FREE DMB: Wednesday's issue of the New York Post was nothing more than one long paid advertisement for AOL, and its alleged free concert by the Dave Matthews Band that took place tonight in Central Park. The Post was distributed freely in the entire metro area, AOL's logo appeared throughout (including on the front and back pages), and the entire middle section of the paper was taken up by a "special advertising section" for the show, quite obviously prepared by Post writers who have never listened to Dave in their lives.
Like the fraudulant MTV/Radiohead and Tribeca Film Festival/Norah Jones concerts earlier this year, the AOL/DMB shindig was advertised as a "free concert," implying that anyone who wanted to could show up and enjoy it, in the tradition of the famous 1981 "Concert in the Park" by Simon and Garfunkel that was attended by a half-million people. But with DMB, the only way people could get tickets was either by winning blind drawings, having them handed off by "street teams," or buying VIP packages for $250- and the lopsided supply/demand ratio of course led to frenzied bidding on Craigslist, with bids starting at $100/ticket. The concert was for "a good cause"- the New York public schools- but the money came not from ticket sales (which were "free") but rather a donation by AOL, as well as the band themselves. If it's "free," and the sponsor is kicking in the money anyway, why not just let people in first-come, first-serve?
Speaking of Dave, I picked up his solo debut yesterday. The usual Dave album, minus the band of course, with 3 or 4 near-brilliant songs, 1 or 2 horrid ones (featuring unlistenable pseudo-gospel), and the rest somewhere in the middle, leading toward good. But I agree with one thing that I've seen in nearly every review of "Some Devil": Dave's use of "ring around the rosey" as the chorus of "Gravedigger" is so cringe-inducing that it ruins an otherwise great song- and it's so weak that he includes it on the album twice. I kept waiting for Matthews to emulate "The Joe Schmo Show" and follow "ashes to ashes" with "you're dead to us now."