Friday, April 28, 2017

RIP Pier Concerts?



It's been a very busy week here at Universal Studios. I watched all of Red Oaks, I wrote my Love spec, hell I even had time to read a book about Hillary Clinton's doomed campaign.

And while none of those things are technically in my job description, I came into the office today convinced that I had deserved a nice easy day of looking at Reddit and laughing at meme accounts on Twitter. But then I got the text...

"Did you hear that the pier concerts are cancelled?"

Let me back up a bit.

I am an underachiever.

I probably outscored you on the SATs, I was born with a near perfect body composition and my socioeconomic status is better than most.

It was said that George W Bush was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Well I was born on second and then immediately got picked off.

I'm a 6 foot 3 white male with gorgeous hair, yet I have failed to get ahead in life mostly because of my lack of passion. While others cared about things like social justice, making the world a better place; my chief concern has always been where to meet people for happy hour. That is to say until my favorite thing in the world was in danger of being taken away from me.

In a March 28th post. entitled The Day I Became a Democrat I addressed the ongoing battle at City Hall about the future of the Twilight Concert Series. At the time some in the Santa Monica City Council found the concert too expensive for the total benefits it was contributing to the city. This post netted me 7 likes, one Marine calling me a cuck and an email from my father telling me I use the F word too often.

Shortly thereafter it was revealed that the council had greenlit the summer series for 8 instead of the usual 10 shows. Between that and privatized security vs actual police there was to be enough savings for the city that the concert series (subsidized by partners such as Snap Chat and KCRW) would become fiscally sustainable.

And that was the end, so I thought...

In the days that passed I would scour the internet for little hints and clues as to who the artists might be this year. Would we get some up and comers, nostalgia acts or bands that were just about to peak. A few days ago the first bread crumb arrived in a Bandsintown page for teenage sensation Khalid.

June 22nd, 2017 Santa Monica Pier 7pm.

Everything checked out. My prior research had told me that the concerts would be starting in June this season. One of the ways Santa Monica thought they could mitigate attendance was move the schedule forward, out of the late August early September high tourism season.

A day later a Facebook page for the event popped up. I thought we would be seeing an official schedule any day...

and then I got the text.

 "Did you hear the pier concerts are cancelled?"

FAKE NEWS I immediately thought to myself. In one of my extremely rare instances of actual journalism, I had studied this case. Scaled down? Sure. Safe in the future? Definitely not! But this year? No Twilight Series 2017 was a go.

"No, it was money stuff, but they worked it out," I nonchalantly replied as if I was a cool kid in the know.

"Oh? I heard it was bomb threats."

Bomb threats? I hadn't heard of any bomb threats? Sure I had always thought deep in the twisted recesses of my mind that a well placed frag grenade on a Thursday night could take out a fuck load of drunks but I had never heard any actual rumors to this point. As my friend works at Red Bull (a cooler company than Universal) I decided to take her claim seriously and began to do some research.

My first stop was the Twittersphere. It seems I wasn't the only one who had discovered the show as a few people were already talking about it.

But then something strange happened. Sometime last night, the mood on Twitter changed to confusion...

Is your show sold out?

Now clearly you and I know that these shows can't sell out. Why would they be under the impression that 'tickets' were no longer available.

I decided best to check the original Bandsintown and Facebook pages for more info...

Upon my Google search, things seemed to be exactly as they had been the day before.

There it was, just as I expected it to be. But to be sure, I clicked the link to make sure everything still seemed to be on the up and up.





WUT?

Clearly there was some major fuckery going on.





I reached out to several sources for comments: The Santa Monica Pier, Snap Chat, The Santa Monica Daily Post, Khalid himself.


Nothing.




I texted a confidential source inside of Snap Chat and she said she hadn't heard anything about a cancellation. No one on Twitter seems to have heard of a cancellation. So perhaps Khalid (who is performing at Staples Center on June 23rd as part of The BET Experience just cancelled his show with zero explanation...just scrubbed it from the web as if it never existed.


Or perhaps, there are more sinister things at play. Perhaps, a city council that never wanted a party in their backyard figured out a way to get rid of it, because sure you can wave a balance sheet in someone's face, but if you really want people to get up in arms the quickest way to do that? Safety.

Now I do not know for a fact that the Pier Concerts are dead. I don't feel some sort of journalistic imperative to wait for all the facts. This is by the way a blog that frequently discusses how many shots of vodka I take on a Saturday night. But if I was a betting man and I had to handicap this pier concert season? Well sadly my friends, I would lay the under.

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