Why I will never listen to Ray LaMontagne again

Last night I went to the Guster("/Ray LaMontagne") concert at Penn's Landing. Guster was awesome, the opening band (Donavan L-something) was pretty good, and there were lots of geeky boys sitting on their friends' shoulders, waving their shirts around (there is an explanation for this but I don't feel like typing it out.) That resulted in Guster doing their encore shirtless, which was predictably less appealing than Guster doing their encore fully-clothed. Oh, and Ray LaMontagne was a douche.


Shirtless Guster fans. I stole this from this dude.

I had never heard of Ray LaMontagne until I saw that he was co-headlining with Guster. So he comes out onstage after the opener, looking like the typical hairy-faced "serious indie" singer-songwriter, and starts playing with some backup musicians and I'm like, "Eh, poor man's Damien Rice." He plays a few more songs and I'm like "Ok, maybe not so Damien Rice, but still nothing special." He played maybe 10 or so songs, and the entire time never said a single word. Until FINALLY the backup people left and he introduced them and we all cheered a lot because it meant he was finally going away and Guster would be out sooner! So he proceeds to start some solo song, and then stops in the middle and I guess he said something about being quiet because I heard some people shhh-ing, and then he did the song. And then he just threw his guitar on the ground and walked offstage.



FUCK YOU, BUDDY! I paid $45 to stand around for 4 hours and I'll fucking talk if I want to. Nobody was there to see Ray LaMontagne, for one thing. They were there to see Guster. And he could have said something to make me listen to him, because his songs weren't interesting enough on their own to make me shut up. A good performer either engages the crowd (Guster, Ben Folds) or is so awesome that they don't need to (Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello). Lame attempts at humor are lame, but at least they're attempts.

The way I see it, Mr. LaMontagne has two options: he can get over himself, or he can at least produce something I'm willing to withstand cigarette smoke and sweaty people for.