best concert tour names

The 50 Greatest Concerts of the Last 50 Years

The list below was born out of some pretty serious arguments. Was Bruce Springsteen better in 1975 or 1978? When did Kanye hit his stride? Which was more awesome, “The Joshua Tree” or “Zoo TV”? The concerts and tours that made the final cut weren’t just huge spectacles, they deepened the power of rock & roll itself – from Neil Young thrashing out 20-minute jams with Crazy Horse to Beyoncé turning stadium glitz into a personal outpouring. “You’re almost levitating on the energy from the audience,” says Keith Richards. “And I miss it when I’m not doing it.” Here are the people who’ve done it best.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience Worldwide Tour

Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 debut album, Are You Experienced, established his genius. The 200-some shows he played to support the album assured his legend. Backed by his ecstatically indulgent English rhythm section — bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell — Hendrix did nothing short of liberate the electric guitar, turning each show into a pyrotechnic exploration. “I thought, ‘My God, this is like Buddy Guy on acid,’ ” Eric Clapton later recalled. For the U.S., the coming-out party was the Monterey Pop Festival, where Hendrix set his guitar ablaze, terrifying the fire marshal while leaving the crowd spellbound. As the Experience toured that year, they played alongside Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens in every type of venue, from theaters to biker bars. “We also did a graduation ball in Paris in March 1967, a really plush place,” Mitchell recalled. “There was an oompah band on before us, and they would not leave the stage. I remember one of our roadies, in a final act of desperation, pushing the trombonist’s slide back into his mouth – blood and teeth everywhere.” When the shows went right, however, Hendrix was a tour de force. His sense of showmanship went back to his years as a sideman with Little Richard; dressed in radiant psychedelic frills, he banged the neck of his guitar, bit its strings and played it behind his head. “With Jimi, it was a theater piece,” Soft Machine drummer and onetime Hendrix tourmate Robert Wyatt once observed. “The drama, the pace, the buildups and drops.” The peak Summer of Love moment came in early June, when the Experience played London. With the Beatles in the crowd, Hendrix opened with the title track from  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which had been released just two days earlier. “1967 was the best year of my life,” he declared later. “I just wanted to play and play.”  Kory Grow

James Brown at Boston Garden

On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. In the aftermath, America burned. There were riots in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Chicago; Kansas City, Missouri; and other cities. In Boston, city leaders expected more violence to come. Amid this tension, James Brown, the most explosive African-American musician of the era, pulled off a miracle. Brown and his band were booked to play Boston Garden on April 5th. The city considered canceling all public events that night, but the concert’s promoter, local City Councilman Thomas Atkins, convinced Mayor Kevin White that calling off a show of that magnitude might lead to even more anger and violence. “If [his] concert had not occurred,” recalled local radio DJ James “Early” Bird, “we would have had the biggest problem in the history of Boston since the Tea Party.”

Frustrating to Brown was the decision to televise the show, a way of keeping people out of the streets that would also drive down ticket sales. “But he had an obligation to honor Dr. King,” says Brown’s saxophonist and bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, and after Brown obtained the fee he wanted, everything was set.

“The show went on just as it had in all the other places we had played,” says trombone player Fred Wesley. “It was a regular show.” Of course, in 1968, the “regular show” meant a display of raw energy and dynamic power unlike anything else in music. Dressed in a black suit, hair in a tight pompadour, Brown moved with lightning quickness, his screams rattling the rafters, as he drove the band through his hits. They did “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in a double-time blur, and “Cold Sweat” featured an incredible solo showcase for “funky drummer” Clyde Stubblefield.

Still, Wesley, who had only recently become a part of Brown’s band, remembers a palpable sense of fear among the band members, and tension in the arena: “We didn’t know if there was a war against black people, or if a race war was happening. As we got to the stage, we were still wary about what might happen.”

But what ended up impressing him most was what amazed him about James Brown every night: his ability to hold and command a crowd. As the set reached its climax during Brown’s dramatic “cape act,” young fans began rushing the stage, and white police officers ran in to restore order. Shoving ensued, and the moment of mayhem many had anticipated seemed to have finally arrived.

But Brown quickly interceded. “You’re not being fair to yourself and me or your race,” he told the crowd. “Now, are we together, or we ain’t?” Turning to Stubblefield, he ordered, “Hit the thing, man,” and the band launched into a furious version of “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me).” Brown was even joined onstage by Mayor White, whom he announced as a “swinging cat.” Brown exited the stage shaking hands with the people up front, as much like a political leader as a soul star.

In the weeks to come, requests for Brown to appear elsewhere poured in, including one to travel to Washington, D.C., to speak to rioters. In August that year, he’d release his monumental message record, “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” “I was able to speak to the country during the crisis,” he later said, “and that was one of the things that meant the most to me.” Almost 50 years later, Ellis is still moved by the moment. “I’m proud to have been part of that,” he says. “I’m pleased that it came off the way that it did.” Jon Dolan

Big Brother and the Holding Company American Tour

Like so much of Janis Joplin’s career, the tour to support Cheap Thrills, her 1968 album with Big Brother and the Holding Company, was a triumph wrought from chaos. On the eve of the tour, the ­singer announced she was leaving the band, leading to screaming fights with some of the musicians. Yet that very tension — combined with grueling album sessions that tightened what, as drummer Dave Getz admits, “wasn’t a tight band” — made for a riveting farewell. The combination of her wild-child rasp and Big Brother’s wailing blues rock proved transformative. “By the end of ’68,” says Getz, “I don’t think there was a singer in rock & roll who could touch her.” David Browne

Elvis Comeback Special

“Elvis was hardly ever nervous,” says drummer D.J. Fontana, remembering the NBC special that relaunched Presley’s career after years in Hollywood. “But he was then.” The highlight: an intimate sit-down set with his band, Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore, that was almost like catching Elvis at the Louisiana Hayride back in 1954. “Performing with Elvis was amazing,” remembers Darlene Love, who sang backup for Presley on the show, “because we didn’t really know what to expect from him.” K.G.

Cream Farewell Tour

Eric Clapton ended Cream in 1968 after only two years, burned out and sick of keeping the peace between bandmates Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. But even as they were breaking up, Cream pushed the boundaries. “It had nothing to do with lyrics or ideas,” said Clapton. “It was much deeper, purely musical.” At Madison Square Garden, they played a wild, nearly 20-minute “Spoonful.” At San Francisco’s Fillmore, they played under the venue’s psychedelic light shows as Clapton, Baker and Bruce soloed simultaneously. As Roger Waters, who saw them at the time, put it, “It was an astounding sight and an explosive sound.” K.G.

Johnny Cash at San Quentin Prison

“I remember walking through two sets of iron gates, and when I heard them close, I thought, ‘Man, I hope we get back out of here,’ ” Johnny Cash’s guitarist Bob Wootton recalls of his visit to San Quentin prison on February 24th, 1969. San Quentin was (and remains) California’s oldest prison, as well as the largest death-row facility in the country.

That day, as Cash stood onstage in his usual black suit, he was greeted by a sight that might have frightened a different performer: 2,000 hollering, charged-up inmates. But Cash, who always felt a special connection to prisoners, seemed to realize the gravity of the moment. “John was very solemn that day,” Wootton says. “We all were. It reminds you how much you take for granted. John connected with [the prisoners] in a way I never saw him connect with another audience.”

Cash had played prisons before – including an earlier San Quentin gig and, famously, California’s Folsom Prison. His show at San Quentin in 1969 was a full-on revue featuring the Carter Family, the Statler Brothers and Carl Perkins, and was shot for British TV. He performed with steely intensity, when he wasn’t cracking jokes to his audience. In a sense, he became one of them.

Cash treated his set list more as a guide than as a hard-and-fast program, but ended up catering to the inmates with songs like “Starkville City Jail” and Bob Dylan’s “Wanted Man.” Cash also wrote a song for the occasion – the twangy, brooding “San Quentin.” Its first line – “San Quentin, you’ve been livin’ hell to me” – prompted hooting and cheering from the crowd. “One more time!” they called out. “All right,” Cash said. “Hey, before we do it, though, if any of the guards are still speakin’ to me, can I have a glass of water?” The crowd laughed, then booed the guard.

One of the show’s standout moments was “A Boy Named Sue,” which made its world premiere before everyone in the prison, including the band. “I didn’t even know he had the song,” drummer W.S. Holland says with a laugh. “Back then, we didn’t have monitors and couldn’t hear all that much onstage. John just started doing it. The first time I actually heard the song was [later] in the studio.”

“A Boy Named Sue” became a Number One country single and crossed over to the pop charts, clearing a path for greater success, much to Cash’s amusement. “I’ve always thought it was ironic that it was a prison concert, with me and the convicts getting along just as fellow rebels, outsiders and miscreants should,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “that pumped up my marketability to the point where ABC thought I was respectable enough to have a weekly network TV show.” K.G.

Ike and Tina Turner American Tour

The Rolling Stones’ return to America in 1969, after three years away – a period that included Beggars Banquet and the death of guitarist Brian Jones – was what critic Robert Christgau described as “history’s first mythic rock & roll tour.” But on the 17-date spin through the States, time and again they were upstaged by their handpicked opening act, old friends Ike and Tina Turner and their combustible R&B revue.

The Stones met Ike and Tina among Phil Spector’s orbit in England. “I’d always see Mick in the wings,” Tina remembered of performances in the mid-Sixties. “I’d come out and watch him occasion­ally; they’d play music and Mick would beat the tambourine. He wasn’t dancing. And lo and behold, when he came to America, he was doing everything!” Jagger later admitted he “learned a lot of things from Tina.”

In the U.S., Ike and Tina won over a new audience with wild, sweat-drenched covers of the new rock & roll canon, including a brassy burst through the Beatles’ “Come To­gether” (“I said to Ike,” recalled Tina, “ ’Please, please let me do that song onstage’ ”). They spun through Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” and a high-octane version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” that, by 1971, would become their biggest hit. Their take on Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” garnered its share of attention too, thanks to an orgasmic bridge that eventually got even raunchier. “I don’t think it can go any further,” Tina said in 1971, “because, as they say in New York, it’s getting porn­ographic.”

At Madison Square Garden, Jop­lin herself stopped by to assist on “Land of 1,000 Dances.” By the tour’s end, writers couldn’t control their enthusiasm. “ Vogue said it best,” said Tina. “ ’They came to see Mick Jagger, but they saw Ike and Tina, and they’ve been comin’ ever since.'”  Christopher R. Weingarten

Led Zeppelin World Tour

Before the private planes, mountains of cocaine and allegations of black magic, Led Zeppelin were four blokes tearing a path through America for the first time. They hit the U.S. in late December 1968, just before their debut LP hit shelves. “I remember pulling up to a theater and the marquee said, ‘Vanilla Fudge, Taj Mahal and support,’ ” Robert Plant said in 2005. “I thought, ‘Wow, here we are: support!’ ”

Everyone knew their name soon enough. A month in, they unleashed a four-hour set at the Boston Tea Party. “We’d played our usual one-hour set, using all the material from the first album,” John Paul Jones said. “The audience just wouldn’t let us offstage.” Over 168 shows that year, as they unveiled new songs like “Whole Lotta Love,” Zep’s live fury and future promise came into view. “This group could become one of the biggest bands in history,” Jones said. “I hope we don’t blow it.” Andy Greene

Black Sabbath American Tour

When Black Sabbath landed at JFK Airport for their first U.S. tour, Ozzy Osbourne scrawled “Satanist” as his religion on the immigration form. Many who saw their shows – opening for the Faces, Alice Cooper and the James Gang – didn’t know what to make of the shaggy Brits. A turning point came at New York’s Fillmore East. “I tore my floor tom off the riser and threw it at the audience,” says drummer Bill Ward. “I was like, ‘Fucking move! Do something!’ Soon everyone was headbanging.” Relentless touring in Europe had turned Sabbath into a brutal assault force. “It was primal,” says Ward of the tour. “There’s a lower self that went onstage, and it was just dynamite.” A.G.

The Who at the University of Leeds

After 1969’s rock opera Tommy , the Who wanted to return to their raw roots with a live album. Pete Townshend hated the recordings they made on their U.S. tour so much he threw them onto a bonfire. But everything clicked back home in England, in front of 2,000 ravenous fans at the University of Leeds, where the band tore through 38 songs, including a nearly 15-minute “My Generation.” Townshend later called it “the greatest audience we’ve ever played to.” A.G.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse Winter American Tour

In early 1970, Neil Young had finally become a star thanks to the huge success of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. During a quick break from that band and from recording his third solo LP, After the Gold Rush, Young decided to introduce his new fans to his other band, Crazy Horse – whose garage-rock thrash sounded the complete opposite of CSNY – on a run of clubs, theaters and the occasional junior-college auditorium. “When Neil plays with Crazy Horse, he goes into this other place and plays deep from inside,” says drummer Ralph Molina. “He becomes Neil Young, the real Neil Young.”

It was a sound no one had heard before. While other early jam bands like the Allman Brothers played with virtuosic professionalism, Crazy Horse produced raw chaos. Each night began with a brief solo acoustic set before Crazy Horse came onstage. Songs like “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” sometimes stretched to nearly 20 minutes, Young trading unhinged solos with guitarist Danny Whitten. “Danny had a strong musical presence, probably just as strong as Neil,” says bassist Billy Talbot. “We started doing songs longer, which Neil had never done before.”

In March, Bill Graham booked them at the Fillmore East for four shows in two nights, where they shared a bill with Miles Davis and the Steve Miller Band. Each night, Whitten sang “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” a song about scoring heroin, which he’d started using heavily around this time. One night backstage, Young wrote down the phrase “I’ve seen the needle and the damage done” on a sheet of paper. Within two years, Whitten was dead, and Young’s song about him, “The Needle and the Damage Done,” would appear on Harvest, the best-selling album of 1972. “It was such a loss,” said Young. “[It taught me] you can’t count on things. You just can’t take things for granted. Anything could go at any time.” A.G.

