I can’t think of anything worse than this one…

In 1the early summer of 1986 we won free tickets to see Julian Lennon at the Spectrum in Philly.

Of the 17,000 seats available, there might’ve been 2,000 people there and that’s being generous.

In any case, the opening act was…a comedian/juggler.

This guy was an abomination.

He wasn’t funny, he was actually wearing rainbow suspenders and juggling bowling pins, pies, wine bottles and I forget what else.

Not exactly rock and roll.

It was preposterous.

At this point there may have been 1,000 or less in the building.

The silence was deafening, so much so, that you could hear the air conditioning running.

We went down to the floor and heckled this guy mercilessly.

He was already being booed, but to a bunch of high school kids, we thought this was pure torture.

He yelled back at us, because it was so easy to hear everything.

He finally left the stage to bottles and soft pretzels being thrown.

Julian was pretty good (and he did a few Beatles tunes), but you could tell he was embarrassed by the near-empty arena and what had preceded him with the juggling fool.

So yeah, that was an opener I’ll never forget (wish I knew what that clown’s name was).

sass jordan opened for steve perry in cleveland on his 'strange medicine' tour.

extremely loud band and almost inaudible vocals.

we went out in the lobby until she was done.

some DJ spinning before Madonna

When Jimbo and I saw GnR at MSG many years back (when Buckethead was the guitar player), they had a DJ as the opening act. I mean what the hell? Even Jimbo made a face.

When I saw KISS a few years ago before COVID at the Barclays, the opener was a painter.

And last week some awful noisy group called The Acid Helps were the opener for TOOL. TOOL was like a sonic revelation after being subjected to that noise.

Just a few off the top of my head.

I can name two. The openers weren't bad on their own accord, but for whom they were opening made them bad..............


Aerosmith, Oct. 14, 1978 in St. Paul MN. Opener? Exile. Yes, that Exile. Kiss You All Over was the big hit at the time before they went country. The crowd was stunned but decent. Talk about two opposites.

Cheap Trick, July 21, 1979 in Bloomington MN (suburb of Minneapolis). Opener? The Romantics.

CT were riding high on Budokan at the time. The arena was sold out. I had never seen a band so ostracized before or since. Beer cups galore thrown at these guys. Another huge mismatch.

I know it's for the worst openers, and I believe these two examples qualify due to the huge mismatch of music.

I don't think the Romantics are a bad match for Cheap Trick. I saw that tour and Prism and Graham Parker and the Rumour opened for Cheap Trick in Ottawa. I find those three bands much farther apart than your bill.

The worst REACTION I've ever seen an opening act receive was Black Uhuru opening for The Police in 1982 on the Ghost In The Machine tour at the Brendan Byrne Arena in NJ. I seem to remember them tossing copies of their latest album (or single) into the crowd, and people breaking the records & throwing them back on stage. I didn't appreciate them, being a white 16-year-old rock fan, but I didn't hate them and in hindsight I'm really glad I got to see them. I've been a fan for a few decades now.

Probably the worst reaction I ever saw from a crowd was in Madison Square Garden in 1977 at a TULL show. Livingston Taylor came out and was met with a vicious reaction. He was booed and belted off the stage. Really poor behavior by an extremely rowdy NY crowd. But the 70s were very crazy.

We saw G n R that very next night in Philly…sort of.

The awful CKY and that DJ (I believe it was Mixmaster Mike from the Beastie Boys) also opened for Guns ‘N’ Roses.

Of course that was the night Axl didn’t show and no announcement was made until after 11 pm which led to a massive riot and the police battalion came in with shields.

The tour was canceled by Live Nation the next night.

I also saw a hideous act called Maggie’s Dream open for Fishbone in NY in 1991.

They were some sort of pop hard rock act and were pelted with shoes and bottles after two or three songs.

The singer stopped the show and asked if “we could all just get along and have fun.”

Someone threw a boot at him and they were gone after having played just three songs.

Fishbone didn’t take the damn stage until 1 am, but were awesome as always.

Fishbone would be on SNL the very next night.

I’ve seen tons of local bands that managed to get opening slots for larger acts at clubs, especially in the 90s. I don’t really remember names of bands I don’t like though.

I do remember seeing some guy I’d never heard of open for Fates Warning a few years ago - solo guitarist that just played over backing tracks. I know it’s not unheard of these days, but this guy didn’t even try to interact with the crowd. He just kind of stood there on stage in his own little world, wanking along. He may not even have made eye contact with anyone.

When I saw Bob Dylan, many years ago, the opening act was a band called Dave Graney & The Coral Snakes and they were dreadful. Maybe it's because people wanted to hear Dylan and this band could only suffer in comparison to him...but they were genuinely not good in my opinion. The frontman seemed nervous (or over-medicated) and the bass player kept somehow losing the plot and making mistakes (going out of time, or simply stopping playing and starting again seemingly at random). The drummer was the only one who seemed not to be continually messing things up and this only made the mistakes the others were making more obvious.

