08/13/1999 Eve6, Velour (Buffalo, NY @ Sideshow Music Hall)
By Eric | August 13, 1999 11:59 pm
While I was never the biggest Eve6 fan in the world, a free show is a free show. Coke was running a promotion called IYDKYDG (If You Don’t Know, You Don’t Go), and I forgot what hoops we had to jump through to get the tickets, but it wasn’t much. I do remember the sideshow being a sauna, and our first grade trio of myself, Sara and Joe G. being the ones that went. This was our second run-in with Velour, and again we thought they were terrible.
We thought the crowd was terrible too. Not sure if it was the Eve6 fan base, or just in general, but there were many failed attempts at crowdsurfing, the mosh pits were fairly lame as well. As for the show, Eve6 seemed to be having a great time playing up the “rock star” persona, and they sounded decent too. According to an old MTV article I found, Max Collins, the singer, had recently had surgery to remove nodes on his vocal cords, so this was only the 4th show back on the road for them. I have no idea what they played, but considering they only had the one album out at the time, I’ve got to assume they played close to the whole thing.
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Eve6, Sideshow Music Hall, Velour
07/02/1999 Friendship Festival: The Tea Party, Esthero, BTK (Fort Erie, ONT @ Mather Arch Park)
By Eric | July 2, 1999 11:59 pm
The Friendship Festival was always one of those shows that we anticipated going to, and then wondered why we anticipated it so much. We’d always love one or two of the bands that would play, but the venue was never the greatest. For a couple years it was held at the Mather Arch in Fort Erie, and it was a cluster every time. Hard to get to, everyone packed in like sardines, and since it was free, EVERYONE showed up. Usually just to get drunk and party (it’s a holiday weekend after all), but it made life a little difficult for those of us who were “all about the music” back then and wanted to be up front.
I don’t recall who the first band on was, but we were pretty much crushed all through the first three sets. Literally and figuratively couldn’t move. I’d seen BTK and Esthero both at Summersault the summer before, so they were good enough as openers. Don’t recall a whole lot about their sets, however.
Unfortunately, when The Tea Party came out, so did the idiots. The aforementioned drunks slobbering, spilling and creating the usual festival beer garden-type mayhem. At one point, Mary got a whole beer spilled on her, so that about sums up how our night went, crowd-wise. The band’s set was excellent; Triptych wasn’t even a month old, so this was our first time hearing Heaven Coming Down and Great Big Lie in the live settings, and according to Jeff Martin it was the first time ever for The Halcyon Days. Listening back to the bootleg, that song was a bit different from how they’d end up playing it in the future, as there was no Zahira intro, and he actually hit the high notes in the chorus. Beyond those three, it was a typical set, but with some cool inserts as they threw some Jeff Buckley, Led Zeppelin, and David Bowie covers in. So the show itself was fantastic, but the crowd was a bit of a bummer.
Hooray for the internet! Someone posted a bootleg of the show on Guitars101.com along with the setlist:
01 Drums [Intro]
02 Temptation
03 Army Ants
04 Fire In The Head
05 Psychopomp
06 Great Big Lie
07 The Bazaar
08 Halcyon Days
09 Release
10 Save Me > Last Goodbye (Jeff Buckley) > Save Me
11 Voodoo Child (Jimi Hendrix) > The River > Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin) > The River
12 Heaven Coming Down
13 Winter Solstice
14 Sister Awake > Temptation (New Order) > Heroes (David Bowie) > Sister Awake
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Tags: 1999, BTK, Esthero, Fort Erie, Friendship Festival, Mather Arch Park, The Tea Party
05/07/1999 Staind (Buffalo, NY @ Showplace Theater)
By Eric | May 7, 1999 11:59 pm
This was the first time seeing Staind while actually knowing all the songs, and hands down it’s still my favorite Staind show.
I was on the Staind bandwagon fairly early. Between seeing them open for Limp Bizkit (which I didn’t really remember), seeing them open for Kid Rock a month before this, and then buying Dysfunction the day it was released (about three weeks before this show), I was pretty excited to see them and actually know the material. We got there fairly early, and once inside, Mary and I were two of like maybe five, ten people tops there who even knew who Staind was. Not that there were many people there yet, period. I guess Monster Magnet fans were latecomers, not that it mattered to us. Once Staind started I think we made it pretty obvious that we were there to see them, rocking out to each song. I don’t have the exact setlist, but for a lot of the Dysfunction tour they didn’t switch it up much, so I’m assuming we saw:
A Flat
Mudshovel
Spleen
Suffocate
Crawl
Just Go
Raw
They sounded great, and we had a blast. Aaron Lewis was still finding his on-stage persona, I recall a lot of wandering back and forth across the stage, and standing sideways kinda facing the wall. The rest of the guys were very energetic though, and made for a great show.