Elton John at the Troubadour

When Elton John took the stage at Los Angeles’ Troubadour for the first night of his six-date residency, he was a little-known 23-year-old pop singer with thick glasses and greasy hair who had only recently changed his name from Reginald Kenneth Dwight. When the show was over, Elton was a sensation. The stakes couldn’t have been higher: His debut LP, which had come out that spring, wasn’t selling. After what he called a “crisis meeting” with his label, it sent him to the States. The label made sure to pack the 300-capacity club with big names like David Crosby, Graham Nash and Mike Love of the Beach Boys. “The second night, Leon Russell was in the front row, but I didn’t see him until the last number,” Elton recalled. “Thank God I didn’t, because at that time I slept and drank Leon Russell.”

Neil Diamond introduced Elton. “I’m like the rest of you,” he said. “I’m here because of having listened to Elton John’s album.”

But those who had heard his album had no idea what they were in for: a poetic singer-songwriter with the flamboyance of a rock star. Album tracks like “Take Me to the Pilot” and “Sixty Years On” were played with a punk-like energy, Elton falling to his knees like Jerry Lee Lewis and knocking the piano bench over. The set also mixed in standards like “Great Balls of Fire” and “Honky Tonk Women.” And the rapturous reception he received encouraged him to experiment with even more adventurous stagecraft. “He seemed like a very quiet, subdued person,” says drummer Nigel Olsson. “All of a sudden, in front of an American audience, he started wearing Mickey Mouse ears and jumping up and down. That’s where all the strange gear started.” Unlike Elton’s debut album, which was packed with lush strings, harp and a synthesizer, he performed that night accompanied only by Olsson and bassist Dee Murray. “We just made a lot of noise,” Murray told Rolling Stone in 1987. “It was new. Elton was experimenting. Plus, we had to make up for the orchestra. We just socked it to them.”

Elton played five more nights as word started to spread around town: “His music is so staggeringly original,” Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn wrote. In the coming weeks, “Your Song” began climbing the charts, eventually hitting Number Eight in January 1971.

Forty-seven years later, Elton still looks back fondly on that first trip to America. “It was just all systems go,” he says. “Nothing was impossible. You’re working on adrenaline and the sheer fact that you’re a success. I still love what I do, and I’m 70 years old. I love it even more.” A.G.

Aretha Franklin at the Fillmore West

When promoter Bill Graham booked the Queen of Soul for his San Francisco venue for three nights in March 1971, no one was certain the matchup would work, including Aretha Franklin herself. “I wasn’t sure how the hippies reacted to me,” she said. As Franklin’s drummer Bernard Purdie recalls, “She’d been doing what you’d call Vegas-type shows. But this was a whole different audience.” No one needed to worry. With saxman King Curtis leading a band that included Billy Preston on organ, Franklin remade pop and rock classics in her own image — turning Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” into call-and-response gospel and reworking “Eleanor Rigby” as a funky stomp. The weekend of shows (portions of which were released a few months later as Live at Fillmore West ) had an appropriately glorious finale: On the last night, Franklin pulled Ray Charles out of the crowd. Though they’d just met that day, the two traded piano and vocal parts on an epic 19-minute version of “Spirit in the Dark.” “She turned the thing into church,” Charles said later. “I mean, she’s on fire.”  D.B.

B.B. King at the Cook County Jail

B.B. King was playing a regular club gig on Chicago’s Rush Street in the late Sixties when he was invited to do a show at the local Cook County Jail. “I knew the inmates would enjoy it,” said warden Clarence English. “And that would be something they’d be beholden to us …  If you give extra ice cream or let them stay up late at night, [they] don’t fight and destroy each other.”

King’s new manager, Sid Seidenberg – who was helping King score a career resurgence by booking him at venues like the Fillmore West – saw an opportunity. He told King to take the gig, and invited press and a recording engineer for a future live album (Johnny Cash had released the successful At Folsom Prison two years earlier). But what began as a commercial move became something much deeper. “I couldn’t help but feel the oppression,” King said later. “My heart was heavy with feeling for the guys behind bars.” With a full big band behind him, King belted burning takes on “Every Day I Have the Blues” and “How Blue Can You Get?” with a fury the loud assembly evidently connected with. The inmates booed when he took the stage, but by the end they were hypnotized. The show was released on 1971’s Live at Cook County Jail, a document of an electric-blues master at the top of his game. “There were tears in people’s eyes,” English recalled. “In mine, too.” Will Hermes

The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East

The Allmans were still young, hungry Georgia rockers when they booked three nights at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York in early 1971 with the idea of recording a live album. “My brother always believed a live album was what the Brothers needed to do, and the record company finally agreed,” Gregg Allman recalled. “The Fillmore was just the logical choice. I don’t think we even discussed another venue.” The LP they made there, At Fillmore East, became their defining statement.

The Allmans were initially slotted into a bill headlined by Johnny Winter. But they came out guns blazing the first night, and when the hall emptied out after their set, they were promoted to headliner. With the band order duly shuffled, the Allmans had time to stretch out on spectacular journeys — “On those long jams, you climbed in and there was no tomorrow, no yesterday,” said drummer Butch Trucks. The gigs were hardly trouble-free. On the last night, a bomb scare delayed the start of the second show until the wee hours (“Good mornin’, everybody!” someone announced before “Statesboro Blues”). That early-a.m. set ended up becoming the keeper: “Whipping Post” sprawled over gorgeous melodic terrain for 23 minutes; “Mountain Jam” ascended for more than a half-hour. Atlantic Records engineer Tom Dowd oversaw the taping; unlike most live albums, nothing needed to be redone in the studio besides a few vocal overdubs. The LP went gold on October 25th, four days before guitarist Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident. “It’s the best-sounding live album ever,” said the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. “It’s just fuckin’ awesome.” W.H.

The Band at the Academy of Music

The Band’s 1978 farewell movie, The Last Waltz, is the greatest concert film of all time. But even that performance didn’t reach the heights of the Band’s four-night stand at New York’s Academy of Music at the end of 1971. The shows, which were released as a box set in 2013, captured the Band at their tightest and funkiest, injecting New Orleans R&B swagger into their harmonious folk rock. It was a period of high morale and expert musicianship for the sometimes volatile group, the result of a decade of hard touring, with Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan and finally on their own. “There was a spell that everybody was doing really, really good,” the Band’s Robbie Robertson told Rolling Stone in 2013. “It was a roll of the dice after that. You just didn’t know what condition somebody was going to show up in.”

It was a moment the Band needed. Three years on from their groundbreaking debut, Music From Big Pink, their two most recent studio albums, Stage  
Fright and Cahoots, 
  had been greeted with 
lukewarm reviews.
 Aiming for some fresh 
energy, Robertson re
cruited veteran New
 Orleans band lead
er Allen Toussaint to 
put together a horn 
section for their holi
day gigs at the Academy of Music. It almost 
didn’t work out. To 
everyone’s horror,
 Toussaint’s briefcase 
full of horn arrangements was stolen on his way from New Orleans to the band’s Woodstock headquarters, where he was forced to rewrite the charts from memory. He wrote them in the wrong keys, and the Band had to relearn their songs in entirely new keys. Robertson recalled thinking, “We’re doomed.”

That anxiety lifted when they took the stage. “A chill ran through me,” Robertson said. “I thought, ‘OK, I’m feeling some magic in the air here. …’ As soon as we kicked off the first song,” he added, “we weren’t even touching the ground.”

The group set the tone with a taut, funky cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It,” and gracefully moved through its canon. The Band played with intensified warmth on “Unfaithful Servant” and “Get Up Jake” and jittery energy on deep album cuts like “Smoke Signal.” “We only did it once or twice,” said Robertson. “Levon [Helm] did an amazing job on it.” They turned “Chest Fever” and “Rag Mama Rag” into the stuff of a Crescent City street party, and returned to their roadhouse roots on Chuck Willis’ 1958 deep cut “(I Don’t Want to) Hang Up My Rock & Roll Shoes.”

The Band saved their biggest surprise for last. During their New Year’s Eve encore, they invited out their old friend Dylan, who had been out of the spotlight for years. Looking like his mid-Sixties self with aviators and a Telecaster, Dylan howled fiery takes of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” pausing only to talk through the arrangements. “We were being a little bit bold,” said Robertson. (The horns didn’t accompany Dylan, though: “He looked over and saw us, jumped back from the microphone and glared over his shades,” says tuba player Howard Johnson. “I told everyone, ‘OK, let’s just get offstage.'”)

Months later, highlights of those shows comprised the dazzling live double LP Rock of Ages , which critics immediately called one of the best live albums of the Seventies. For drummer Helm, it was simply “the most fun I ever had making a Band record.” D.B.

The Rolling Stones North American Tour

Mick Jagger has a clear memory of being onstage in the summer of 1972, singing “Love in Vain,” the Robert Johnson song the Rolling Stones had recently reworked into a soul ballad. Jagger still marvels at the live version – particularly Mick Taylor’s searing lead guitar, which slowly took over the song and culminated in a minute and a half of mournful, melodic virtuosity. “He was playing beautifully at this point,” says Jagger. “It was chilling. It was so sad and haunting. And the horns were really just subtly there. The beats and stops were usually perfect. That was one of my favorites.”

The Rolling Stones were at the peak of their powers in the summer of 1972: Keith Richards was playing the most fearless rhythm guitar of his career; Taylor stretched out their music to improbable peaks; and Jagger stalked the stage, whipping his belt and perfecting his ability to turn music, as critic Robert Greenfield observed, into a psychodrama.

It was the band’s first North American tour since Altamont, the disastrous, deadly California festival in December 1969. Shaken by that debacle and the death of Brian Jones, the band hunkered down in the studio, recording three masterpieces: 1969’s Let It Bleed, 1971’s Sticky Fingers and 1972’s Exile on Main Street . Their Sixties peers – the Beatles, Bob Dylan – were less prolific, withdrawing from public view. In their absence, the Stones had only grown in stature. “After 10 years of playing together, the Stones had somehow become the number-one attraction in the world,” Greenfield wrote in his chronicle of the tour, A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones . “The only great band of the Sixties still around in original form playing original rock & roll … They were royalty.”

Both Jagger and Richards remember the excitement they felt ahead of the eight-week run. If the prospect of getting back on the road weren’t enough, the opening act on tour was a 22-year-old Stevie Wonder, whom Jagger made a habit of watching side-stage. “It was exciting, the feeling of anticipation – getting back in touch with what it is we did,” says Richards. Adds Jagger, “We were trying to get out of the studio, out of the South of France, and Keith had all these drug problems – so it was kind of good to get out on the road.”

The Stones’ office was overloaded with requests for tickets, priced at $6.50 (some fans sent in as many as 60 postcards each). A Dick Cavett TV special on the tour described the strange new phenomenon of scalping (plus the new concept of groupies). On opening night in Vancouver, 2,000 fans tried to force their way into the Pacific Coliseum, leaving 31 policemen injured – the first of several violent incidents. “That was in the day when people who didn’t have a ticket would show up,” says Jagger, “and be like, ‘OK, we’re here, we’re fucking going in.'”

Unlike the 1969 tour – which featured slow, slogging rhythms – the band played at breakneck speed. “Keith was doing that,” says Jagger. “I’m not trying to blame him for anything. He kept starting it.” Says Richards, “That was probably trying to catch up with lost time.” Songs like “Street Fighting Man” ran several minutes longer than the studio versions as the band ripped away. “We were probably searching for the ending,” Richards jokes.

For Richards, the highlight was playing the new songs from Exile on Main Street, recorded the previous summer. “Playing the Exile stuff for the first time was a real turn-on,” says Richards. After opening with “Brown Sugar,” the band tore through several Exile classics: “Rocks Off,” “Rip This Joint,” “Sweet Virginia.” Unlike later tours, Jagger hung around during Richards’ songs, howling away “Happy” into the same mic. “I always enjoyed doing that,” Richards says.

There were also a few throwbacks, including a horn-fueled version of “Satisfaction,” and “Bye Bye Johnny,” a Chuck Berry song that the Stones had been doing since 1963. According to Richards, they picked the deep cut for its rhythm: “There’s an interesting reverse beat going on that always intrigued us.”

On the road, the Stones encountered an older audience – one that ranged from about age 15 to 30. “There always used to be screamers, and they didn’t seem to worry much about the music,” Bill Wyman told Cavett. As a result, the band played with more focus. It helped that arena sound had improved: “Now you hear everything and you see everything, and there’s so much tension,” said Wyman.

For all the onstage professionalism, the backstage scene was as wild as any rock & roll tour before or since. The band traveled with the largest entourage in rock history up to that point – including a physician, label president Marshall Chess and a press corps Richards compared to a political campaign. The press included photographer Annie Leibovitz, and authors Terry Southern, Robert Greenfield and Truman Capote, who reluctantly joined for a Rolling Stone cover story. “For him, it was a social occasion,” says Jagger, who recalls Capote saying he hated the fact that Jagger wore the same clothes every night. “He would’ve liked it better now – I have such a bigger wardrobe.” (Capote never wrote his piece, claiming it “didn’t interest me creatively.”)

Jagger admits that the traveling party was “a bit distracting.” He had to watch his drug intake in order to perform. “I wasn’t on meth, out of my mind or anything,” Jagger says. “But I was having a lot of fun.” Richards’ favorite story “has got to be Bobby Keys and me nearly burning down the Playboy mansion,” he says. Staying at Hugh Hefner’s home, Richards and saxophonist Keys accidentally set fire to one of the bathrooms. “We were going through a doctor’s bag and we knocked over a candle,” says Richards.