Nine Inch Nails had some weird pervy "circus" freak show open for them once. People hanging weights off their nipples and...other bits. Stuff like that. It was awful.

Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge tour, Lenny Kravitz. I like Lenny, but he chose to do a solo acoustic set and it was singularly underwhelming.

When in Rome lip-synced their way through a "performance" (I knew the DJs who worked the club they were playing, and they showed me the tape, although it was very obvious anyway), but I can't remember who they were opening for.

Worst opening act: Comedian Jackie Kahane for Elvis Presley in 1974. Surely the King could have had a better court jester than that guy, spouting unfunny one-liners!

Excluding the non-musical opening acts - I've come to think of that as a cheapskate move by the headliners - I try not to judge opening acts too harshly. In smaller venues - especially in Canada - they're generally local bands just happy to play in front of any audience, and maybe get a chance to meet a band they're fans of. And occasionally, you can see amazing things happen - like a band go from headlining a 400 seat bar to opening a Stadium show.

For more moderate sized venues, they're either a really promising young band, or a journeyman act still out there slogging away. Either way, while I've not enjoyed many of them, and been bored, very few of them have been actively disagreeable. I'm also aware that a mix and match approach by the headliner may mean I'm not going to like the opening act because I don't like their genre (example; I'm a metal head, but I really don't like the Death Metal sub-genre. So any Death band is going to be unenjoyable). As I've gotten older - and been able to afford more shows - this is the one I'm most likely to skip on, although I hate doing that.

And of course, since I tend to do a lot of big shows, I've seen some pretty big name acts as openers over the years. I've even seen many of them as headliners in their own right in 2,000-3,000 seat venues. Some of them you can see that's their ceiling, and for others, you hope they can break through to arena headliners on their own. (Ghost is the best current example of that) There seems to be a lot of that this year, as bands seem to be loading their bills. I'm seeing Buckcherry, Within Temptation, The Pretty Reckless, and Lacuna Coil as openers.

Probably the worst category of opener for me is a headliner who's fallen on hard times, and resents their spot on the bill. Their performances tend to be perfunctory, disengaged, and uninteresting, even if the material itself is well known and popular. It's a paint by numbers greatest hits record, without even the energy of the studio version. But even then I try to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's just a bad night.

My favourite kind of opening act - and it's dangerous for the headliner - is to take out a veteran band who is comfortable with who they and their fans are, and are just looking to be on the road playing and having a good time. They don't care that they're opening, they still play like they know people are there specifically to see them. I've seen Alice Cooper open for 3 different acts - even if he gets 75 minutes or so Rancid is another one who can really get a party going. But as a headliner, you have to know you're going to bring it, or your opening act will blow you off the stage.

Was he the guy that invented “I just flew in from Toledo, boy are my arms tired!”

For my money, over the last 5-7 years, John 5 is the runaway winner for having bad opening acts. Locally, he's used a band called Venus In Furs. This band has had two dancers each show - not the same dancers each show - who look like somewhat emaciated heroin addicts. And they apparently get a different feed than the rest of us because what they do has no relationship to the music. And music is a stretch - at one show, I saw a cop and I asked if he was doing security. He said he was, and I said, "Oh, I thought maybe someone called to have to you arrest that one band for impersonating musicians." He laughed and said, "No shit."

He had an opener in Cleveland where the guitar player assumed all these rock god poses and showboated during his solos, and my buddy said, "It takes a lot of balls to act like that when you have Jared James Nichols and John 5 coming up next." I will say the posing was better than the playing.

We saw another local band opening a few months ago that caused my buddy to say, "Do you think their friends actually think they're good, or do you think they're just not telling them as a joke?"

We saw a band open for Ace Frehley - twice - that had a girl in the band playing tambourine. And not on mic. Nowhere near a mic, in fact. No singing. No other instruments. Just unamplified tambourine.

Not even that creative!

I have seen many piss poor openers, but nothing can top SNL Alum Charles Rocket and his Accordion opening up for The Plasmatics at Pier 84 in NYC back in 1981. Anything that wasn't nailed down was thrown at the stage. The crowd chanting in unison "FUCK YOU!" was deafening. Oddly enough, the second worst in my memory was at the same venue a year or so later when The Clash had Kurtis Blow as their opener. Not pretty. Strummer actually admonished the crowd for being so closed minded to Rap music.

I'm sure she was very good at something.

There have been several and I wish that I could tell you, but as soon as they've walked off the stage, they're quickly forgotten.

Yeah, it's not worth dwelling on the disappointments. Unless they inexplicably become a hugely popular act later. (Which happened to the opening act from my very first concert. I was embarrassed for them at the time, and they got booed, but they got the last laugh.)