And because of that, and despite me not really being a Helmet fan just because I know the one song everybody else does, I decided to pay money to go to a concert to see the band just for that song. It may not be efficient, but if I love the song enough, I have decided it's worth spending the money to buy an overpriced beer, stand behind people blocking the view of the stage, and wading through song after unknown song just to hear the one that you've been rocking out to since your twenties. I didn't buy a ticket to the Dakota when Cowboy Junkies were in town. "Sweet Jane" may be, IMHO, The Second-Best Cover Of All-Time, but the ticket was just too expensive when I might know only one other song that I have heard of from them.
But Helmet? The ticket price was more manageable -- at least I thought. I was going to go, but I really did not want to pay full-price for it. So, once I remembered that the Helmet concert was last/Monday night at the Varsity -- I've been busy with work -- I waited and checked (when I could, or when I remembered) on scalper sites SeatGeek and Stubhub. For some reason Stubhub was more expensive than face value and some tickets on SeatGeek were below. But I also checked the firsthand website selling tickets to the concert and there were still tickets available. I figured that so long as it's not sold out, people selling secondhand have to offer them for cheaper than full price, and that is where I really want to strike.
I was going to set a drop-dead date for Sunday. If I didn't find a below-face ticket by then, I will just go to the firsthand website and buy there. But then I got busy thinking about packing up the house for when my parents come home. I decided that if I was going to spend any money on Sunday, it would be cash only. So when decided that Sunday was a no-credit card day, I totally forgot about Helmet. And so by the time I paid for Chipotle that afternoon and a carrot cake and tea at Caffetto that night, I had committed myself to only purchasing through paper currency, and that meant not using my credit card to buy a ticket to the show online once I remembered the concert.
But, dammit, I couldn't help myself. If I waited until the next day, one where I would permit myself to go back to using credit cards, the place might be sold out. So just before I went to bed, I checked Ticketmaster to see if the price of the ticket I saw when I was checking the same site a few hours before at Caffetto. But the damn page just stalled out, and it gave me an error code. Oh, shit. Did they just sell out the show? Or are they pulling all unsold tickets?
Well, as peeved as I was at myself with hesitating and losing, I decided then that if the ticket was above the price I last saw it as, which was a bit more than $41, I will skip seeing the band. I tried again the next morning. This time there were tickets available, but it was for $48. And I saw the phrase "Day of Show" -- ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, so that's (probably) why I got that error code when I checked for tickets overnight. They just needed to adjust its price higher.
And yet that made me dig my heels in more over not paying more for a ticket than I saw it as. Never mind that I kind of screwed up. Maybe people were still selling tickets they can't use. So I waited through yesterday/Monday at work ... well, it was easy to wait because I got so wrapped up in all the crap that came at me at work that I totally forgot. And when I got home, determined I was going to go to the concert, I was equally determined to eat Jimmy John's first. So I got Jimmy John's, went home, ate, relieved myself, then got back in the car ... all the while forgetting to check SeatGeek or Stubhub.
I remembered I hadn't done so while I was driving. Shit. I had to go to a gas station and park while I got out my phone and looked at the scalper sites. I saw one on SeatGeek going for $21. Ah, so thinking there would be a dirt cheap last-minute ticket from someone whose friend cancelled did work after all! And I tried to buy it, but as I progressed through the pages, I kept getting an error message, so when I went back, the ticket was gone. Goddammit. I might have had time to buy the ticket if I looked through SeatGeek while eating my sandwich, but I didn't, fuck me.
But I was still on the road, and I wanted to end a bad day at work with Helmet, dammit. My only thought, then, was to go there and see if there were tickets still available. Thank goodness the Varsity is not one of those places that has a fake box office, where the person behind the window tells you go to the app instead (that was the case, or at least I think, at the soccer park for St. Louis City). Indeed, Helmet tickets were available -- and for $37.50. That $48 I saw that morning included a convenience fee of $13. So, all in all, buying the ticket the old-fashioned way was cheaper than buying online, at least in this case. And I still remember the hell of not getting that Frozen Four ticket last year, so maybe I wouldn't've gotten that $21 ticket after all.
And you know what? I liked the Helmet concert, even the other songs I've never heard.
Have I ever posted a video of "Unsung?" Well, even if I have, here it is, the second version of the video with the remastered, "known" version of the song remastered once they signed a major-label deal:
No comments:
Post a Comment