At the same time, Jagger remembers “all these dark moments” on the tour. On the morning of July 17th in Montreal, dynamite exploded beneath one of the band’s vans, destroying equipment. “It was kind of scary because it was during the separatist movement of Quebec,” says Jagger. “I mean, it wasn’t just some random guy trying to blow up a truck.” The show, remarkably, went on that night, but a riot ensued when 500 fans with counterfeit tickets were turned away.

The following day, the band flew to a small airport in Rhode Island. As the entourage cleared customs, Richards took a nap on the side of a parked firetruck. He woke up to the flashing lights of a local newspaper photographer. “I just reacted,” Richards says. “I got up and hit in the general direction of the light and busted the guy’s camera. Things escalated from there. Then the fucking FBI got involved.” The photographer claimed he was assaulted, and Richards and Jagger were arrested and placed in a jail cell, while an unruly audience at Boston Garden waited. Fearing a riot, Boston Mayor Kevin White organized their release, and the band took the stage after midnight. “There was never a dull moment,” says Richards.

The offstage chaos was documented by the legendary photographer Robert Frank, who brought along a camera for a documentary that, as Jagger understood, would be “about playing and about music.” Instead, Cocksucker Blues was a cinéma vérité experiment full of lurid scenes: naked groupies having sex on an airplane, Jagger snorting cocaine, and groupie heroin use. The band blocked its release (though it became a popular bootleg). “[Robert] would initiate things,” says Jagger. “Most documentary filmmakers kind of get you to do things that you perhaps wouldn’t do if they weren’t there.” Jagger cites the famous scene where Richards and Keys threw a TV out of a Hyatt Hotel window: “Robert would probably say to Keith, ‘Keith, throw the TV out the window.’ They probably weren’t going to do that that morning.” But Richards disagrees. “Bobby Keys and I engineered that,” he says. “We called the cameraman ’round when we dismantled the TV. So that scene was directed by Bobby Keys and Keith fucking Richards.”

The tour wrapped with four shows at Madison Square Garden. Though the Stones had played 48 shows in only 54 days, they didn’t hold back. The July 25th show featured a sentimental sing-along of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and perhaps the fiercest “All Down the Line” ever played. “You almost feel like you’re levitating on the energy from the audience,” says Richards. “It’s a strange experience.” The tour ended the following night, on Jagger’s 29th birthday. Wonder joined the band for a raucous medley of “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and a revved-up, horn-fueled take on “Satisfaction” (Wonder said he wrote “Uptight” with “Satisfaction” in mind). A cake was rolled onstage, and the show ended with a pie fight among bandmates. The afterparty, thrown by Ahmet Ertegun, included Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

It was the end of an era. Afterward, Richards slid further into addiction, and was arrested on heroin and gun charges the next year. In 1974, after only five years, Taylor left the band to go solo. The Stones’ next North American tour, in 1975, featured stage props like a giant inflatable phallus, and little of the ragged charm of the 1972 tour. “There were no sort of guidelines,” Richards says. “You sort of made it up and you went along. It was a good feeling, that tour. A bit frenetic and a little blurry, like an old movie, you know? It was a bit jerky.” Patrick Doyle

David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars World Tour

“I wanted the music to look like it sounded,” said David Bowie, who reigned over the moon-age daydream of his greatest tour as a crimson-haired, sparkly, makeup-slathered rock & roll space god. The music, thanks to the savage elegance of the Spiders From Mars, was even wilder, with an intense symbiosis developing between Bowie and chunky-toned guitarist Mick Ronson. “There was magic there,” says keyboardist Mike Garson. Ziggymania broke out across the world, and even as Bowie moved on, it never really stopped. A.G.

Van Morrison North American Tour

It takes an extraordinary band to top the studio versions of songs like “Domino” and “Cyprus Avenue,” but with the 10-piece Caledonia Soul Orchestra, Van Morrison pulled it off night after night. With horns, strings and blazing jazz chops, the band was ready to “take the songs anywhere Van wanted to take them,” says guitarist John Platania. “Every performance of each song was different.” Morrison was, as usual, lost in the music, getting so into it that he gave himself backaches – the platform shoes he was favoring at the time probably didn’t help. He rarely addressed the crowd, and kept his band on its toes with subtle gestures that sparked dynamic shifts worthy of James Brown. “He had these signals behind his back,” says Platania. “He would flash his hand and spread his fingers out. We knew instantly we had to bring it down and then build it up again.” Morrison was stretching out, toying with his phrasing, elongating syllables like a jazz singer. The band ended when the tour did – but it lives on in Morrison’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now, one of the most essential live albums of all time, recently released in a gloriously extended version. “We were sad to see it end,” says Platania. “But in those days, he would say stuff like, ‘The show doesn’t have to go on.'” D.B.

Patti Smith Group and Television at CBGB

Over a two-month-long residency, the Patti Smith Group went from art project to formidable band – and lower Manhattan’s CBGB was well on the road to becoming one of the most famous rock clubs in the world. Much of the material that ended up on Smith’s debut, Horses, came to life at CB’s, with Smith improvising poetic chants as the band brutalized simple chord patterns. “CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion call,” Smith wrote. Television, meanwhile, had just begun emphasizing the guitar-weaving tapestries they would immortalize on Marquee Moon . Rock history was being made at a club with no dressing rooms and an incontinent dog in residence – and the musicians knew it. “I remember one night standing outside CBGB, in the doorway of the derelict hotel next door, smoking a joint,” says Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, “and realizing that this was the kind of gathering of psychic energies I’d always dreamed of when, say, I would read about the San Francisco scene in 1966.” W.H.

Bob Marley at the Lyceum Theatre, London

Bob Marley’s two concerts at the Lyceum Theatre in London in July 1975 were more than just musically transcendent shows: They were the triumphant peak of Marley’s first proper tour as a solo artist and would elevate him from cult act to international icon – in part thanks to Live! , a concert document from the shows that gave him his first international Top 40 hit, “No Woman, No Cry.”

“Lyceum was magic,” recalls Marley’s friend Neville Garrick, the Wailers’ lighting designer and art director at the time. “It was an old theater, so the acoustics were proper. … They took out all the seats, and people were going from the very first song.” Booked in a small room to drive up ticket demand, the Lyceum shows sold out in a day, and roughly 3,000 ticketless hopefuls mobbed the streets outside the venue on Marley’s first night there, along with a phalanx of cops. Some fans nevertheless managed to tear the fire doors off their hinges and rush in, packing the room tighter still, shoulder to shoulder. It was so hot, condensation was dripping from the ceiling, and roof hatches had to be opened to let air in. Marley appeared before the crowd like a prophet in a denim work shirt, dreadlocks bobbing, and few moments in pop are as spine-tingling as the opening of “No Woman, No Cry,” the audience chanting the chorus like a hymn before Marley had even sung a word. Recalled bassist Aston Barrett, “Everyone onstage [got] high from the feedback of the people.” W.H.

Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue North American Tour

Bob Dylan could have played arenas when he toured to support 1976’s Desire . Instead, true to form, he did the unexpected: He booked tiny theaters with just days’ notice, charged less than $9 per ticket and took along a gaggle of friends – including Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Joan Baez. Dylan had started hanging around his old West Village haunts with buddies from his folkie days, and he wanted to take that nostalgic spirit on the road. “We all sing and sing and sing and laugh until we pass out,” Baez told Rolling Stone . “For us, it makes no difference if we just play for 15 people or 15,000.” Backed by one of his best bands ever (including guitarist Mick Ronson), Dylan stretched out shows for as long as five hours – with help from McGuinn, Elliott and others, who would do their own sets and join his. New tracks from Desire were mixed with 1960s classics (“It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Just Like a Woman”) and covers (“Deportees”). The shows were full of raw, spontaneous intimacy: Dylan duetted with his ex-lover Baez, did scorched-earth versions of “Idiot Wind,” and pleaded for the release of jailed boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. As Rolling Thunder participant Allen Ginsberg said, “Having gone through his changes … Bob now has his powers together.” A.G.

Grateful Dead North American Tour

“Our second coming,” says Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart of the band’s 1977 North American tour. Everyone knew the Dead could jam out infinitely. But that year they were discovering something new: that tight, songful concision could transport a crowd just as easily. “We had a lot of new songs and wanted to get at ’em,” says singer and guitarist Bob Weir. “And the only way to get at the next song was to finish the one you were doing.” Ironically for a band that had little use or patience for studios, it would be recording sessions that strengthened its live approach. Terrapin Station , the group’s most recent LP, was recorded with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen, who’d helmed their self-titled 1975 breakthrough; he forced the Dead to prep and rehearse more than they ever had. “Going in with Keith and having him organize and arrange all this stuff,” says Weir, “that gave us a solidity.” The results of Olsen’s whip-cracking became clear as soon as the Dead went back on the road — they tore into old favorites like “St. Stephen” and tried new combinations, like going from the fast-paced “Scarlet Begonias” into the churning “Fire on the Mountain,” and proved their newly honed chops could help sculpt jams such as the 10-minute “Terrapin Station.”

“We felt like rock gods,” Weir says. It helped that the band was in relatively good shape physically as well. “Jerry was healthy,” says Hart. “That was a big thing.” The high point took place on May 8th at Cornell University’s Barton Hall, regarded by Deadheads as the band’s greatest show ever. In the end, the 1977 tour completely changed the Dead’s sense of connection with fans, and their own musical purpose. “That was an era where it started to creep up on us that people came to hear the songs,” says Weir. “It finally dawned on us: ‘Oh, that’s what it’s all about.'” D.B.

The Ramones European Tour

The Ramones arrived in England with something to prove. The punk revolution had broken out in London in 1977, with the Sex Pistols getting wall-to-wall press and causing havoc. But no one in the nascent U.K. punk scene was ready for the precision-strike arrival of the Ramones. In his memoir, Johnny Ramone wrote that at a Pistols show on their first night in town in December ’77, “Johnny Rotten asked me what I thought of them, and I told him … they stunk.”

Three days later, the Ramones unleashed a furious assault on the audience in Glasgow, opening with “Rockaway Beach” and not taking a break until 26 songs later. Playing to a punk-crazed English audience pushed the Ramones to play their most intense shows. The tour wrapped on New Year’s Eve at the Rainbow Theatre, their 148th show of the year. “Probably the best show the Ramones ever did,” said Johnny. Amazingly, Joey had been singing through incredible pain; he’d suffered third-degree burns on his neck when a makeshift humidifier exploded on him. Said Ramones co-manager Linda Stein, “[Johnny] came to me and said … ‘Put me in a wheelchair and get me on a plane before I go insane.'” He wanted to be sedated. A.G.

The Eagles U.S. Tour

The career-defining two-year stretch of shows that followed 1976’s Hotel California saw the Eagles become a stadium band. Yet in an era in which rock shows were growing bigger and more impersonal, the Eagles’ studio perfectionists, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, found a way to recreate the feel and detail of their albums onstage, with every harmony and guitar lick seamlessly in place decades before backing tapes and Auto-Tune made that process easier. Hits like “Life in the Fast Lane” and “Take It to the Limit” were given almost impossibly pristine treatment. The tour itself was chaotic; at one point, bassist Randy Meisner and Frey got into a fistfight when Frey called Meisner a “pussy.” But you wouldn’t have known it watching their sets. “Some critic said we used to go out onstage and loiter,” Henley said. “I think we accomplished a great deal.” D.B.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band American Tour

It had been three very long years since Born to Run made Bruce Springsteen a national star. A bitter lawsuit filed against his former manager in 1976 left him legally unable to enter a studio for two years before making Darkness on the Edge of Town . “Prove It All Night,” his new single, stalled at Number 33 on the charts. Anything radio-friendly, like “Fire” and “Because the Night,” was held off Darkness to maintain the starker atmosphere Springsteen wanted for his set of songs about the reality of everyday working life. To many, all of this was evidence that Springsteen was in decline. So he did the thing he could do better than almost anyone alive: He went on tour. “With the burden of proving I wasn’t a has-been at 28,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, “I headed out on the road performing long, sweat-drenched rock shows featuring the new album.”

Springsteen and the E Street Band played 115 shows across North America, the longest series of dates they would ever play in a single year. Even the soundchecks were grueling. “Literally, we would play ‘Thunder Road’ for a half-hour and Bruce would walk around and sit in every section and make sure the sound was as good as possible,” says drummer Max Weinberg. “Look, Bruce took his fun very seriously.” Not everyone thought it was so much fun. “I thought it was a little self-indulgent and a little bit silly,” says bassist Garry Tallent. “We would do four-hour sound-checks and then a three-and-a-half-hour show. We were younger then.”

Sets featured the majority of the new album, a big chunk of Born to Run and favorites off the first two discs, like “Spirit in the Night” and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).” After so much time off, the band played with a stunning mix of pent-up energy and technical precision. “Anyone can be great on any given night,” says Weinberg. “To really be great every night takes a lot of willpower, a lot of dedication, a lot of self-confidence, a lot of respect for your audience – tremendous respect for the audience.”

Live, the songs completely transformed from their recorded versions. For “Prove It All Night,” the band added a piano and guitar intro that built to a furious climax, and “Backstreets” developed an emotional spoken-word interlude about lost love that eventually morphed into “Drive All Night,” from The River. “Even at that point, the whole thing was ‘You have to see them live – you can’t go by the record,'” says Tallent.

As the tour crisscrossed the nation, with five shows getting broadcast on the radio and quickly hitting the bootleg market, a new respect for the album took hold. “Night after night, we sent our listeners away, back to the recorded versions of this music,” Springsteen wrote in Born to Run, “newly able to hear their beauty and restrained power.”

One particularly great show took place at the tiny Agora Ballroom in Cleveland. Opening with a ferocious cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and wrapping up three hours later with a wild “Twist and Shout,” it became one of the most coveted bootlegs in rock history. “It was really hot,” says Weinberg. “Just sweltering. It was incredibly exciting. Then you just get on the bus and go to the next gig. It was like that about five nights a week with two days off.”

