2020/8/21 Pigeons Playing Ping Pong Drive-In @ Citizen’s Bank Park, Philadelphia, PA
I miss live concerts and I’m all in on supporting the bands and behind the scene players that make live events happen. To those of you who got creative and busted your asses to make something happen, thank you. That being said, this was my first and last drive-in show. I was never really sold on the idea and I’ll start by saying that I made every effort possible to give this format a chance of success. I rented a pickup truck and bought a 100-watt portable PA speaker from Best Buy, what more could I have done to make this work???
The singular most important thing {to me} at a concert is concert sound, a massive soundscape that puts the music front and center of the experience. It is, after all, a concert. Well, with no sound, you can hardly call these drive-in experiences concerts. A fun tailgate, to be sure, and to the letter of the definition — a musical performance given in public — I begrudingly admit that it qualifies. But if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Same concept.
So I’m just going to say it. The sound sucked. To be fair, it didn’t even suck. There was none. The only sound to be heard was by tuning in to your FM dial and listening on your car speakers. I guess if you sat in the front seat with the doors closed — I of course tried this — you could approximate pretty good sound, but that’s not exactly my idea of a good time. When you left your car, all you had were the diluted soundwaves that escaped the open doors. So as alluded to earlier, I rented a pickup with a bed big enough for four grown dudes to hang and bought the best portable PA I could find. It wasn’t even close to enough and that certainly wasn’t for a lack of trying. What’s more, even at a distance of three hundred feet or more, there was total cacophony as the live drums were in complete disharmony with the slightly delayed FM signal. What. A. Disaster. I even attempted the Umphrey’s McGee Headphones & Snowcones route, but that, too, proved impossible as there was no way to get an FM signal to my headphones. An app you say … not possible. Those transmit internet signals and what was required was a true FM broadcast.
Another thing struck me as so odd that I still can’t wrap my head around it. The pickup parked next to us had its doors closed, cab closed, windows up, stereo off, while its occupants sat in the bed. What the actual fuck were they doing? I was inches from a 100W PA that I could barely hear and they were content to ride the coattails of our insufficient sound … did they know how this thing was supposed to work?!?
So where were we parked? Did location matter? Okay, as I said I wasn’t sold on the idea, especially not at the price point, so I didn’t actually buy tickets until a $99 all in offer came in the days leading up to the show. Thus, my financial exposure was limited but that put our spot in the back. I’m an up front kind of guy but what’s the difference I thought? With the only sound coming from our FM dial, there would be none that I could see. But curiosity got the best of me and I took a walk to see if being closer mattered. It didn’t. Truth be told, it was worse as the discord from the live drums and FM feed was so distracting the closer you got that it became unbearable and I quickly retreated. As I see it, the only way this would have worked is if the parking lot had been filled with line arrays of speaker stacks placed at strategic intervals, filling the vast space with concert sound. I inherently understand the cost of doing so would neutralize any profit from the event which probably had razor thin margins to begin with, but at one point I actually hugged the PA I bought and it still wasn’t close to enough.
What about security? Were you allowed out of your car? Cars were parked in a checkerboard pattern so no vehicle had a neighbor in front, behind, right or left. We were free to stand or dance next to our vehicle but anyone with a chair outside their car was reprimanded. Cops rode around on bicycles but didn’t seem to be giving anyone a hard time other than those trying to use chairs. The problem was, if you left your vehicle, you left the best sound behind. If you sat in your car, then sound be damned, you might as well be at a traffic light. I really wanted to like this. Surely you don’t think I spent seven hours plus the time and cost of a rental truck and a trip to Best Buy thinking the night would fall flat.
Let this not be an indictment on the band, however, or those who worked so hard and channeled their creative juices to make it happen in the first place. I applaud the effort. Truly, I do. Pigeons Playing Ping Pong were great. It was just lost on me. I’d sooner take that bootleg and my three friends on a road trip. Instead, during “High As Five”, which was actually fucking awesome, I was sitting on the roof of the truck eating yogurt. That’s not what I want to be doing during a concert, drive-in or otherwise.
Bright spots … Manny Newman is the best young lighting director in the business and seeing him ply his trade was a delight. What else? I had a great sandwich — chicken cutlet with fresh mozzarella and roasted peppers on perfectly oily semolina. Hot damn. Ironically, I drive an hour each way to discover a sandwich that originated three miles from home. Smh.
“Pigs (Three Different Ones)” was incredible and I summoned all I had to get my feet moving a little, but in the end just couldn’t sustain the effort. It was inauthentic. If you know me, then you know I dance. Hard. But I’ll swear to my grave that the music physically moves me and I literally have no control of my reaction to it. {That’s not exactly true but I dance when I feel it, not because I feel like dancing. Oh gosh, that probably confused you even more.} My body just responds to the stimuli of live music and its inherent energy. This didn’t feel like the former and had none of the latter. “F.U.” could have been great. The whole show could have been. Would have been. The format just failed. So we literally drove out during “Penguins” and somehow held on to our radio signal for a couple miles as we circled the arena to get back to the highway, at one point getting our best sound of the night when we drove behind the stage with the windows up and the sound cranked.
All that being said, I had a great time hanging with buddies. But we could have just as easily been in one of our backyards or rolling down the highway to go whitewater rafting while listening to the same show. Or, imagine if the concert that was a tailgate party was really just a tailgate party for an actual concert. Well then, to that I’d say bravo!
But as the experience itself, a drive-in concert neither justified the cost nor the effort, and especially not with an hour-plus drive each way. I wish I felt differently. I’m not excited to hit send and tell you that I hated it. I want to promote music and artists and everything that puts good people to work and gets friends together to celebrate life and art. I wanted sooo badly to like it. But I write what I feel and if I’m not true to that, then I got nothing. So there it is.
Please don’t take my word for it, though. Try a drive-in concert. You may love it. It’s just not for me.
Zero steps. Ugh.
Setlist: Live In Drive In
Set One: Distant Times, Totally, Poseidon > Daddy Wasn’t There > Poseidon, In The Bubble*, High As Five, Snake Eyes, Doc
Set Two: Time to Ride > Kiwi > Time to Ride, Lowdown, Pigs (Three Different Ones) > The Hop > F.U., Penguins > Funkijam > Bad For You.
Encore: Dawn a New Day
* – Debut