Sound Check -- Geoff Carter: Concert scene in Las Vegas closes in on crisis point

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com

A few weeks ago I was asked by KVBC 105.1-FM (Hot Talk) radio personality Dennis Mitchell to make an appearance on the morning show he co-hosts with Garry O'Neal. I was a bit puzzled by the offer -- shucks, who wants to talk to little old me? But I was still flattered, and early one Friday morning I made the scene.

It was a good interview, despite my somnambulant manner, and I only said one dirty word by mistake. (Oh, excrement.) It went so well that I answered one of Dennis' questions a bit too stridently: "How would you rate the Las Vegas concertgoing experience?"

"Exceptional," I said. "We've got, for the most part, brand-spankin' new venues with excellent sound and good parking. More bands and artists are coming here than ever before. And there's always a casino nearby and all the cheap cocktails that come with it."

The problem with that snap answer -- aside from the fact that I'm paraphrasing it to flatter my conversational style -- is that it was spoken by someone who has rarely paid for concerts. If I had paid to get into half the shows I've seen, I might have given a much different answer, one informed by a series of problems that is fast coming to a crisis point. Venues are being loaded past capacity, ticket prices are soaring into an impossibly high orbit and audiences are becoming more aggressive.

The problems were perhaps most visible at the last two shows I attended: Sevendust at the House of Blues, and Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers at the Hard Rock's Joint. The Sevendust concert was a low-cost, all-ages affair that was punctuated by one fight after another; HOB's crack security staff had matters under control, tossing out one shirtless heathen after another, but the violence marred the experience nonetheless.

The Petty show was something else entirely. The room was packed to an uncomfortable mass. A couple of staffers told me, sotto voce, that an estimated 2,300 tickets had been sold -- filling The Joint well over its established limit of 1,400 people. (The official fire department figure, released later, was 1,786 people.)

Even if the staffers were wrong on the numbers, it was still an awful lot of bodies -- not so much a throng as an oppressive crush. Getting from point A to point B was a chore, even in the back of the room, where one normally goes to breathe. It is an unfortunate blemish on the Hard Rock's service record, which has been pretty exemplary up to this point.

And if I'd paid the $102 ticket price that nearly everyone else had paid, I imagine I would not have left the venue that night without wearing someone's ear out. As it was, I left quietly, grumbling to myself about growing pains.

Las Vegas is the unofficial test market for Too Much Too Soon. Just three years ago I might have had to drive to Los Angeles or Phoenix to see Tom Petty, and I certainly wouldn't be able to revel in the post-gig afterglow until 3 in the morning, when the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Woodstock 1994 suits begin to look like a quartet of extraterrestrials and my internal clock protests loudly for a cab ride home.

Today we get the entire, wonderfully twisted experience -- Ween at the House of Blues, Flaming Lips at the Hard Rock -- but there are no rules I can detect: concertgoers and promoters alike seem to treat every Vegas show as their last, and pull out all the stops.

Quick reality check: Our mayor isn't really a mobster, and this isn't the wild frontier. It never was. Ours is a culture built on hospitality and courtesy -- extended not just to visitors, but also to residents. Fans shouldn't trash the venue, and the venue shouldn't gouge the fans. It may be wishful, blue-sky thinking on my part, but I like to believe that eventually ticket prices will go down, fans will quit punching each other in the head and promoters will favor safety above sales. Maybe then I'll have something truly affirmative to say to Dennis. And I might even be fully awake when I say it.

Stereo Dynamics

The Magnetic Fields, "69 Love Songs," Merge Records

Multidisc sets are trouble. Things were bad enough when artists realized they could squeeze 70 minutes of music onto a compact disc: the result was albums such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik," with its 20 solid minutes of filler. Multidisc albums declare a lack of restraint -- Billy Corgan flaunting the monster egotism that sullies even the Smashing Pumpkins' best work.

The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" -- due Sept. 7 -- has little or nothing to do with that school of thought. If "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" is the Mall of America, the three-disc "69 Love Songs" is a big flea market, boasting everything and the kitchen sink. Band mastermind Stephin Merritt conceived of the song cycle as a 100-song staged piece; upon realizing that the show would run more than three hours, he reduced the piece in size to the next logical number, and made what amounts to a tiny masterpiece, in scale if not in size.

There are no ponderous millennial statements here, no sinister subtexts -- just a bumper crop of love songs, heartfelt and witty, performed in a palate of styles ranging from folk to neo-surf to Celtic. It's terrific listening from beginning to end, as light and breezy as Indian Summer, and Merritt's lyrical honesty is bracing and quite wonderful: While other artists weave elaborate metaphors around the old bucket o' clams, Merritt briskly declares, "A pretty girl in her underwear/if there's anything better in this world/who cares?" Who indeed? At 69 songs and three discs, it isn't nearly enough.

Get Out, Act Up

Steve Winwood is one of an elite number: an aging rocker who has held on to his dignity and made some great songs in the process. The voice of "Gimme Some Lovin' " and "Roll With It" performs at the Hard Rock Joint tonight at 8. Call 693-5066.

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