Word of Springsteen’s glorious return prompted CBS Records to mount a huge billboard of his image on the Sunset Strip, advertising the album and tour but making no mention of the band. “It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” Springsteen told a radio DJ. One night, Springsteen snuck up to the roof of a nearby building with Tallent and saxophonist Clarence Clemons. Armed with cans of black spray paint, Springsteen hoisted himself onto Clemons’ massive shoulders and wrote “Prove It All Night E Street” across the entire thing. “We didn’t deface it,” says Tallent with a laugh. “We corrected it. That was our way of letting people know to not expect the next coming of Christ. It’s just a rock & roll show.”

Darkness on the Edge of Town still wasn’t a commercial hit by the end of the run, but critics across the country hailed the tour as the best of the year, and the album remained at the core of Springsteen’s set list for decades to come. “[They] are perhaps the purest distillation of what I wanted my rock & roll music to be about,” Springsteen wrote. “[On the last stand of the tour] an exploding firecracker tossed by an inebriated ‘fan’ opened up a small slash underneath my eye. A little blood’d been drawn, but we were back.” A.G.

The Clash North American Tour

They called it the Pearl Harbour Tour, and they opened each night with a slashing version of “I’m So Bored With the USA.” For an English punk band trying to break through in the States, it was an interesting marketing approach. “England’s becoming claustrophobic for us,” Joe Strummer told Rolling Stone . “I think touring America could be a new lease on life.” With a touring budget of just $30,000 from their record label (most of which they gave to opening act Bo Diddley), the Clash stormed the heartland and made converts wherever they went. During downtime on their tour bus, they watched a VHS copy of Star Wars over and over. They hit the Palladium in New York in February, blowing away a crowd that included Andy Warhol and Bruce Springsteen. “Every country has one thing in common, which is they all listen to shit music,” said co-leader Mick Jones. “We’re here to alleviate that.” A.G.

Pink Floyd ‘The Wall’ Tour

Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera, The Wall, was their most ambitious album to date, and when they took it on the road the next year they knew a traditional stage show would simply not do it justice. Pushing the limits of concert technology, they built an actual wall during the first half of every show, then played the bulk of the second half behind it, obscured from the audience. “Not much spontaneity,” said drummer Nick Mason, “but we’re not known for our duck-walking and gyrating around onstage.”

The logistics were so daunting that they staged it only 31 times across 16 months, hitting just four cities: Los Angeles; London; Dortmund, Germany; and Uniondale, New York. The most dramatic moment of the show happened near the end, when the wall came tumbling down. “The first couple of bricks would terrify people in the front rows,” said guitarist David Gilmour. “The audience would think they were going to be killed.” A.G.

Talking Heads ‘Speaking in Tongues’ Tour

It was an image that defined Talking Heads for a generation of music fans – skinny, nervous David Byrne on the Speaking in Tongues tour, struggling to dance in a cartoonishly huge white suit. “What I realized years before,” Byrne says, “is I had to find my own way of moving that wasn’t a white rock guy trying to imitate black people, or bring some other kind of received visual or choreographic language into pop music … I just thought, ‘No, no, you have to invent it from scratch.'”

Since forming in the mid-Seventies, Talking Heads had gone from CBGB New Wavers to one of the biggest bands in America. For the tour to support 1983’s Speaking in Tongues, their most popular album to date, they reinvented themselves, growing from a quartet to a nine-piece funk mob that included P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell, Brothers Johnson guitarist Alex Weir and vocalist Lynn Mabry. Byrne also took cues from the experimental visual-art world, projecting abstract slides onto a spare backdrop, creating a stark aesthetic to match the band’s driving, uncluttered funk. The suit was inspired in part by Japanese Noh theater.

What emerged was arty dance-party transcendence. Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz recall the two-night run at New York’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in August as a highlight. “Madonna had just released her first record; she was walking around barefoot,” Frantz says. “I saw Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall off to the side of the stage – she was dancing, Mick wasn’t.” The Greek Theater in Berkeley the following month was a similar bacchanal. “We’d begun to get the Deadhead crowd,” Frantz says, laughing.

In late 1983, the band decided to document the tour with a concert film, and teamed up with director Jonathan Demme (who would later win an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs ). “We didn’t want any of the bullshit,” says Frantz of the band’s initial idea for Stop Making Sense. “We didn’t want the clichés. We didn’t want close-ups of people’s fingers while they’re doing a guitar solo. We wanted the camera to linger, so you could get to know the musicians a little bit.”

Shot over three nights at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, Stop Making Sense may be the greatest concert movie. It begins with Byrne walking onto a deserted stage with a boombox, setting it down, pressing “play,” then reimagining “Psycho Killer” for acoustic guitar and 808 drum-machine beats. His bandmates and backing musicians join him incrementally, song by song. “It’s cut down,” Byrne notes, comparing the film to the two-hour shows, “but there were no other substantial changes.”

The effect was so real, people actually got up and danced in movie theaters. “I’d never seen that before,” Frantz says. “Or since.” W.H.

Fela Kuti at Glastonbury

If anyone at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival didn’t already know Fela Kuti, they soon learned why he was one of the planet’s most electric artists. Before his biggest international crowd to date, Fela played big-band Afrobeat that owed as much to James Brown’s funk as to the high life of his native Nigeria. Fela managed just two songs in two hours – but the grooves were so intoxicating, no one minded. “The love the audience gave was fantastic,” recalls son Femi Kuti, who backed him on sax that day. He left a legend in his wake. W.H.

Prince ‘Purple Rain’ Tour

On each night of the Purple Rain tour, Prince and the Revolution huddled backstage for a prayer. “It was a meaningful ritual,” says bassist Mark Brown. “The crowds were so loud, and it was so crazy, that we needed each other because that was the only thing you had: each other for support.” With Prince’s movie Purple Rain  catapulting the singer toward megastardom, the 98 shows he did in support of the soundtrack album were like Broadway productions. Prince began the show ascending from beneath the stage on a hydraulic lift, and went through five costume changes. “He had all these visual cues,” recalls keyboardist Lisa Coleman. “He’d throw a hankie into the air, and when the hankie hit the ground, that’s when we would stop.” At the Los Angeles Forum, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna joined Prince for the encore, which included a nearly half-hour-long version of “Purple Rain.” “He wanted to tower over everybody,” says keyboardist Matt Fink. “He was the Muhammad Ali of rock.” D.B.

Run-DMC ‘Raising Hell’ Tour

“There was no concept of charts and no concept of airplay,” says LL Cool J, describing the landscape for Run-DMC’s 1986 tour, which featured LL, the Beastie Boys, Whodini and others as openers. That underground status changed two months into the tour, when Run-DMC had a breakout MTV hit with their Aerosmith collaboration “Walk This Way,” from their Raising Hell album. “Motherfuckers in the front row started looking like the Ramones and Cyndi Lauper,” says DMC of the new white fans who came to check out their shows. “We got a bunch of Madonnas asking for autographs.” DMC also noticed that cross-cultural appeal working the other way as a predominantly black audience embraced the tour’s beer-spraying opening act, the Beastie Boys, then months away from releasing their debut LP, Licensed to Ill. “The Beasties were crazy,” recalls rapper Ecstasy of Whodini. “They created an illusion that they were happy-go-lucky and careless, but they were on top of their shit. They were the white Run-DMC.” Competition among the artists was fierce. “I wanted to chain-saw the audience,” says LL Cool J, who was 18 years old at the time. Toward the end of the tour, a riot at a show in Long Beach, California, provided fuel for negative media coverage. But Raising Hell’ s positive legacy is undeniable. As DMC says today, “When Obama first got elected, all my white friends said, ‘That’s because of what Run-DMC did.'” C.R.W.

Metallica Damaged Justice Tour

In 1988, Metallica released their pivotal album … And Justice for All and went from thrash-metal renegades to mainstream stars. But when their manager suggested an arena tour to support the LP, the band wasn’t convinced. “I was like, ‘Seriously?'” drummer Lars Ulrich recalls. “We knew we could do L.A., New York, San Francisco, but the American heartland didn’t seem like a great idea. No band as extreme as ours had ever done a full arena tour. So we used Indianapolis as a yardstick. If we were cool there, we were cool almost anywhere. When the tickets went on sale in Indianapolis, we ended up doing 13,000 or 14,000, which in 1988 was an insane victory.”

On the Damaged Justice Tour, Metallica learned just how many authenticity-starved headbangers were really out there. The band got the first taste of its transformative power in the summer of 1988 when it was booked onto the Monsters of Rock Tour, opening for Van Halen and Scorpions. At the L.A. Coliseum, fans responded to Metallica’s set by flinging their folding chairs at the stage to create a football-field-size mosh pit. “It was bonkers,” says bassist Jason Newsted, who had recently joined the band, replacing the late Cliff Burton. “For a kid coming off a farm and jumping into my favorite band, it was very dreamy. I didn’t sleep. Every day was another dream coming true.” He also got a lesson in how to conduct himself on the road. “I’d walk on the crew bus of a big band and there’s a pile of blow on the table in the front lounge,” Newsted recalls. “I look over there at my heroes, all red and swollen, and I’m like, ‘Guess what I’m not gonna do? That!'” The kickoff of the Damaged Justice Tour coincided with the success of Metallica’s anti-war-themed video for their new single, “One,” which quickly became an MTV hit. At the peak of bloated hair metal, Metallica were playing jagged seven-to-nine-minute-long thrash odysseys. But the crowds at their shows kept growing. “The kids know that at the end of the day there’s something very real and honest about what we do,” Ulrich told Rolling Stone in 1989. “You can’t take that away from us.”  K.G.

Madonna Blond Ambition Tour

As Madonna’s career was taking off in the mid-Eighties, most of her tours were relatively straightforward affairs, based around her singing and dancing. But for the stadium blowouts that supported her 1989 classic, Like a Prayer, she wanted to up her game. In the process, she reinvented the pop megatour itself. “I really put a lot of myself into it,” she said. “It’s much more theatrical than anything I’ve ever done.” That year, Madonna had caused a nationwide controversy with the video for “Like a Prayer,” which daringly mixed sexual and religious imagery. Blond Ambition extended that provocation and upped the spectacle.

The show opened with Madonna climbing down a staircase into a factory world inspired by German expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang. She sang in a giant cathedral for “Like a Prayer” and under a beauty-shop hair dryer in “Material Girl.” And, most infamously, she simulated masturbation while wearing a cone-shaped bustier on a crimson bed during “Like a Virgin.” “The Blond Ambition Tour was what really catapulted her into the stratosphere,” says Vincent Paterson, the tour’s co-director and choreographer.

Madonna took a hands-on approach to the show, working with her brother, painter Christopher Ciccone, to design sets, and creating the costumes with fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier. “I tried to make the show accommodate my own short attention span,” she said. “We put the songs together so there was an emotional arc in the show. I basically thought of vignettes for every song.”

Starting out in Japan in April 1990 and hitting the U.S. the following month, the tour grossed almost $63 million. But it didn’t go off without any complications: Madonna had to ditch the blond-ponytail hair extensions she wore early in the tour because they kept getting caught in her headset microphone. And in Toronto, the masturbation sequence almost got her and her dancers arrested in what became a bonding moment for her entire crew.

Madonna’s close relationship with her collaborators would be a major theme in the blockbuster 1991 tour documentary Truth or Dare, especially in memorable scenes where she invited her backup dancers into her bed. Today, Blond Ambition’s over-the-top intimacy is a staple of live pop music, from Lady Gaga to Miley Cyrus. In 1990, it was a revolution. “It was a kind of turning point,” says Darryl Jones, who played bass on the tour. “A lot of young girls were watching.” Steve Knopper

Public Enemy Sizzling Summer Tour

For the tour to support their groundbreaking LP Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy wanted a show to match their music’s combative assault. “OK, if we’re gonna fill a stage, everything’s gotta be moving,” leader Chuck D recalls of the band’s approach. They’d built their live rep on short, explosive sets. Now they packed an hour with Chuck as bullhorn MC and Flava Flav as his firecracker comic foil, leaping across the stage and diving into the crowd. In Houston, Ice Cube joined them to perform his guest verse on “Burn Hollywood Burn,” a song that became each night’s incendiary high point. “We didn’t need to use pyro,” says Chuck. “When I see acts use pyro, I’m like, ‘What lazy fucks.'” C.R.W.

Sonic Youth and Nirvana European Tour

In the summer before they released Nevermind,  Nirvana were still a largely unknown band. They booked a series of European festival dates, opening for their friends Sonic Youth — and witnessed for the first time their power to convert and ignite huge crowds. “It was passionate. It was reckless,” says Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, who also astounded audiences with their New York noise-rock. “[Nirvana] were going on at 2:00 in the afternoon, playing a 20-minute set. But there was this massive amount of pogo’ing going on.” With drummer Dave Grohl on tour with the band for the first time, and the new Nevermind material, Nirvana were received almost like headliners. Kurt Cobain biographer Charles Cross called it Cobain’s “happiest time as a musician.” Recalls Grohl, “Everything was still very innocent.” A documentary of the tour, 1991: The Year Punk Broke, captured Cobain spraying champagne all over a dressing room and Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic gleefully tearing through a backstage cheese plate. The high point for Moore was in Brussels, where security tried to stop Nirvana’s nightly ritual of smashing their gear, and Novoselic had to be pulled down as he tried to climb up the closing stage curtains. “It was,” says Moore, “the most perverse, deconstructed, psychedelic freakout concert I’ve ever seen.” J.D.

U2 Zoo TV Tour

For its first tour of the Nineties, the biggest rock band in the world had one simple goal: to completely reinvent itself as a live act. U2 had just given their sound a full-scale makeover with 1991’s Achtung Baby – a groundbreaking fusion of rock, pop, electronic dance grooves and krautrock – and they needed a tour that reflected their sleek, challenging new music. “We were drawn to anything that was going to give us a chance to get away from the Joshua Tree earnestness,” said the Edge, “which had become so stifling.”

