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"I don\u2019t have an April fools trick for everyone&amp;amp; but I can present a guest-blog from one of the funniest girls I know: Sloane Crosley! Sloane just wrote a book, I Was Told There\u2019d be...\n\nI don\u2019t have an April fools trick for everyone\u2026 but I can present a guest-blog from one of the funniest girls I know: Sloane Crosley! Sloane just wrote a book, I Was Told There\u2019d be Cake, which is out TODAY. (Run! Jump! Double-click! Do what you must to get this book!)\n\nfacebook dialogPinterest\n\nSince this is a music blog, I asked Sloane to guest blog about her most uncool music-related secret. Here\u2019s what she had to say:\n\n&amp;quot;I have been keeping the following uncool secret for far too long and now is the time for the truth to come out. Are you sitting down? Good. Because I don\u2019t like rock concerts. I\u2019ve had enough mediocre experiences that I\u2019ve been permanently tainted by the flailing elbows, the neon wristbands that stick to your skin, the overpriced T-shirts and the bitter beer. You may be asking yourself what everyone asks me when I inform them of my allergy to microphone feedback: isn\u2019t live music worth it? Um, no. Beyond all of these minor concert-going infractions, lies a single moment around which my aversion to concerts centers. I am convinced that at some point, towards the very end of a band\u2019s multi-hour set, everyone would just as soon go home. The fear of looking like a dilettante fan keeps them standing and cheering for an encore, their feet pounding and their personal space violated. And this is what bugs me most: that rooms full of 50, 500 and sometimes 50,000 people are all harboring the same dirty secret. So, to make my confession complete, here are the all-time worst concerts I have ever been to:\n\n1) Rusted Root. This is not entirely the concert\u2019s fault. Rusted Root is, objectively, a bad band. This was 1991 or maybe 1992 one of the first concerts I had ever been to. It was at The Beacon in New York, Joan Osborne opened for them and I sat so close to the speakers that they changed the rhythm of my heartbeat (Rusted Root was very percussion-based). While not focusing on my palpitations, I spent the rest of the time watching a girl with dreads head bang against an intricately carved pillar until her forehead bled. True story. But maybe this is what I get for paying money to see Rusted Root.\n\n2) Travis. I saw Travis with a friend at The Electric Factory in Philadelphia. We had just returned from a study-away program in Scotland and were yearning for all things tartan. After getting into a fender-bender in the parking lot, we stood around feeling bitter at our fellow audience members for not &amp;quot;owning the music&amp;quot; they way we did. Which is funny because the prize in question was Travis. Not, say, The Clash. We consoled ourselves by screaming strange Scottish references between sets, like the names of British chain supermarkets or advertising slogans. Eventually Fran Healy looked out into the crowd, totally perpled and said, &amp;quot;Eh??&amp;quot;\n\n3) The Allman Brothers. It rained the whole time and the band played like a gun was being held to their heads. Like we were in the concert version of the movie Speed, and the entire venue would blow up if they didn\u2019t keep squeezing something resembling a tune out of their instruments.\n\n4) Belle &amp;amp; Sebastian. Try to remember that not liking a concert doesn\u2019t make me less of a fan of this band. It\u2019s more of a circumstantional problem. And in this case it was the circumstances of being in Brooklyn\u2019s Prospect Park and getting my hand crushed by a an indie guy who stepped directly on it. They also played about one song from &amp;quot;Boy With The Arab Strap,&amp;quot; which I found vaguely criminal.\n\n5) Liz Phair. I am a big fan and had seen Liz Phair once before. She was great but had no real desire to see her while she was on tour for her self-titled album. Then two tickets arrived in the mail in an unmarked envelope with no return address. I asked around but no one knew anything about it. Eventually I dragged a friend with me and spend the entire time waiting for someone to tell me I had won a million dollars or drop a bag of sand on my head. Neither happened. Much like most of Phair\u2019s performance, it was pretty uneventful.\n\nIt\u2019s not all bad. I have been to pretty great concerts (Yo La Tango, The Roots, Magnetic Fields, Luna, The Pretenders). And yes, there\u2019s a tie between the quality of the band and the concert. But at the end of the day, I\u2019d just as soon do it all sitting in my apartment with friends, safe in the knowledge that when I lift my feet, they won\u2019t stick to the ground.&amp;quot;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.teenvogue.com/story/when-concerts-go-wrong>