If the show was good, the aftermath was even better. During set-change, and after buying our inaugural Staind shirts (I think I topped out at 8 or 9 at one point!) we saw Mike come out to the bar, told him we loved the show and asked for an autograph. He did us one better, invited us to come talk outside, and we ended up chatting with the entire band out by the bus for probably a half hour, just the two of us! All four guys, Mike, Jon, Old-School and Aaron, were awesome, very personable, as interested in what we had to say as we were in them. I think the fact that we were college engineering students may have had something to do with that, as we found out that Mike had been working towards an electrical engineering degree! Since this was right around Mother’s Day, as we talked to the other three band members, Aaron was on the phone with his mom, but when he was done, he was amazingly nice to us as well. Being that this was very early on in their major label career, they seemed happy that anyone recognized the songs, or them for that matter. As for me, this just solidified my love of the band and they were easily my favorite band all through college.
Needless to say, we didn’t end up going back in to see Monster Magnet, and we really didn’t care. This show is still one of my more treasured concert memories!
I found a YouTube video of a show from a week later, so this is pretty much exactly what we saw! (I don’t think we got Home or Me, but regardless…)
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Showplace Theater, Staind
05/01/1999 Sugar Ray, Orgy, Run-DMC (Buffalo, NY @ SUNY Buffalo)
By Eric | May 1, 1999 11:59 pm
This was a free show put on by UB, and was actually part of the MTV campus invasion tour. Needless to say, there were TONS of people packed into Baird Point. Sara, Danielle, Mary and I waited in what seemed like the longest line ever to get through metal detectors, but then A) I found an RIT buddy that let us jump in and cut half the line, and B) Run-DMC started playing while we were in line and a bunch of people skipped out of line to go sit on the big hill and watch. We finally got in and caught the remainder of Run-DMC’s set. I remember everyone was ripping on Run-DMC for some reason, I thought they were cool as hell! These are rap legends we’re talking about! Not that I knew the entire catalog or anything, but certainly the hits. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. Apparently Run-DMC played early so they could get to a second gig later that day, and Orgy wasn’t quite ready. More than an hour later (or so it felt like), they finally got out there.
Orgy came out, and the place got nuts, Sara got kicked in the head by a crowd surfer, and we moved off to the back and the side for the rest of the day. Orgy played a good set, I still didn’t recognize too much besides Blue Monday and Stitches, Judging from other sets from this era, I’d say we probably saw Dissention, Gender, Fetisha, Stitches, Pantomime, and Blue Monday.
Sugar Ray came out, and it wasn’t the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen. They were decent, but 19-year old me wasn’t really into it. Of course, they played Fly and Every Morning, I think they opened with RPM, and maybe they played Mean Machine, couldn’t tell you much more than that. They brought up two kids to freestyle rap, and both kids sucked. Badly. Mark McGrath kept saying how he was so sexy and whatnot. In other words, its a good thing this one was free.
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Orgy, Run-DMC, Sugar Ray, SUNY Buffalo
04/09/1999 Moxy Fruvous, The Push Stars (Rochester, NY @ RIT Clark Gym)
By Eric | April 9, 1999 11:59 pm
This started the string of mediocre or worse RIT concerts. The Push Stars were okay, light rock, but every song sounded the same. Chris Trapper was the main guy in this band, and apparently has a decent solo career. Moxy Fruvous was entertaining, but I think they probably worked way better as a lawn concert, not a roomful of college kids. So I guess I appreciated them, but wasn’t overly thrilled.
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Tags: 1999, Moxy Fruvous, RIT Clark Gym, rochester, The Push Stars
04/01/1999 Vanilla Ice, Dial 7, Skarhead (Rochester, NY @ Water Street Music Hall)
By Eric | April 1, 1999 11:59 pm
Of any of the concerts I’ve attended, this one ranks right up there for the “you saw WHO???” reaction. Couldn’t have happened on a better day either. April Fools Day!
The genesis of attending this goes back to early in my freshman year of college. A buddy of mine called me into his room, plays what we’d later know as “Too Cold”, and says, “Who do you think covered this??” I had no idea, and he gleefully told me, “HE DID!” We made a small bet to see who could come back with the whole “Hard To Swallow” album over Thanksgiving break. I have no idea if Mike even tried, but I found it at Record Theater in the used bin for $5 and bought it. And it’s not half-bad! Considering this was the era of my getting into all things nu-metal, this fit right in. So once I found out A) Ice was touring, and B) he was coming to Water Street, I kinda had to go.
So for the show itself, Mary and I figured it would be dead, and no one would be there. Holy crap were we wrong. The place was legitimately SOLD OUT. We waited forever to get in, and once we did and got up front, we were a little unprepared for the first opener. Skarhead was a true NYC hardcore band, and as you’d expect, a giant pit opened up. In the ensuing mayhem Mary ended up with a black eye! Whoops. She was a trooper though; we never left the front!