The notion of U2 as the inheritors of rock’s social mission had been central to their Eighties stardom. But as the band was well aware, it was increasingly out of step with an era defined by groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who cast a skeptical eye at sweeping Joshua Tree– style rock heroism. For the Achtung Baby tour, U2 were ready to loosen up and throw a dance party, albeit a subversive one, packed with multimedia images that were a clear break from the stark purity of their Eighties stage sets. “The tour was being conceived at the same time as the album,” Bono recalled in 2005. “Zoo radio was a phenomenon before reality TV, with so-called shock jocks such as Howard Stern. It was aggressive, raw radio, the precursor to The Jerry Springer Show. The world was getting tired of fiction. … We wanted to make a tour that referenced this zoo/reality phenomenon.”

Extensive cable news coverage was a fact of life by the early Nineties; during the Gulf War, images of Scud missiles raining down on Iraq became dinnertime entertainment. U2 essentially turned the Zoo TV set into a postmodern art installation that reflected the numbing cacophony of the cable-TV era, playing in front of a mosaic of TV screens that mashed up war footage with old sitcoms, cooking shows and everything in between.

Bono, meanwhile, came up with a new, sly persona to match the new stage set. He donned an Elvis-style leather jacket, wraparound sunglasses and leather pants that evoked Jim Morrison. He took this rock star amalgamation and created a character called the Fly. “When I put on those glasses, anything goes,” Bono told Rolling Stone . “The character is just on the edge of lunacy. It’s megalomania and paranoia.”

Zoo TV opened in Florida on February 29th, 1992. If the staging and Bono’s wild get-up weren’t enough indications this was a new U2, the band kicked things off with eight consecutive songs from Achtung Baby. “People went for it,” Bono said to Rolling Stone later that year. “The first show, you just didn’t know. ‘How is this going to go down?’ And they went for it. I think our audiences are smart and that they expect us to push and pull them a bit. They had to swallow blues on Rattle and Hum, for God’s sake! They can take it.”

The tour’s first leg coincided with the 1992 presidential race, and every night from the stage Bono called the White House and asked to speak with President Bush. “Operator Two and I had a great relationship,” Bono said. “She tried not to show it, but I could tell she was very amused, as we rang her night after night.”

Bush never took the call, but a young Arkansas governor was all too happy to talk to the band. U2 met with Bill Clinton in Chicago in September 1992 during the tour and forged what became an enduring relationship. The sitting president was unmoved. “I have nothing against U2,” Bush told a crowd in Bowling Green, Ohio, that month. “You may not know this, but they tried to call me at the White House every night during their concert. But the next time we face a foreign-policy crisis, I will work with John Major and Boris Yeltsin, and Bill Clinton can consult with Boy George.”

For opening acts, U2 chose artists who enhanced the idea of the band as a gathering point for pop music in an increasingly fragmented era – from Public Enemy to the Ramones, Velvet Underground and Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder was initially skeptical about the scale of Zoo TV, but he came around. “[I eventually] understood that these weren’t decisions they were making out of fashion or simply being clever,” Vedder said. “It was like an edict they’d created as a new philosophy for the group, to really explore the avenues of connecting to people on a large level.”

During a break in early 1993, U2 recorded Zooropa, which took the experiments of Achtung Baby further. When the tour resumed, Bono devised a new character: MacPhisto, a devilish figure with white face paint and horns. “The character was a great device for saying the opposite of what you meant,” said the Edge. “One highlight was calling the minister of fisheries in Norway, young Jan Henri Olsen, to congratulate him on whaling, which was forbidden by the European Union but legal in Norway. He actually took the call and invited Bono to come and have a whale steak with him.”

Those phone calls became a major part of each performance – some nights Bono ordered pizzas for the crowd; on another he rang Madonna on her cellphone (she didn’t pick up). As venues got bigger, U2 kept things intimate by adding a miniset to the show, playing on a tiny stage.

The wall-to-wall video screens also set the scene for every pop spectacle that followed, from Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball to Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark Tour. “Zoo TV wasn’t a set piece, it was a state of mind,” said the Edge. For Bono, the experience was life-changing: “I’ve had to stop ‘not drinking.’ I’ve had to smoke incessantly. I’ve learned to be insincere. I’ve learned to lie. I’ve never felt better!” A.G.

Radiohead at Glastonbury

The scene Radiohead encountered at 1997’s Glastonbury Festival looked more like a war zone than a concert. It had been pouring rain for days, forcing the 90,000 fans at the remote field in Somerset, England, to live like refugees in a monsoon. Two stages sank into the mud, and some fans actually came down with the World War I–era malady trench foot. Early in Radiohead’s set, Thom Yorke’s monitor melted down. The lighting rig was shining directly into his face, meaning he couldn’t see in addition to being unable to hear himself play. “If I’d found the guy who was running the PA system that day,” Yorke told a journalist , “I would have gone backstage and throttled him. Everything was going wrong. Everything blew up.”

Weeks after releasing their career-defining album, OK Computer , it looked like Radiohead might flop during a headlining set at the world’s biggest music festival. Instead, the chaos inspired one of the band’s greatest performances. Rage poured through Yorke all night long, giving extra fire to eight songs from  OK Computer, plus nearly all of The Bends —  and even a crowd-pleasing version of their first hit, “Creep.” It was a transcendent performance, even if Yorke didn’t realize it at the time. “I thundered offstage at the end, really ready to kill,” he said. “And my girlfriend grabbed me, made me stop, and said, ‘Listen!’ And the crowd were just going wild. It was amazing.” In 2006, Q magazine voted it the greatest concert in British history. A.G.

Sleater-Kinney American Tour

In early 1997, the most exciting new band in rock was a trio of young women driving their own van across the country, with only their friend Tim along as a roadie. “We’d get to the club,” recalls Sleater-Kinney singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, “and the sound man would be like, ‘Wait. You’re the band? You? You girls?'” But playing songs from its album Dig Me Out, the group bulldozed the staid indie-rock scene with unbridled punk-rock exuberance. “In Atlanta, 10 women got onstage and took their shirts off and danced with us,” says co-leader Carrie Brownstein. “I don’t know if they’d ever felt that freedom before, and I was really proud to provide the soundtrack for that.” J.D.

Pearl Jam American Tour

By the mid-Nineties, Pearl Jam were in serious danger of imploding, thanks to intraband tensions and a self-defeating war against Ticketmaster that had left them almost unable to tour. But they started over with 1998’s aptly named Yield, their most collaborative album yet, and when they hit the road with a new drummer, Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron, the shows fulfilled their promise as one of rock’s all-time great live acts. New tracks (“Given to Fly,” “Do the Evolution”) were instant crowd favorites, and classics like “Alive” sounded bigger than ever. “We’re making up for lost time here,” Eddie Vedder told the crowd one night. “Thanks for waiting.” A.G. 

Phish at Big Cypress

For Phish’s Trey Anastasio, this colossal one-band festival, at a South Florida Native American reservation, was “the culmination” of the band’s first run. “Eighty thousand people came from all over,” he said, “and virtually nothing went wrong.” The fest’s final set began around midnight, and went on for more than seven hours, displaying every side of peak Phish, a singular mix of in-joke quirks and ESP-level improv. Toward the end came an unforgettable take on the “Sunrise” section of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” played as the sun actually rose. “I will never listen to that tape because I know what a letdown it would be compared to what it was actually like,” Anastasio said. “When that sun came up, and the sky was blazing pink, it was an indescribable moment.”  W.H.

Brian Wilson at the Royal Festival Hall

For decades, Brian Wilson avoided even talking about Smile , the psychedelic follow-up to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds he shelved under the stresses of drug abuse and psychiatric problems. At a 2002 Pet Sounds show in London, though, someone said to the promoter, “How can we possibly top this?” The idea of a Smile tour came up. “We all kind of chuckled,” says Wilson keyboardist Darian Sahanaja. But 20 months later, after poring over the old Smile tapes, Wilson walked onstage and finally delivered on his decades-old promise of a “teenage symphony to God,” bringing rock’s most famous unheard album back to life. From the first celestial harmonies of “Our Prayer” much of the audience was in tears. Backstage afterward, Wilson was exultant, shouting, “I did it!”  A.G.

Daft Punk Alive Tour

In the early aughts, electronic-dance live “performances” were rarely more than one or two dudes nodding their heads around laptops. All that changed at Coachella on April 29th, 2006, when Daft Punk unveiled their genre’s most dazzling musical spectacle. In the overheated, overcrowded darkness of the festival’s Sahara Tent, two helmeted, robot-like figures – Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo – stood inside a 24-foot aluminum pyramid covered in high-intensity LED panels and performed their catalog as a megamix to nearly 40,000 fans. “It was the most synced-up we ever felt,” Bangalter said. What might have been a legendary one-off became a 2007 tour that blew minds across Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia, inspiring the likes of Skrillex and untold others . W.H.

Leonard Cohen Worldwide Tour

It started as a financial rescue mission. After Leonard Cohen learned, at age 70, that his manager/sometime-lover had absconded with most of his life savings, he realized that his only chance of replenishing his funds was to go on tour. Cohen wasn’t sure how many fans he had left, so he first agreed only to a test run of theater dates in far-flung Canadian towns.

Though he’d never
 much enjoyed touring,
 Cohen was a unique
ly charismatic live performer. Even those first shows stretched past the two-hour mark, mixing elegant rearrangements of 1960s classics like “Suzanne” and “Bird on the Wire” with more recent tunes like “Waiting for the Miracle” and “Boogie Street.” His voice had deepened considerably, but that only gave it more authority and character. “It’s like he was whispering into your ear,” says longtime backup singer Sharon Robinson.

The shows were spectacular, and word-of-mouth spread quickly. By 2009, Cohen was selling out arenas all over Europe, and eventually he hit 20,000-seaters in America, including Madison Square Garden. The tour eventually ran for 387 shows across five years. Even as he neared his 80th birthday, he kept adding new songs and stretching the running time to three and a half hours, even skipping offstage before the encores. “Leonard was really good at conserving his strength and blocking out distractions and prioritizing his energy,” says Robinson. “He lived an almost monastic lifestyle even though he wasn’t a real monk.”

By the time he played his final show, in Auckland, New Zealand, Cohen had gone from cult favorite to cross-generational icon. After he closed that performance with a sprightly “Save the Last Dance for Me,” he doffed his hat, took a deep bow and walked off the stage, smiling. “I want to thank you,” he said to the audience. “Not just for tonight, but for all the years you’ve paid attention to my songs.” A.G.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert

The idea was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with no less than the most important multi-artist concert in history. “I knew the anniversary had potency,” said Hall of Fame Foundation chairman (and Rolling Stone founder) Jann Wenner. “I thought that we had earned the right and responsibility to do this thing. It was an opportunity not to be missed.”

The organizers were determined to put on a show that was far more ambitious than any of the previous megashows, while capturing the intimate, collaborative spirit of the annual induction ceremonies and telling the story of rock & roll. “[I kept saying], ‘If this is just miniconcerts of greatest hits, I’m bored,'” recalled co-producer Robbie Robertson. “‘What do we have to offer that you can’t get anywhere else?'”

The shows, held over two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, were a rock fan’s dream, with all the artists delivering blistering, unforgettable sets, no doubt inspired by the presence of so many of their peers and the event’s grandeur. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, who closed the first night, performed at their absolute peak, turning themselves into a soul revue as they backed Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Tom Morello and Darlene Love. U2 brought Springsteen back the next night, but the biggest moment came near the end of their set, when they kicked into “Gimme Shelter,” and – out of nowhere – an unbilled Mick Jagger appeared onstage to the stunned delight of the crowd.

The first night began with a nod to rock’s origins: Jerry Lee Lewis pounding out “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Next were Crosby, Stills and Nash (joined by Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and James Taylor), Stevie Wonder (with guests Smokey Robinson, John Legend, B.B. King, Sting and Jeff Beck) and a note-perfect Simon and Garfunkel. On the closing night, Aretha Franklin sang with Annie Lennox and Lenny Kravitz; Jeff Beck jammed with Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons and Sting; and Metallica backed Ray Davies, Ozzy Osbourne and Lou Reed.

“For a lot of us here, rock & roll means just one word: liberation. Political, sexual, spiritual liberation,” Bono said onstage, before Springsteen interrupted him with the other side of the equation: “Let’s have some fun with it!” A.G.

LCD Soundsystem at Madison Square Garden

“It’s your show,” LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy shouted to a sold-out Madison Square Garden. The raging farewell by Murphy’s beloved group was a Last Waltz for New York’s early-’00s dance-rock scene. “I thought it would be really sad,” recalls keyboardist-vocalist Nancy Whang. “But it was just fun. The energy in the room was really charged.” Fans danced to near-exhaustion as LCD played songs from their entire catalog. With barely two months to prepare the nearly four-hour spectacle, featuring a choir, a horn section and a rickety spaceship, the band tackled a production scale beyond its experience. “It was held together with gum and string,” Whang admits. The night (captured in the 2012 film Shut Up and Play the Hits ) ended in a snowstorm of balloons, culminating the band’s dream of throwing “the best funeral ever.” W.H.

Jay Z and Kanye West ‘Watch the Throne’ Tour

“I’m sorry if this is your first concert,” Kanye West said to a Los Angeles crowd on the Watch the Throne tour. “It’s all downhill from here.” Supporting their triumphal 2011 LP, Watch the Throne, Jay Z and Kanye convened the greatest superstar summit in hip-hop history. The pair performed on giant, rising cubes that projected video, and, when the tour hit Paris, encored with their hit “Niggas in Paris” 12 times in a row. “People just wanted more,” says the tour’s lighting designer Nick Whitehouse. “It made people crazy.” C.R.W.

