Listen, I love the music of The Buttertones. 

Their songs are unlike anything I’ve ever heard. They are musical geniuses, in my mind. I began listening to them at the end of 2023, especially to songs like “Matador” and “Baby Doll” from their older albums. 

Their music is a mix of many genres, such as garage pop, surf rock, and post-punk rock, not to be confused with traditional punk rock. Overall, their music isn’t hard rock, and it has lots of psychedelic music sounds, with a mix of jazzy tunes. 

Sometime during the middle of last year, I found out that The Buttertones were having an “Album Release Show” in my city, so immediately, I knew I wanted to go. There was a Halloween theme, and they encouraged us to dress up, so naturally I did.

I wasn’t expecting this experience to be so much like that of a hard rock, metal or punk rock concert. I expected people to just be swaying and dancing around. 

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I arrived about an hour early, before the doors opened, to get a good spot in the front, as tickets were general admission. The line already had about twenty to thirty people in it. 

I’m not going to lie: I was a little disappointed by this. When I had gone this early to smaller concerts like this one, I had always been, at most, the tenth person inside. 

Once we got inside the venue, I went to the front, and I ended up in the second row of people. I stood there as the spaces behind me started filling up. 

Soon, the opening acts began playing their songs. The first one was a band called Buckets, and I liked their performance and their music. Somewhere in the middle of their performance, a mosh pit formed for a few seconds, and that distracted me a bit, but it wasn’t too terrible. 

Next, the second opening band, Chicano Mosh, came up on stage and began to play their songs. I was enjoying about one or two of their songs until people started an endless mosh pit in the middle of the crowd. I was being pushed into the people in front of me, and I felt like I was being crushed. People were stepping on me and I was stepping on them because of how much crowd movement there was.

But that was not all that happened. If you didn’t push back against the people in the mosh pit, you would be hit very hard while they ran around the circle. Someone eventually ended up spilling their entire drink on me, yanking my hair and pulling my clothes off. There was not a single centimeter between me and all the people around me in the crowd, so everyone was touching each other, with no respect for personal space. 

At one point, someone ran into me so hard from the back that I lost my breath for a second. Then began the crowd surfers and stage divers. 

I don’t blame the band members themselves for all of this, but it was just the fault of the audience. They pushed themselves up to the front and climbed onto the stage where the band was performing.

I was one of the first targets of the people jumping, since I was in the front and there was no chance to get out of the way. I was stuck wherever I was standing. People were jumping into the crowd left and right, and I couldn’t keep track of them. One guy even jumped and his boots almost whacked me hard in the head, but thankfully I moved my head away just in time. 

There was a thirty-minute break after the second band’s performance, before The Buttertones went on. During the break, the crowd calmed down and I was able to push myself through the crowd and get out of harm’s way. 

I ended up standing in the very back part of the room, and I stayed there for the entirety of The Buttertones’ performance. I just didn’t want to be in that crowd again. The whole reason I went there was to see them up close, so it sucked to get one of the worst views of the show.

The concert was also meant to be for all-ages, but it seemed like very unsafe conditions for the younger audience. Most of the audience was older than eighteen years, so this didn’t seem fair for their younger fans.

You may ask, what does that have to do with the performers? Well to start off, I wish I could have known something about the way the audience would be so I could be more careful when attending concerts like these. 

Now I know to do more research on how a band’s concerts tend to be, so it won’t be an unexpected experience for me. I thought these kinds of things only happened at heavy metal or hard rock concerts. Since this band isn’t that type of music, I was not expecting this type of behavior from their audience.

Personally, I won’t be attending another Buttertones concert, even though I enjoy their music. But, if people enjoy these types of concerts, then I get it. This was just not for me.