SKARHEAD & VANILLA ICE TOUR! 1999-WE HAD A GOOD TIME ON THE ROAD WITH ICE & HIS BAND. BOSTON MIKE RIP! @vanillaice pic.twitter.com/ldKwsPbXaQ
— DANNY DIABLO (@DannyDiablo) September 19, 2014
Once Skarhead was done, Dial-7 was the next band up. While their rap/rock/funk was pretty decent (like a much lighter version of (hed)pe), it felt like their set took FOREVER. Every time we thought they were done, “we got one more for ya!”
Finally it was Vanilla Ice time. The stage was packed with band members and gear, and they put on a hell of a show! Naturally Too Cold / Ice Ice Baby was the highlight, but the whole set was fun, they took it old-school towards the end, and Ice even did some scat/beat-boxing in the middle of the set. I didn’t know what to expect, but the show beat my expectations! The guy actually can perform. Plus the fact that it was a full house helped, and as I recall most everyone was into it, whether just for the nostalgia factor, or for the new stuff. Despite the openers, we had ourselves a blast, and one of our better concert stories!
Wikipedia says that the bass player for this tour was Scott Shriner, who has been the bass player in Weezer since 2001. That’s a bit of a genre switch!
There’s little media available online anywhere from this tour, but here’s a couple of tidbits I’ve come across:
SNAFU from Seattle sometime in 1999:
Too Cold from the same show:
An MTV News report about the tour!
setlist.fm only has one setlist from this tour (15 days later in Minnesota), but I’ve got to imagine it’s pretty close to what we saw as well:
The Horny Song
S.N.A.F.U.
Living
Too Cold
A.D.D.
Stompin’ Through the Bayou
Fuck Me
Beat Box
Zero
Scars
Prozac
Ice Ice Baby
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Tags: 1999, Dial 7, rochester, Skarhead, Vanilla Ice, Water Street Music Hall
03/27/1999 Econoline Crush, God’s Children (Buffalo, NY @ The Tralf)
By Eric | March 27, 1999 11:59 pm
I don’t recall a ton about this show, other than to say that this started Mary’s love of Trevor. I know we got in quite early and were no more than 2 feet away from the band all night. The band played all but one off of The Devil You Know, “Wicked” from Affliction, and “You Don’t Know What It’s Like”. The crowd was great, no pushing, no barrier(!), and the band sounded great! I do know it was nice seeing them in a small club versus on a huge stage at a festival.
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Tags: 1999, Buffalo, Econoline Crush, God’s Children, The Tralf
03/21/1999 Kid Rock, Staind (Rochester, NY @ Water Street Music Hall)
By Eric | March 21, 1999 11:59 pm
We knew the show was happening, but weren’t really planning on going as it was a Sunday night. Kid Rock did a signing at the House of Guitars earlier in the day, so I went for the hell of it, and got a pretty sweet personalized autographed poster. Considering it was only 8 bucks a ticket, Mary and I decided we’d go after all, and I’m really glad we did!
I had also picked up a tape sampler from Staind, whom I’d vaguely remembered seeing at the Limp Bizkit Funhouse gig. Once we got into Water Street, however, I’d never forget them again. Staind made a hell of an impression on us. Between Mike’s spastic guitar playing, and the way Aaron switched between singing and screaming, it was right in my wheelhouse. Even despite Aaron staring at the wall for most of the set, rather than looking at the crowd. I got hooked. Dysfunction hadn’t been released yet (it’d be another three weeks or so), but they played a bunch of stuff from it. Judging from other setlists of that era, I’m guessing ours was the same, so most likely:
A Flat
Mudshovel
Spleen
Suffocate
Crawl
Just Go
Raw
So after being blown away by a band we didn’t even know was on the bill until day of, we got to see Kid Rock! I’d also seen him prior, stopping for about two seconds to watch him at Warped Tour the preceding summer. Fast-forwarding to the time of this show, “Welcome 2 The Party” had done nothing as a single, but “I Am The Bullgod” was finally getting the album some attention. “Bawitdaba” was two weeks away from being released as a single, so at this point Kid hadn’t had the big mainstream success yet. It didn’t matter, as I remember the place being rather full. Rock and the band sounded fantastic. I have no idea what he played or in what order, but I do remember being super-impressed with him and the band. At one point, someone tossed a beer bottle right at Kid Rock up on stage, hitting his guitar, and he looked on the verge of jumping off the stage to fight whoever did it. Unfortunately, Joe C was sick on this night, and didn’t perform, so I never did get to see him live. But all the articles about Rock are true, he has always put on a high-quality show, no matter how small the venue or the crowd.