Fleetwood Mac ‘On With the Show’ Tour

The return of Christine McVie after 16 years brought the Mac’s live show to a whole new dimension. Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar solo on “Go Your Own Way” soared to new heights; Stevie Nicks seemed possessed during the nightly exorcism of “Rhiannon”; and all three voices locked seamlessly on “Little Lies.” It was all the magic of 1977 without the distractions of hard drugs and sexual soap operas . A.G.

Taylor Swift ‘1989’ Tour

“You’re not going to see me playing the banjo,” Taylor Swift warned Rolling Stone at the outset of her 1989 world tour. On her Speak Now and  Red tours, she claimed her turf at the crossroads of country, pop and classic arena rock. But for 1989, Swift made her bold move into full-on dance pop. She turned up the glitz with new material like “New Romantics” and “Blank Space” (“blatant pop music,” as she put it), but she didn’t compromise on her trademark emotional overshares, whether opening up in confessional interludes or torching up ballads (“Clean”). Swift aimed for a glammier look onstage, reflecting the grown-up flair of the music, and she invited high-profile guests: In Nashville, she duetted with Mick Jagger; in L.A., she brought out Beck, St. Vincent, Justin Timberlake, Chris Rock and Alanis Morissette. It all summed up her staggeringly ambitious vision of modern pop. Rob Sheffield

Beyoncé Formation Tour

Strutting in stacked heels across the turf of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, wrapped in golden bandoleers and flanked by a Black Panther–styled phalanx of dancers, Beyoncé performed “Formation” at the 2016 Super Bowl in a cameo appearance even fiercer than her 2013 Super Bowl triumph. It was the overture to a tour that redefined stadium-scale concert staging. “She had an overall vision of what she wanted,” says Steve Pamon, chief operating officer of Beyoncé’s label, Parkwood Entertainment. “Not only in terms of a business, but in the type of experience we want to give the fans.”

Four days before the tour began, Beyoncé surprise-dropped her instant classic Lemonade. British set designer Es Devlin, who had previously worked with Kanye West and U2, created a kind of spectacular intimacy that fit the album’s personal themes. At midstage was the “Monolith,” a video-screen centerpiece standing seven stories high that projected the show in 70-foot magnification, making every seat feel front-row. On opening night in Miami, Bey burned through “Crazy in Love” and “Bootylicious” in a fire-engine-red latex bodysuit and matching boots, looking like an anime empress. The shows also dialed it down for slow jams like the breakup meditation “Mine,” during which the Monolith split in two to reveal dancers suspended on cables while Bey and a squadron in lace bodysuits rose up from beneath the stage. At the end of the show, a moving catwalk connected the main stage to a huge wading pool, where Beyoncé and her dancers splashed around in a baptismal moment that reflected Lemonade’ s journey from betrayal to rebirth.

The Formation World Tour began around the time of Prince’s death. In Minneapolis, she performed his classic “The Beautiful Ones” before a rapt crowd, honoring a hero and placing herself in his epic lineage. “I would put that tour up against any performance,” Pamon says. “By any artist at any age.” Brittany Spanos  

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Chappell roan cancels all things go music festival appearance: “things have gotten overwhelming; i need a few days to prioritize my health”, breaking news.

The Top 10 Music Tours Of 2023

By Robert Lang , Tom Tapp

As in most other areas, Taylor Swift dominated the touring landscape in 2023. Her The Eras Tour grossed more than $1 billion , the biggest haul for any tour ever.

But there were other notable acts making big bucks on the road this year, including Beyoncé , Harry Styles and Drake .

Scroll through the gallery below to see who came out where on the list.

1. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

2. Beyoncé: Renaissance World Tour

$579 million

3. Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band 2023 World Tour

$379 million

4. Coldplay: Music Of The Spheres Tour

$325 million

5. Harry Styles: Love On Tour

$290 million

6. Morgan Wallen: Dangerous Tour

$284 million

7. Ed Sheeran: + – = ÷ x Tour

$268 million

8. P!NK: Summer Carnival Tour

$231 million

9. The Weeknd: After Hours ‘Til Dawn Tour

$220 million

10. Drake: It’s All A Blur Tour

$184 million

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52 biggest concert tours 2023: get tickets for springsteen, swift & more.

2022 was undoubtedly a huge year for live music— Paul McCartney, BTS, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga and My Chemical Romance all put on substantial nationwide tours.

To that, 2023 says, “No big deal.”

Although announcements are still dropping every day, 2023’s slate already appears ready to rival 2022’s with colossal pop, classic rock, modern rock, R&B, country and hip-hop tours on the horizon.

It doesn’t matter what musical genre is your favorite; there will likely be a huge tour you’re excited about on our comprehensive list of upcoming tours.

From Springsteen to Swift to SZA , here are the 52 biggest acts on tour in 2023 — one for each week — you won’t want to miss when they come to a city near you next year.

Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour”

Featuring Paramore, HAIM, Phoebe Bridgers, beabadobee, Girl In Red, MUNA, Gayle, Gracie Abrams, and OWENN on select dates Runs March 17 through Aug. 9

Adele’s “Weekends With Adele”

Runs Jan. 20 through March 25

Ed Sheeran’s “Mathematics Tour”

Featuring Khalid, Russ, Dylan, Rosa Linn, Cat Burns and Maisie Peters on select dates Runs May 6 through Sept. 23

Katy Perry’s “Play”

Runs Feb. 15 through April 15

WizKid’s “More Love, Less Ego Tour”

Runs May 6 through Sept. 23

Classic Rock

Bruce springsteen and the e street band.

Runs Feb. 1 through April 14

Billy Joel with Stevie Nicks’ “Two Icons, One Night Tour”

Runs Jan. 13 through Sept. 23

Jimmy Buffett’s “Life On The Flip Side Tour”

Runs March 4 through May 6

Sting’s “My Songs Tour”

Runs April 1 through April 9

John Mellencamp’s “Live and In Person Tour”

Runs Feb. 5 through June 24

Lynyrd Skynyrd with ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Simple Man Tour”

Featuring Uncle Kracker Runs July 21 through Sept. 17

Journey’s “Freedom Tour”

Featuring Toto on select dates Runs Jan. 27 through April 25

Runs Jan. 25 through May 28

Dead and Company’s “The Final Tour” with John Mayer

Runs May 19 through July 16

Def Leppard, Motley Crue and Alice Cooper’s “The World Tour”

Runs Feb. 10 through Aug. 18

Elvis Costello’s “100 Songs and More Tour”

Runs Feb. 9 through March 10

Morgan Wallen’s “One Night at a Time Tour”

Featuring Parker McCollum, Hardy, Ernest and Bailey Zimmerman Runs April 14 through Oct. 7

George Strait’s “Stadium Tour”

Featuring Chris Stapleton Runs May 6 through Aug. 5

Garth Brooks’ “Plus One Las Vegas Residency”

Runs May 18 through Dec. 16

Zac Brown Band’s “From the Fire Tour”

Featuring Marcus King, Tenille Townes and King Calaway Runs June 23 through Nov. 4

Reba McEntire’s “Reba: Live In Concert Tour”

Featuring Terri Clark and The Isaacs Runs March 9 through April 15

Blake Shelton’s “Back To The Honky Tonk Tour”

Featuring Carly Pearce and Jackson Dean Runs Feb. 16 through March 25

Luke Combs’ “World Tour”

Featuring Riley Green and Lainey Wilson Runs March 25 through July 29

Shania Twain’s “Queen of Me Tour”

Featuring BRELAND and Hailey Whitters on select dates Runs April 28 through Nov. 14

Kane Brown’s “Drunk or Dreaming Tour”

Featuring Dustin Lynch and LOCASH Runs March 16 through Aug. 3

The Judds’ “Final Tour”

Featuring Martina McBride, Brandi Carlile, Kelsea Ballerini, Little Big Town and more Runs Jan. 26 through Feb. 25

Thomas Rhett’s “Home Team Tour”

Featuring Cole Swindell and Nate Smith Runs Feb. 9 through Sept. 29

Kenny Chesney’s “I Go Back Tour”

Featuring Kelsea Ballerini Runs March 23 through July 22

Carrie Underwood’s “Denim and Rhinestones Tour”

Featuring Jimmie Allen Runs Feb. 2 through Dec. 9

Lady A’s “Request Line Tour”

Featuring Dave Barnes Runs Feb. 22 through Oct. 28

Runs Jan. 25 through Feb. 18

Lizzo’s “Special 2our”

Featuring Latto Runs April 21 through June 2

SZA’s “S.O.S. Tour”

Featuring Omar Apollo Runs Feb. 21 through March 23

Janet Jackson’s “Together Again Tour”

Featuring Ludacris Runs April 14 through July 9

Usher’s “My Way: The Vegas Residency”

Runs Feb. 24 through July 15

The Temptations with The Four Tops

Runs Jan. 13 through May 21

New Edition’s “The Legacy Tour”

Featuring Keith Sweat, Guy and Tank Runs March 9 through April 30

Nick Cannon’s “Next Superstar Tour”

Featuring Symba, 24kGoldn, Justina Valentine, Hitman Holla, JD McCrary, Traetwothree, Klondike Blonde, DW Flame and POP MONEY Runs Feb. 25 through April 8

’80s, ’90s and ’00s rock

Metallica’s “m72 tour”.

Featuring Pantera, Five Finger Death Punch, Mammoth WVH and Ice Nine Kills on select dates Runs Aug. 4, 2023 through Aug. 30, 2024

Blink 182’s “North American Tour 2023”

Featuring Turnstile, Rise Against, The Story So Far and Wallows on select dates Runs May 4 through Oct. 21

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Featuring The Strokes, Iggy Pop, The Roots, Mars Volta, St. Vincent, City And Colour, Thundercat and King Princess on select dates Runs Jan. 14 through July 21

The Killers’ “Imploding The Mirage Tour”

Runs March 16 through March 25

Maroon 5’s “M5LV The Residency”

Runs Feb. 4 through Aug. 12

Matchbox Twenty

Runs May 16 through Aug. 6

Third Eye Blind’s “An Evening With Third Eye Blind”

Runs March 10 through April 15

Arctic Monkeys’ “North American Tour 2023”

Featuring Fontaines DC Runs Aug. 25 through Oct. 1

Depeche Mode’s “Memento Mori Tour”

Runs March 23 through April 14

Muse’s “Will Of The People Tour”

Featuring Evanescence, Highly Suspect and ONE OK ROCK Runs Feb. 25 through June 25

Death Cab for Cutie & the Postal Service’s “20th Anniversary Tour”

Runs Sept. 8 through Oct. 13

Paramore’s “In North America Tour”

Featuring Bloc Party and Genesis Owusu Runs Feb. 9 through Aug. 2

Pink’s “Summer Carnival 2.0”

Featuring Pat Benatar with Neil Giraldo, Brandi Carlile, Grouplove and KidCutUp on select dates Runs July 24 through Oct. 9

New Found Glory’s “Make The Most Of It Tour”

Featuring Leanna Firestone Runs Jan. 28 through March 22

They Might Be Giants

Runs Jan. 10 through May 21

Dropkick Murphys’ “Full Electric St. Patrick’s Day Tour”

Featuring The Rumjacks, Jesse Ahern and The Turnpike Troubadours Runs March 1 through March 19

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31 Must-See Tours & Music Festivals: How to Get Tickets to Missy Elliott, Megan Thee Stallion, Justin Timberlake & More

We've put together a list of 30 tours and music festivals to attend in 2024.

By Latifah Muhammad

Latifah Muhammad

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2024 is the year of mega-tours. After two years of rescheduled, postponed or canceled tours and concerts , music fans can rejoice in knowing that live shows are in full swing.

How to Score Tickets to Bad Bunny’s Most Wanted Tour

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For more tour guides, check out our roundups of 2023 Latin Tours in the U.S. , Las Vegas residencies and country musi c tours .

A List of Must-See Music Tours (Updating)

Alanis Morisette — The Triple Moon Tour launches on June 9 in Phoenix. The tour will feature Joan Jett and the Blakchearts. Get tickets here and here .

Avril Lavigne — Avril Lavigne: The Greatest Hits Tour kicks off on May 22. All Time Low, Simple Plan, Royal & the Serpent and Girlfriends will be featured on select dates. Get ticket here and here .

Billie Eilish — The Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour starts later this year. Get tickets here and here .

Billy Joel — In addition to joining Stevie Nicks for a co-headlining tour , Billy Joel has solo shows scheduled for this year. Get tickets here .

Blink-182 – Blink-182 will be heading back on tour in North America this summer. Buy tickets here .

Bruce Springsteen – After postponing 2023 dates, Bruce Springsteen resumed his tour in March. Buy tickets to see The Boss here and here .

Chris Stapleton – If you enjoyed his rousing rendition of the National Anthem at last year’s Super Bowl , you need to see the country star live . Get tickets to here .

Dave Matthews Band — The Dave Matthew Band’s tour starts today (May 22). Get tickets here and here .

The Eagles – The legendary band announced a UK residency as part of the band’s farewell tour. Get tickets to see The Eagles here .

Foo Fighters – The Foo Fighters’ Everything or Nothing Tour starts in July. Get tickets here and here .

Janet Jackson — Following the success of last year’s Together Again Tour, Janet Jackson is extending her stage run. Get tickets here .

Justin Timberlake — Justin Timberlake added additional dates to the Forget Tomorrow World Tour. Get tickets here and here .

Luke Combs – Luke Combs extended his Growin’ Up and Gettin’ Old Tour into this summer. Get tickets here and here .

Nicki Minaj — The Pink Friday 2 Tour starts launched in March. Get tickets here and here .

Megan Thee Stallion — The Hot Girl Summer Tour started on May 14. Get tickets here and here .

Missy Elliott — Busta Rhymes, Ciara and Timberland will join Missy Elliott for her first-ever, headlining tour in July. Get tickets to the Out of This World: The Missy Elliott Experience 2024 Tour here and here .

