since we had to park way off site and take the shuttle bus to the festival grounds, which were supposed to stop at 11:30 p.m. (but obviously kept going after midnight to get everyone back to the parking areas). I think Adam had to cut his encore to just one song because of the bus schedule, since I understand at other concerts he did two songs.

My only other quibble was with the whole camera thing. I've been going to concerts for a few decades now, so I know that in general one can't bring in cameras. Obviously some of that had changed to some extent with phones having cameras, I haven't heard of any place that keeps one from bringing your phone into the concert, even if it has a camera in it, but I haven't gone to a whole lot of concerts in the past couple of years (kids will do that).

With Musikfest, I thought seriously about bringing my small camcorder and my sister-in-law did bring her camera, which was a little bit larger than a phone, with a protruding lens (i.e. it doesn't easily slip inside a pocket, but its not a 'professional' type camera either). I tried to find information as to whether such was allowed at the Musikfest concert, since the rest of the festival was free, had a lot of music, games, other entertainment for families, who one would expect would naturally bring their camera. But I couldn't find any info.

In the end, I didn't bring my camcorder, which I guess was a good thing. We're in line to get into the venue when we see the sign that says "no cameras". Its now 6:40 (the website said the concert was to start at 6:45 - although it actually was an hour later) and since we had parked a long ways a way and taken the shuttle bus, we had no easy way back to the car. Neither of us had pockets, so I did a little trick with my purse and got the camera in (lets just say I've had a little bit of experience with that). Of course, inside the venue, we see that 90% of the people have camera phones and most aren't even bothering trying to hide them. So why is there any restriction at all on cameras, if everyone has a camera phone these days? Turns out, we couldn't even get any decent pictures because of our seats.

But despite all that, I loved Adam's show. His voice was absolutely wonderful and he puts on a pretty good show (at least what I could see of it). He was beautiful on Soaked and I liked the acoustic change up for Aftermath. I was sorry to miss out on Whole Lotta Love, but 20th Century Boy was pretty good instead. I'll definitely plan to see him again, but next time in a real theater.