I subsequently found out that there’s a live version of “Wasting Time” off of the German “Only God Knows Why” single that was recorded at this show!
I found a setlist via a bootleg tracklisting from the show in NYC three days later, I’m assuming it’s gotta be close to what we saw:
Intro
Devil Without A Cause
3 Sheets To The Wind
Welcome To The Party
I Am The Bullgod
Balls In Your Mouth
My Name Is Rock
Kid Mix (Kid Playing all Bands Instruments)
Somebody’s Gotta Feel This
Fist of Rage
I Got One For Ya
Wax The Booty
Wasting Time
Cowboy
Detroit Medley
Bawitdaba
Where U At Rock
Black Chick, White Guy
Only God Knows Why
Fuck Off
April 2020 – The super-awesome Liberated Tape Archive posted a video of essentially this set from a month later in Pittsburgh!
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01/21/1999 Fuel, Velour (Rochester, NY @ Water Street Music Hall)
By Eric | January 21, 1999 11:59 pm
Ahh yes, the show that it feels like all of RIT attended. Everytime I talk to someone that’s into music that was in our incoming freshman class, I swear they all say they were at this show. This also marked the first time we’d come across our nemesis opening band… Velour. A local Buffalo band that we never, ever gave a chance to. We didn’t like them the first time, and we didn’t like them any subsequent time we saw them either.
I feel like this was Fuel hitting their stride on the first (major label) album cycle. They were awesome. Much like the Showplace gig, they ran through the whole album, plus this time we got to hear Sister Mary Innocent, Walk The Sky, and Sunday Girl. Interestingly enough, this turned out to be a rougher show crowd-wise than I would have expected. The “highlight” in that regard was was some drunk chick trying to sneak her way up front, and when some random guy wouldn’t let her in, she started clubbing him over the head! So grabbed her arm and stopped her, so naturally she spun around and was gonna try to club me! Perhaps the height scared her, because as soon as she started she just staggered off like nothing happened. It would prove to be the first of many shows that I would (or almost would) get into fights at. But the show itself? Fantastic.
One lonely pic from this show that I found here
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Tags: 1999, Fuel, rochester, Velour, Water Street Music Hall
11/27/1998 Deftones, Quicksand, Snapcase (Rochester, NY @ Main Street Armory)
By Eric | November 27, 1998 11:59 pm
This remains one of my favorite all-time shows. Came back to school the day after Thanksgiving, mostly for this, but also to move my stuff into my new dorm room (At RIT, Gleason Hall had just finished renovations, so all of us Fish Hall residents got transferred). I met up with my fellow dorm-dweller Dave (and his brother?), and before the show, hit up Burger King for dinner. Normally, this doesn’t even bear mentioning, however on this night, said Burger King RAN OUT OF BURGERS. No meat in the place. Haven’t experienced that before or since.
After that crisis, we got into the Armory a touch later than we wanted to, and so we missed the first song from Snapcase. Everything we did see was dynamite. I can’t remember any sort of setlist for them, but I definitely remember hearing Incarnation, plus this review says we saw Zombie Prescription, Caboose, and a Bad Brains cover (presumably “I”). I don’t remember a whole lot about Quicksand, other than to say they sounded good.
But everyone was waiting for the Deftones, and whooo boy did the crowd have some pent-up energy. Opening with Be Quiet And Drive and then into My Own Summer, into Root, and the crowd went ballistic. The guy in that other review says there were at least four pits that opened up, and I believe it. I was probably dead center, maybe 20 people deep, and a bunch of us went down in a heap. A touch scary, but everyone was cool and picked everyone back up. They sounded fantastic, and played a great mix between the two albums, including Teething! A personal highlight was Engine No. 9, during which I had managed to make it to the barrier, where among others, Chino shoved the mic right into my face for the last chorus of the song! For the last song of the main set, they did a really cool take on Weezer’s Say It Ain’t So, and did a raucous encore with Headup. Hell of a show.
These are stills from the video bootleg:
I know audio and video bootlegs of this show exist, but I’ve never been able to actually obtain them. If anyone wants to help me out with that endeavor, it’d be much appreciated!
I found the video! It cuts off during Engine No. 9 unfortunately, but three-quarters of a show is better than no show!
And the Setlist was as follows:
01. Be Quiet And Drive (far away)
02. My Own Summer
03. Root
04. Nosebleed
05. Mascara
06. Around the Fur
07. Lotion
08. 7 Words
09. Bored
10. Teething
11. Engine No.9
12. Dai The Flu
13. Say It Ain’t So (Weezer cover)
14. Headup
Topics: Concerts | Comments Off on 11/27/1998 Deftones, Quicksand, Snapcase (Rochester, NY @ Main Street Armory)
Tags: 1998, Deftones, Main Street Armory, Quicksand, rochester, Snapcase