Metallica – The hotly anticipated M72 Tour from the rock legends returns to North America this summer. Get tickets here and here .

Olivia Rodrigo – The Guts tour is making its way around Europe. The tour returns to the U.S. in July. Get tickets here and here .

The Rolling Stones — The Hackney Diamonds Tour launched April 28 in Houston. Get tickets here .

Stevie Nicks – Stevie Nicks will be on the road starting in February. Get tickets to see the music icon live here .

Taylor Swift – The international leg of the Eras Tour started in Japan in February. The pop star will be back stateside later in the year. Get tickets here .

Usher — The Past, Present Future tour starts in August. Get tickets here and here .

2024 Music Festivals: Where to Get Tickets

Coachella, Stagecoach, SXSW, Lollapalooza, Dreamville Fest, Global Citizen Festival and Austin City Limits are just some of the many festivals on the calendar this year. See a list of upcoming festivals below.

Austin City Limits Music Festival — The 2024 Austin City Limits Music Festival will be held on Oct. 4-6 and Oct. 11-13).

Bonnaroo Festival — Post Malone, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fred Again, Reneé Rap, Megan Thee Stallion, Malanie Martinez, Diplo, Jason Isbell, Dominic Fike and T-Pain are some of the performers on the bill for Bonnaroo 2024. The festival will be held from June 13-16. Get tickets here and here .

Bottle Rock Festival — The Bottle Rock Festival takes place from May 24-26 in Napa, Calif. The lineup features Stevie Nicks, Megan Thee Stallion, St. Vincent, Nelly, Pearl Jam, Bebe Rehxa, Ed Sheeran, Mana, Kid Laroi, Kali Uchis, Queens of the Stone Age and more. Get tickets here and here .

CMA Fest — CMA Fest returns to Nashville from June 6-9. The lineup includes Gretchen Wilson, Reyna Roberts, Ashley McBryde, Britney Spencer, Jelly Roll, BRELAND, Gavin Degraw, Chase Matthew, Carly Pierce, The War & Treaty, Lainey Willson and Keith Urban. Get tickets here and here .

Lollapalooza Festival — Tyler the Creator, Hozier, Stray Kids, The Killers, Metro Boomin, Blink-182, Melanie Martinez and Skrillex From Aug. 1-4. Get ticket here and here .

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The biggest gigs and tours to look forward to in 2023

From reunited legends to rising stars, 2023’s live calendar is jam-packed with unmissable appointments

Times are tough right now, there’s no denying that. But there’s also no denying the healing power of music – especially going to witness your favourite artist or new obsession live. Luckily 2023 is already jam-packed with massive tours and big gigs to help brighten up our lives, whether that’s Arctic Monkeys stepping up to stadiums, rap’s newest star GloRilla showing her mettle, or reunited legends like Blur and Pulp giving us some good old nostalgia. Here are the biggest gigs and tours to look forward to this year.

• Arctic Monkeys

Dates announced: Arctic Monkeys ’ 2023 dates start early, ringing in the New Year in Australia. From there, they’ll tour Asia and Europe, before coming home to the UK for a massive stadium tour and returning to the US.

Why you should go: To witness a live show as dazzling as the mirrorball the band performed around on their 2022 tour. Something tells us the grandiose strings of latest album ‘The Car’ will sound absolutely majestic in the humongous venues the Monkeys will be playing over the next 12 months.

Dates announced: Elton John starts his year in Australia and New Zealand before returning to the UK and Europe for a  Glasto finale .

Why you should go: These are quite literally your very last opportunities to see one of pop’s most iconic and unique artists. Sure, loads of acts say they’re quitting touring and then have a big change of heart a few years later, but you don’t want to take the risk of missing out on Elton.

• Red Hot Chili Peppers

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Dates announced: Red Hot Chili Peppers will tour New Zealand, Australia and Asia in the first two months of the year, moving on to North America in spring, and Europe and the UK in summer.

Why you should go: They’re pros at the big stadium spectacular – they’ve been doing it for long enough by now. They’re also bringing some huge names with them in support, from Post Malone to The Strokes and Iggy Pop . Not bad!

• Harry Styles

Dates announced: After three rescheduled LA dates in January, Harry Styles will head to Australia in February, continuing on to Asia and Europe, arriving in the UK in May.

Why you should go: The ‘Love On Tour’ tour might seem never-ending, but even if you’ve been multiple times, it’s still a whole lot of fun to go again. Enjoy the conga lines to ‘Treat People With Kindness’ and make friends with your seatmates as you bellow out Harry’s modern pop anthems together. Sounds lovely.

Dates announced: The iconic British girl group will head down under in February before playing a one-off London date in September.

Why you should go: These dates are a continuation of the original Sugababes line-up’s reunion – Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhan Donagh – and will see the women celebrating the 25th anniversary of the group. They’ve been through a lot of ups and downs in that time, but this feels like a perfect way to mark the milestone.

Dates announced: US tour begins January 27.

Why you should go: GloRilla is the hottest new hip-hop talent in the game and it’s not going to be long before she’s filling massive venues around the world. Get down to this tour and say you saw her first – and enjoy her mix of femininity and boldness in her infectious songs.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

Dates announced: US leg begins February 1; the tour arrives in Europe on April 28, with UK dates from May 30.

Why you should go: There’s been some (deserved) uproar about very expensive tickets, but if you can find a pass at a reasonable price, Springsteen will certainly give you value for money – his gigs are known to stretch for hours, rattling through the big hits and the fan favourites far longer than most acts would perform for.

Dates announced: US leg runs from February to August, with UK dates nestled in the middle in April.

Why you should go: To hear the brilliant new songs from upcoming album ‘This Is Why’ among all the best cuts from their back catalogue. Plus, it’s been way too long since Hayley Williams and co went on a proper tour – five years, in fact.

• Caroline Polachek

Dates announced: The UK, Europe and North America are all on Caroline Polachek ’s schedule, beginning in the former in February.

Why you should go: The alt-pop star’s live shows have been described as a work of art and she always packs surprises into her sets – like at her last London gig, when she was joined by Croydon’s Trinity Girls Choir on ‘Billions’.

Self Esteem 

Dates announced: UK tour kicks off in February.

Why you should go: This tour feels like a victory lap for Self Esteem , who arguably has had the best last couple of years out of all of us. Her album ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ has constantly wowed fans and critics alike, while her live show has been praised as one of the best in recent memory. Give yourself another chance to see why it’s so brilliant before she inevitably pops off to come up with her next mind-blowing record.

Dates announced: US tour kicks off February 21.

Why you should go: Because SZA ’s new album ‘SOS’ is a very late contender for Album Of The Year and, had it been released earlier, would certainly have been nearing the top of a lot of lists. If you need any more incentive (you shouldn’t), she’s also bringing along Omar Apollo in support to add some extra greatness.

Dates announced: The Doncaster rock’n’roller will head out on a world tour, beginning in the UK in February before hitting Europe and North America.

Why you should go: Yungblud ’s gigs are renowned for being inclusive, euphoric and theatrical celebrations where you can let go, be yourself and find a community of kindred spirits. We could all do with a bit more of that energy in 2023 so get down to a show and make the most of it.

Dates announced: Europe tour begins February, with UK dates from March before continuing onto North America.

Why you should go: Lizzo shows are the ultimate upper – a feel good celebration of life from one of the most infectious personalities in music. Grab your mates and make sure you get there in time for “bad bitch o’clock”.

Dates announced: The ladies of BLACKPINK will take their BORN PINK tour across Asia, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand in the first half of the year, before heading to London in July to headline BST Hyde Park.

Why you should go: This K-pop girl group know how to put on a show , from hi-tech, futuristic VTs to set the mood between each phase of the concert, to artful and flashy stage production. The songs are equally as good – by the time you leave the venue, you’ll have several jostling for place as that day’s earworm.

Dates announced: Blink ’s return begins in South America on March 11, before heading to North America in May and the UK and Europe in September.

Why you should go: It’s the pop-punk icons’ first tour with Tom DeLonge since he left the band in 2015 – aka a massive deal. There’s also a new album on the way, so this won’t just be a big nostalgia trip.

• Taylor Swift

Dates announced: US leg begins March 17; international dates TBA.

Why you should go: Taylor Swift ’s 2023 tour is dubbed ‘The Eras Tour’ and, while it’s not entirely clear exactly how she’s going to honour each of her past albums yet, it’s guaranteed to be the perfect chance to celebrate the many highs of her brilliant career so far (if you can beat Ticketmaster). Plus, the support bill in the US is stacked, with Paramore , Phoebe Bridgers , Gracie Abrams , Haim , Girl In Red , and many more along for the ride.

The Walkmen 

Dates announced: US tour begins April 24; one further festival date confirmed so far at Portugal’s Paredes de Coura Festival.

Why you should go: Sure, New York in the early noughties had The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol , but it also had The Walkmen , a band who often get left out of top billing when talking about that much-romanticised scene. Take one listen to the indie disco classic ‘The Rat’ and tell us that’s fair, and then go book your tickets to their reunion tour.

Dates announced: The tour begins in Europe in April, heading to the UK for two sets at Download Festival in June, before moving onto North America.

Why you should go: As if you need a reason to go and see Metallica , the titans of metal. But just in case: they’re masters of their craft – aka big, bruising, headbang-worthy riffs – and have a discography of seemingly endless anthems for you to get lost in the moshpit to.

Dates announced: The Italian rockers will tour Europe across spring with a massive London gig at The O2 in May.

Why you should go: In this day and age, it’s rare for Eurovision contestants to carve out careers post-Song Contest that aren’t short-lived or derided as novelty. But Måneskin are living proof that it is doable, so long as you have the tunes and the charisma to deserve more than 15 minutes of fame. The four-piece have both in bucketloads, as you can bear witness to on this tour.

Dates announced: An intimate UK tour in May.

Why you should go: Foals are now one of the biggest bands in the UK and so the opportunity to see them in tiny venues is a rare chance we must grab when it’s presented to us. Dance to ‘My Number’ on the sticky floor of a club in spring, then celebrate their ascent as they headline Reading & Leeds in the summer.

Dates announced: The UK and Ireland-only dates begin in May, continuing til July.

Why you should go: They’re back, baby! Just under a decade since their last live performances, Pulp have reunited once more and are taking their show back on the road to liven up our summer. Expect all the classics, but no Steve Mackey – the bassist has confirmed he won’t join the band on tour.

Dates announced: Select European festival dates woven between three headline shows in Dublin and London this June.

Why you should go: When Blur first reunited in 2009, they instantly blew away any fears that the band might not be the same after years apart. This latest reunion should be no different and the members seem in good spirits about it, too. “We really love playing these songs and thought it’s about time we did it again,” Damon Albarn said when the gigs were announced.

Moldy Peaches 

Dates announced: One London show and appearances at Primavera Sound in Barcelona and Madrid

Why you should go: It’s been 20 years since anti-folk icons The Moldy Peaches last performed in Europe. Although they announced their reunion with the slogan “Once a Moldy Peach, always a Moldy Peach”, who knows when this opportunity to see New York underground royalty will come around again?

Joni Mitchell 

Dates announced: George, WA, Gorge Amphitheatre (June 10).

Why you should go: Joni Mitchell might be playing only one date next year but you should move heaven and earth to try and make it. Why? The last time she held a full concert was 23 years ago and it’s unlikely she’s about to hit the road for even a handful more dates at this point, so it could be your only chance to see the bonafide legend live.

Pet Shop Boys 

Dates announced: The UK and European tour runs from June to July.

Why you should go: This is Pet Shop Boys ’ ‘Dreamworld – The Greatest Hits Live’ tour so you’re basically assured that you’re going to hear all of the biggest and best songs in their inimitable arsenal.

Dates announced: London, Finsbury Park (June 23)

Why you should go: It’s Jamie T ’s biggest headline show to date and bound to be an absolute riot. This is an artist who can do indie disco bangers, poignant, softer (if booze-soaked) cuts, and everything in between and make it seem effortless.

The Weeknd 

Dates announced: UK and Europe tour begins in June before covering Latin America.

Why you should go: This huge stadium tour will cover both of The Weeknd ’s two latest albums – ‘After Hours’ and ‘Dawn FM’ – taking you inside the sci-fi-tinged world of both masterpieces.

Dates announced: Stormzy will take over one day of London’s All Points East, curating a special ‘This Is What We Mean Day’.

Why you should go: The whole day will be Stormzy’s vision – something he’s already proved countless times is a great thing. The line-up has yet to be announced but expect to discover exhilarating new talent, big names making surprise appearances and, of course, it all to be topped off by a headline set from Big Mike himself.

The Postal Service & Death Cab For Cutie

Dates announced: US tour kicks off September 8

Why you should go: Ben Gibbard is pulling double duty on the tour, fronting both The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie . The tour itself is a celebration of two albums – the former’s ‘Give Up’ and the latter’s ‘Transatlanticism’, and you’ll get to see both played in full. What more could you ask for?

