Soon enough, they'll have the band take a commercial break

When I went to see Belle & Sebastian on Tuesday, it was at a Boston club called the Avalon. Normally, the Avalon is great: The stage is big and high, the sound system is top notch, and there are ample stairs that wise concert-goers like myself can perch on to see the band perfectly. But on that night, the Avalon proved it’s not particularly savvy to the ways of its customers. In fact, it is downright ignorant of them. The problem was this: Every 45 minutes or so during the show, they sent a beer vendor -- an actual guy with an ice tray strapped to his chest, pictured above -- wading through the crowd.

My friends, there is no room for this. Quite literally, no room. The people in these crowds are packed tightly together, like it’s one giant, crowded elevator, and some have been staking out their humble spots for hours. They arrived before doors opened, they hustled down to the floor, they stood in place through an opening band and a set change, they carefully positioned themselves to see just over the shoulder of that tall, chubby guy standing in front of them. And now it’s all gone to hell because the beer guy wanted to play Moses and part the sea.

This is not a baseball game. We, the concertgoers, are not evenly spaced out. We don’t have cupholders, and we can’t put anything on the floor. In fact, if we wanted a beer, we don’t even have enough room to lift it to our mouths without elbowing somebody. Perhaps we’d enjoy beer helmets, but the Avalon isn’t offering those.

I called the club yesterday to ask if this was a normal thing for Avalon, but the chipper girl I spoke with knew nothing. “They experiment with things, so maybe it was something like that,” she said. There are experiments that lead to great, new things, and then experiments that end with some smoke, a squirt and a stain on the carpet. Avalon, please consider this one the latter.

Posted by Jason Feifer at March 3, 2006 09:35 AM