Did the bots scoop us on Jack White tickets at The Sinclair?
The guy who invented that omnipresent sports arena chant (daaaa-da-da-da-daaaa-daaaa) posted in early August that he’d be performing a string of shows in support of the new album “No Name.” Call it the No Name Tour. But instead of your traditional superstar tour of massive arenas with plentiful, fee-laden tickets, this tour will consist of small club dates announced with little to none of the usual promotional lead time.
Why so sly and stealthy? So wrote Jack White aka Johnny Guitar aka Archbishop Harold Holm3s on his Instagram: “I also want to walk through orchard fields and grab apples off of trees at will and fill my belly full of that fruit if the desire strikes me. I’m looking for that cool breeze you know?” Okay, that doesn’t explain anything at all, except maybe White’s been reading John Steinbeck lately.
Rate it a “big get” that The Sinclair hosted Jack White on the No Name Tour on Wednesday. It’s the perfect spot for a superstar to play an intimate gig. Small capacity, good sightlines, great sound. Tickets went on sale at 1 p.m. Friday and sold out within four minutes.
Here’s a string of happy Twitter responses to The Sinclair’s ticketing announcement at 1:02 p.m.
@jodocow: “Lol at 1:02 when this posted no tickets were available”
@miketaylr: “eh, i tried. got prompted for a code at 1pm (???), then no tix available. :(“
@603roller: “Sold out in four minutes…..don’t bother”
@BillyD16: “Sold out in 8 seconds. Garbage”
@x_J_x_J_x: “I was waiting in line the whole time and it refreshed it was sold out, bullshit.”
You snooze, you lose. Don’t worry, there was one fan on the thread who scored tickets. Tweeter @Myskull88 exclaimed “I’ll be there!” Were they? Because when you track @Myskull88 back to their profile page, they had one single, solitary post that read: “Have 1 GA ticket available for Jack White @ The Sinclair. DM me an offer.”
Only one? That seems to be a pattern. Some dude on Craigslist had only one ticket to sell for $500.
And moving up the food chain, Vivid Seats, a ticket reseller that has moved more than 140 million tickets to more than 19 million buyers, had only one ticket left for Jack White at The Sinclair. You could have it for $3,313. (Something tells me that if you bought the “one ticket left,” yet another “one ticket left” would be available at Vivid Seats for an equally exorbitant price.)
Credit the “two ticket” limit on purchases for producing a lot of these “one ticket left” scalper scenarios. Not that it stopped the scalping. Whether you code software that sends a million bots to buy two tickets at a time or sends two bots to buy a million tickets at a time, you get the same result. Namely, regular human ticket buyers left out in the cold.
I reached out to The Sinclair for comment about how resellers can and cannot manipulate their ticketing platform for profit. Didn’t hear back. In general, artists and venues are not fans of the reselling market, have some interesting things to say about it and have experimented with different ways to sell tickets to fans without involving a predatory intermediary. Some of the stipulations at the Jack White event page look like they’re designed to make scalping not impossible, but, you know, inefficient. Things such as:
· Buyer’s full party must be present to enter
· There is a two-ticket limit per customer
· No reentry
Clearly the event organizers are trying their best. But if you are a full-time scalper, you’ve figured a profitable way around these rules.
And if you’re a student and you love to wait in lines, a limited number of $25 tickets were scheduled for release at the box office on the day of the show. Scalp that for $3,313 and you’d be able to cover rent for yourself and your roommates for a whole month in this blessed rental market.
Hit this
Saturday: Gift, fantasy of a broken heart, corporeal (The Rockwell, Somerville)
Catch the krautrock-tinged psych rockers Gift in the black box beneath Davis Square. The band is heading out on tour this fall in support of their new album “Illuminator.” The “Boston” date will be their second gig on the road, so catch them while they’re fresh before they head across the Atlantic for Europe dates starting in October. Openers fantasy of a broken heart and corporeal are hard bands to start a sentence with according to standard grammatical convention because they e.e. cummings their band names.
Sunday: Hack The Planet Day (Somerville Theatre, Crystal Ballroom, Somerville)
What’s going on with this show? Everything. But to simplify, it’s a two-parter. First part: Start in the historic Somerville Theatre with a 35 mm screening of ’90s cult classic “Hackers,” sandwiched by a DJ set, chiptune Battlemode set and special appearance by actor Renoly Santiago, aka Phantom Phreak. Second part: afterparty at Crystal Ballroom. All of this and more on Hack the Planet Day, which is much more chill than Judgment Day (“Terminator”) and way less cringe than Rex Manning Day (“Empire Records”).
Wednesday: EveryDejaVu Records Presents “Pieces” Vol. II (Lizard Lounge, Cambridge)
Local record label EveryDejaVu put out a cassette compilation called “Pieces” a while back, and they’re reviving the vibe with a quarterly concert series. Volume II presents neo-R&B flavor with a four-stack bill, with Onbloom, Borboleta, Maliyah and Kayana in everyone’s favorite red-lit, subterranean, reptile-themed musical dwelling. Read up about more artists in the EveryDejaVu zeitgeist at the label’s blog. Yes, that’s right. The record label is also a music blog. Because no one is allowed to have one job at a time anymore in late-stage capitalism. Gotta grind to shine!
Live: Marika Hackman at The Sinclair
English alt-popper Marika Hackman landed at The Sinclair last Saturday on the front end of a tour promoting her latest album “Big Sigh,” a soundtrack that dwells in heartache and regret in search of cathartic relief.
Seems melancholy, and maybe the songs trend a bit on the sad side, but the real downer of the night was the U.S. government, which failed to issue the requisite visas to allow the rest of Hackman’s band to join her stateside. Somewhere across the Atlantic there was at least one bassist and one guitarist making frantic phone calls to no avail.
Hackman kept calm and carried on (nailed it!) with a stand-in version of her full band, including opener Art School Girlfriend helping out on bass. The set also included a healthy serving of solo acoustic numbers, which reached back to her early material to the obvious pleasure of stalwart and longtime fans.
Judging by the puppy dog eyes and respectful hush in the room, there was little that could go wrong, in any conventional sense, to upset the tender memories being formed in real time. It was a night to launch a thousand journal entries.
Not even a medical emergency in the pit could dampen the mood. Pro tip: If you’re going to have an epileptic seizure, or some sort of fainting fit, you could pick a lot worse place than a Marika Hackman show at The Sinclair. Immediately, an ample margin of breathing room opened up around the victim as house staff swooped in to save the day.
Sources report that the patient was okay, but what’s an artist to know or do about it in the middle of a set?
There is a fine art to smoothing over the rough, ragged edges of a live event that belongs to skilled performers. It’s an art tantamount to mind control, which permits the artist to pull a crowd that has been taken out of the moment by, say, a medical fit, a violent outburst or a 30-minute tech delay back into the Dionysian space of musical communion.
Every artist pulls off the trick in their own way, and the techniques can vary according to cultural norms. Hackman, perhaps embodying a little bit of the British stiff upper lip, made the necessary gestures of human sympathy for the fallen and got on with the set. Which, you know, is preferable in a lot of ways to the American-style of hyper performative empathy. An American artist would have made the incident the centerpiece of the set, stage bantered about it two or three more times and communicated a wellness helpline for fans at the end of the night.
Stay hydrated, folks!
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
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