San Diego Bypass?
Why do so many major concert tours skip San Diego? The article at left cites some reasons. Are you willing (and able to afford) to leave town to catch your favorite acts live? If so, how often? Tell us in the Comments section below.
Get out of town, all you Steely Dan and Foo Fighters fans! If you want to catch a show on either band’s respective upcoming tours, you’ll have to do some traveling. Neither is scheduled to come here.
Steely Dan’s Shuffle Diplomacy Twenty Eleven Tour will begin July 2 in Seattle and conclude Sept. 28 in Boston. Barring any additional shows being announced, the tour’s only three SoCal tour stops are: the Santa Barbara Bowl, July 6; and Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre, July 8 and 9. After that, Steely Dan’s next show is July 12 in… Tulsa.
What does Oklahoma have that San Diego doesn’t? In this case, two Steely Dan dates (the band is also playing July 13 in the lovely Oklahoma community of Thackerville, which is enough to give San Diego music fans an inferiority complex).
Foo Fighters, meanwhile, just announced that the band has teamed up with BlackBerry to launch a Garage Tour contest that, in April, will see the band perform eight concerts in the garages of eight fans in seven U.S. cities and one Canadian city. (The choice of garages is prompted by the fact the Foo Fighters’ new album, “Wasting Light,” was recorded in head Foo Dave Grohl’s garage in Los Angeles.)
The Garage Tour’s closest date to San Diego? Denver.
Alas, Steely Dan and Foo Fighters are not the only acts to bypass San Diego, just the latest. Others range from U2, Arcade Fire and Janet Jackson to Kenny Chesney and the co-headlining concert treks by by Rihanna and Cee-Lo Green and Rod Stewart and Stevie Nicks.
So, why do so many tours skip San Diego? We last explored this issue in depth in late 2009, a year that saw everyone from U2, Paul McCartney and the reunited Phish to Miley Cyrus and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band opt to skip San Diego on their tours.
U2 and Bon Jovi both opted to play extra dates closer to Los Angeles in 2009, rather than make the long, arduous trek down here. The reason?
“People in San Diego, for the most part, attend concerts more like a market that is not a Top 20 market,” veteran concert promoter Bill Silva told us at the time. (San Diego is, in fact, the 17th largest market in the nation, we just don’t act like it when it comes to concerts.)
Silva’s comments were echoed in that same 2009 article by Nick Masters, who was then the chairman of Live Nation Southern California. Live Nation, which owns Chula Vista’s Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre among its many venues nationwide and beyond, is the world’s largest concert and live event promoter.
“Quite honestly, San Diego has a ‘B-market’ status in the concert industry because it sits so close to Los Angeles,” Masters told us in late 2009.
“I think a lot of bands and fans want it to be that large market, but I don’t think it is. It’s a smaller market.”
Make that smaller in terms of both population and venues. This factor was stressed to us by John Wojas, the vice president of AEG Live San Diego, which exclusively books shows at such area venues as Valley View Casino Center (formerly the San Diego Sports Arena) and Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay.
“It comes down to money,” Wojas said. “And that’s usually related to the size of the venue, which at the Honda Center in Anaheim is 18,900 and at the Sports Arena here is 13,000.
“So, if the average ticket price for an act is, say, $80 — and there are 6,000 more seats at the Honda Center than here — that would be almost half a million dollars more that the act would leave on the table to play here instead of in Anaheim.”
Now, as then, it appears that the bottom line is the bottom line. That said, it seems safe to assume most San Diego residents prefer living here over Orange County or Los Angeles. But as yet another notable concert tour bypasses us yet again, it’s hard not to feel frustrated.
Are we not worthy? Um, no, apparently we aren’t.
