Friday, May 16, 2008
It's a hefty price, but Krauss, Plant will be worth it
Ralph Berrier
Riffs, the regional music scene as heard by The Roanoke Times reporter Ralph Berrier, will appear weekly on Sundays.
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A co-worker got all worked-up about the upcoming Robert Plant and Alison Krauss concert. She was excited about seeing the terrific singers perform at the Roanoke Civic Center. Then she saw the ticket prices.
That's why she was all worked up. With prices topping out at $75 for the shaggy-haired rock legend and bluegrass chanteuse, a night at a show is too rich for my co-worker's blood.
"I hope you won't take Roanokers to task when this probably great show gets a tiny turnout," she wrote. "This is outrageous."
Moi? Take people to task? Tsk, tsk, maybe, but never to task.
In fact, I expect this show to draw pretty well, despite the high price.
The June 2 concert in Roanoke is the first show of the duo's American tour. The British leg of the tour has garnered outstanding reviews and reports that the pair is delivering Led Zeppelin classics aplenty, from "Black Dog" to "The Battle of Evermore" to "When the Levee Breaks." According to the reviews, those aren't even the highlights.
I would think the show would do well. Krauss always draws well in Roanoke when she's here with her band Union Station. And how many chances will we ever get to hear and see Plant sing Zeppelin in Roanoke? I'll tell you how many: Between zero and two, that's how many.
Still, my co-worker is right. Three and a half sawbucks is a lot to pay for one concert ticket (that doesn't even count the civic center's mystery fees; at least I don't think it does; I never know until I get the credit card receipt).
If you take a date, you'll want to make a night of it. These days, you can't leave a downtown restaurant for less than $50. If you go, expect your wallet to be lightened by at least two C-notes -- and that's just on gas! Yuk, yuk.
That's show business, as they say. Really, it's all about business. With CD sales plummeting, artists -- especially older artists -- are cashing in with concerts.
Bruce Springsteen tickets were priced as high as $97 for his recent concert at Charlottesville's John Paul Jones Arena. Top tickets for the Police concert at JPJ were $227. In New York, the Police charged $11,500 for four stage-side tickets each.
The high-dollar tickets began hitting Roanoke a little less than a decade ago, when the city struck a deal with the National Basketball Association and SFX Entertainment (later Clear Channel Entertainment) that gave us minor league basketball and many big-name concerts. Even though that deal never delivered everything that was promised, it did bring us Elton John, Cher, Rod Stewart, 3 Doors Down, Toby Keith, Incubus, Matchbox Twenty and lots of monster trucks. And expensive tickets.
For the most part, music fans pay the price. Billboard magazine reports that concerts raked in $3.9 billion last year, an 8 percent increase over 2006. I don't have all the numbers and charts in front of me, but part of that increase has to be because of higher prices.
Concert promoters aren't stupid. They can add. The folks who brought Cher here five years ago knew that they could charge $20 per ticket and sell out the civic center. They also knew that they could charge $90, fill the civic center three-quarters full and triple their profit. Like I said, they're good at math.
So, $75 is double the price Krauss fans paid to see her in Salem last year. But is it too much to see her sing with a rock legend, not to mention a crack band led by T Bone Burnett? Is this show worth that much money?
When the civic center lights dim on June 2, and Krauss draws the bow across her fiddle and Plant wails like it's 1972, we'll know.
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