• Related Topics
• Bruce Springsteen
• Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
• Death Cab for Cutie
• Joni Mitchell
• Pet Shop Boys
• Self Esteem
• The Moldy Peaches
• The Postal Service
• The Walkmen

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The 50 Best Concerts of 2022

Out: couch potatoes. In: crowd surfers… even if we just define that as breaking the waves of the lines of fans queued up to catch concerts during the music world’s first fully open-for-business year in a while. Our writers were making up for lost pandemic time by catching shows at SoFi Stadium, the Forum and the Troubadour on the west coast, or Madison Square Garden, the Kings Theatre and Town Hall back east… or even in Las Vegas, Nashville, Tulsa, Philly, Paris and Medellín. Here, in no particular order, are 50 great ones that reminded us how streaming is ultimately no match for being in the room where it happens. — Chris Willman

Elton John at Dodger Stadium (11/17-20/22)

There was some suspense going into the opening night of Elton John’s three-night stand at Dodger Stadium, the capping engagement to what was billed as his final U.S. tour — not for what he would play, since his set lists have been pretty locked in place, but for what he would be wearing at the finale, since everyone assumed he would come up with a variation on the Dodger uniform he famously wore there back in 1975. In the end, he skipped anything like actual field wear in favor of something more befitting a knight than a ballplayer: a very fancy Dodgers robe. That encore look inevitably made him look like someone who might be ready to retire for the night, but there was nothing about the almost two-and-a-half hour performance that suggested a fellow about to actually retire, apart from the “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” lettering atop the massive proscenium. This was John in top vigorous form, sounding and feeling like he’s ready for the next 50-some years — leaving the touring scene still at the top of his performing game, exiting because he wants to, not because he has to. A touring loss that we maybe hadn’t considered as much is how we’ll miss his touring ensemble, with longtime mainstays like guitarist/MD Davey Johnston, percussionist Ray Cooper and drummer Nigel Olsson being stars in their own right. This was a slightly misty, mostly joyful wave bye-bye to one of the great bands of the 20th and 21st centuries, along with one of the greatest singular entertainers. Each time you see him, meanwhile, there’s the shock of rediscovering what a rollicking rock ‘n’ roll pianist he is. On the globally webcast night 3, Brandi Carlile, Dua Lipa and Kiki Dee joined him for delectable guest turns. But no one coming the previous two nights felt cheated — of star power, still-vital vocals, or magic fingers that still split the difference between classical training and boogie-woogie like no other player in history. All that and glitz, too… however were we so lucky? (Read Variety ‘s review of Elton’s opening night here and coverage of the finale here .) — Willman

Bono at the Orpheum in L.A. (11/13/22)

We thought we’d signed up for a “book tour,” those of us who were fortunate to get tickets to the U2 frontman’s short run of shows in mid-size theaters. Perhaps he’d stand at a podium and crack open his new memoir, “Surrender,” taking a few audience questions for an encore? It was far from anything like that — this was “Bruce Springsteen on Broadway” meets an acrobat’s act, figuratively and almost literally. As physical as he is during a U2 tour, that’s how physical he was in this extended “reading,” from leaping onto a table for dramatic effect to moving back and forth between chairs as he reenacted testy and moving conversations with his father in a pub. If prompters were involved, it sure seemed like Bono was mostly doing without them as he mixed and matched verbatim passages from the book — with a very few additional asides, such as: “Like everyone who arrives in Hollywood, I have a screenplay I’d like you to look at… based on my book that I wrote me-self.” (“My book that I wrote me-self” was a recurring refrain, lest anyone imagine there was a ghostwriter in his machine.) There was music, too, from a trio of musicians that would help out with a snippet of “With or Without You” or “I Will Follow” or two full-length renderings of “City of Blinding Lights.” Mostly, though, there was glorious talk — from the seeds of creation in U2’s origin story to the recurrences of death in the passings of a mother and father and (nearly, in the recounted heart operation that is the show’s opening monologue) Bono himself. So how do we get him to turn this into a months-long residency that most fans who want to could see? Because every day he should write this book. — Willman

Kendrick Lamar at Paris’ Accor Arena (10/22/22)

People had been saying all day before  Kendrick Lamar ’s second sold-out show at Paris’ Accor Arena that the crowd’s reaction on the first night made his  summer concerts in Brooklyn , Las Vegas and even the four-night, North American tour-closing stand in his hometown of Los Angeles seem tame. Damned if they weren’t right. The Paris crowd responded much more powerfully to the songs from Lamar’s challenging latest album, “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers,” than American audiences seemed to. (U.S. audiences did get to see the Paris show, as Amazon Music livestreamed it over Prime Video  and Twitch in an elaborate 19-camera shoot.) He doesn’t jump, he rarely raises his voice, and he doesn’t dance conventionally. But a closer look reveals that the deeply disciplined control and complexity of his lyrics is fully equaled in his performance, from his moves to the lighting and effects. It’s like watching the engine of a fine-tuned Mercedes. “The Big Steppers Tour” was almost the obverse of the ordinary concert tradition, where the hits are saved for encores or the end of the set. Lamar is far from ordinary, and the show was designed to acknowledge his past and please the crowd early — but conclude by signaling that this is where he is now and he knows exactly what wants. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Jem Aswad

Haim at the Hollywood Bowl (5/1/22)

Haim ’s homecoming show at the  Hollywood Bowl  felt a little bit like a block party first, and a big rock ‘n’ roll coronation secondarily. “We are Valley girls through and through!” declared Alana Haim, one of the three sisters who make up the core group, explaining why “there’s gonna be a lot of emotion tonight.” When they’d headlined the Greek Theatre across the hills in 2017,  that  might’ve seemed like the prime hail-the-conquering-heroes moment of their lives, but, of course, there were bigger nearby ravines to conquer. They’re still a rock band when they want to be, Haim is unconcerned about re-proving any rawk bona fides when they could be experimenting with slightly left-of-center pop or R&B chord progressions, picking and choosing styles in service to one of the best song catalogs anybody in rock or pop has amassed in the last 15 years. It felt like a just world for 100 minutes at the Bowl as the evening turned into a celebration of both Haim and Los Angeles, an explosion of mutual affection more cathartic than anything even P.T. Anderson could come up with for a last act. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Willman

Bad Bunny at SoFi Stadium (9/30/22)

The North American leg of Bad Bunny’s “World’s Hottest Tour” lived up to that promise, as the Puerto Rican phenom achieved the  top-grossing tour  of August with this trek, consisting of several stops in the country’s biggest venues. He pulled out all the stops for the first of two back-to-back shows at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium, bringing out several guests — including the reggaeton pioneer  Ivy Queen , who played a medley of her hottest hits — and declared his love for L.A., inciting cheers throughout the night with: “¡Los Latinos in L.A., que se sienta!” During his performance of “Yo Perreo Sola,” Ivy Queen appeared on stage and finished out the last few lines of the track as Bad Bunny’s hype woman. The Puerto Rican singer and pioneer of the Latin urban scene did a short set list of her biggest hits starting with “Te He Querido,” plus “Quiero Bailar” and “Quitate Tu Pa Ponerme Yo.”  Bomba Estéreo’s Li Saumet, who joined him on stage in a neon pink and green look for their Latin Grammy-nominated “Ojitos Lindos.” By the time Bad Bunny’s show-closers “El Apagón” and “Después De La Playa” began to play, the audience was ready to give up any last bits of energy it had left. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Thania Garcia

Dua Lipa at the Kia Forum (3/23/22)

When we called “Future Nostalgia” “the reigning dance-pop album of the century,” we meant it, and her two-night stand at the Forum couldn’t have been a happier two-year anniversary celebration for a record we strongly suspect we’ll be spinning for decades. That she was just now getting around to performing this music live felt like an ideal punctuation point to all but officially mark the end (knock on wood) of the quarantine era “Nostalgia” came out at the beginning of. As much as Dua Lipa is a bona fide superstar at this point, her tour had a kind of thrilling community spirit to it, evident right at the start when she introduced her dancers and band with generous opening credits, teasing a terrific ensemble movie of sorts that her beautifully choreographed show turned out to be. You can’t exactly call Dua Lipa an Everywoman… not when she is modeling something as alien-seeming as a fluorescent yellow-green one-piece that has her boots impossibly sewn right into the costume (and matching long gloves out of a Bob Fosse Day-Glo dream). She’s not “just like us,” but the effect of the show was to weirdly make us feel like we were marching down that same catwalk, or levitating above it in some kind of sympathetic fluidity. (Read Variety ‘s original coverage here .) — Willman

Rhiannon Giddens with the LA Phil at Walt Disney Concert Hall (11/12/22)

Giddens is as insanely talented an artist as we have today, but how she found time to pull off a one-off as spectacular as her collaboration with the L.A. Philharmonic is anyone’s guess. She’s usually doing shows and recordings with her partner Francesco Turrisi, and co-wrote an opera, “Omar,” that was wrapping up its west coast premiere run a few blocks away in downtown L.A. the same weekend she performed with the Phil. But when Julia Bullock and Ava DuVernay come calling, even the busy listen, apparently. DuVernay and Bullock brought Giddens in as part of their Rock My Soul festival at Disney Hall, dedicated to celebrating Black female artists. Giddens’ show further made good on that by having conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson at the helm of the orchestra, as well as the (all-woman and partly, not entirely, Black) Resistance Revival Chorus on the bill as opening act and returning for the headliner’s encore. This was the Giddens show of anyone’s dreams, matching her banjo plucking to a massive swell of strings that transformed songs both familiar and not so much so. The traditional Black folk song “Waterboy,” for instance, which Giddens has usually sung a cappella, felt less stern and more playful, even sensual, somehow, in this setting. And she again proved that she is one of the few people around who has much business singing “Summertime,” a song you have to be pretty sure the Gershwins presciently wrote for her. Any chance the Phil could create a way to make Giddens a singer-in-residence for a whole season? — Willman

The 1975 at NYC's Madison Square Garden (11/7/22)

Frontmen should be fun. Obnoxious, pretentious, eccentric… yes, all good words when it comes to the face of your favorite rock band. So when singer Matty Healy introduces  the 1975  as “the greatest band on the planet,” or gnaws on a slab of raw meat or mimics masturbation more than once in one concert, at least he’s giving you something to talk about. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that over the last decade, the 1975 has been one of rock’s most consistent acts, and their live show has evolved into an impressive culmination of five strong records and a bevy of hits. Ripping through two dozen of their greatest songs and new album cuts, the 1975’s sold-out Madison Square Garden show was a captivating exposition from a band that embraces nearly every pop trope yet demands to be taken seriously. The 1975 transformed the Garden’s stage into an enormous deconstructed house, fully furnished with couches, lamps, bookcases and vintage televisions — lots of them. Healy delivered one song from the top of a spiral staircase and another atop the roof. The singer’s wandering around the set, lounging on the couch and sticking his head out of its fake windows, gave the show not only a vague narrative but also a more intimate, literally homey feel. It got weirder, as Healy began chewing on a raw meat shank and doing push-ups until, finally, he climbed into a TV and disappeared. Despite the vague political messaging and elaborate staging, the most exhilarating part of the show was the songs. Healy and company are no strangers to stunts, theatrics and moments designed for Twitter virality, but if there’s one thing the 1975 won’t let you forget, it’s that they’re one hell of a live band. — Ethan Shanfeld

Danny Elfman at the Hollywood Bowl (10/29/22)

Elfman had warned that the weekend Bowl shows should not be seen as a family-friendly variation on the “Nightmare Before Christmas” screening/concerts he did at Halloween-time at the same venue in 2015, 2016 and 2018, and in a detour last year to the Banc of California Stadium downtown. His main point was that this career-encompassing show, with its courser language and copious overhead animation of intestines in various states of visible distress, was not “family-friendly.” But, in fact, he did deliver three songs from that film’s song score early on — “Jack’s Lament,” “This Is Halloween” and “What’s This?” — which is really about all the musical “Nightmare” anyone needs in one night. The real joys were in the twin poles of the evening: full-orchestral versions of instrumental score excerpts from his 40-year filmography’ and a resumption, after decades of avoiding rock ‘n’ roll, of his manic frontman side, combining Oingo Boingo chestnuts from the ’80s and early ’90s with the more industrial-sounding selections from his rock comeback album, “Big Mess.” There’s never been a show quite like this one because there’s never been a career like this. That he pulled it off as a cohesive concert experience made the show wildly successful, and not just because he’s refilling his rock reservoir after an epic drought. It almost felt like Christmas, with or without the boxed-up snakes. (Read Variety ‘s full review of the show here and preview of the concert here .) — Willman

Lizzo at the Kia Forum (11/18/22)

Lizzo wrapped up the North American leg of her “Special” tour in November with back-to-back, sold-out shows at the Forum, filmed for her HBO Max “Live in Concert” New Year’s Eve special. The concerts were marked by special guest appearances from Cardi B (“Rumors”), SZA (“Special”) and Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott (who surprised Lizzo onstage while she performed their hit “Tempo”). But what made the shows unique was Lizzo’s intention behind the production. The Grammy- (and Emmy-) winner opens each concert by asking the audience, “When was the last time you said something kind about yourself?” It’s the type of bracingly honest question that you’d expect at from your therapist, not a pop star. And what follows is essentially a two-hour music therapy session as Lizzo twerks her way through a lineup of high-energy anthems (“It’s About Damn Time,” “Truth Hurts,” “Juice” and “Soulmate”), soulful ballads (“Jerome,” “Naked”) and Sasha Flute-solos with the help of the Lizzbians and the Little Bigs band and her Big Grrrls dancers. The concert experience is best described as a church service-meets-self-help seminar, leaving audiences floating out of the arena with renewed self-esteem. One could say you’re feeling “Good As Hell.” And it’s all by Lizzo’s design. — Angelique Jackson

'Brandi Carlile: In the Canyon Haze — Live From Laurel Canyon' at the Ross House in L.A., and on IMAX Screens (9/28/22)

Carlile had a terrific headlining tour of amphitheaters, and in some all-star or one-off gigs in person or on television, she was the master of the get-in-and-get-out showstopper number, from Elton’s U.S. finale to the memorials for Naomi Judd and Loretta Lynn to a pair of “SNL” appearances that bookended the year. But maybe her crowning 2022 moment as a live performer was a concert she did that went out live to hundreds of IMAX screens from a hillside overlooking Laurel Canyon at dusk. (The setting was enough to finally give grassy knolls a good name again.) A lot of times, on shoots as high-concept as this one, the magic either doesn’t quite translate to the screen or is actually a lot more vivid through the camera than it is on-site. I was there for the shoot, and as I walked back and forth between what was happening against the sunset outdoors with a very minimal crew and a big screen inside the adjacent house, I can vouch that what viewers saw in their local theaters felt exactly what it was like to be there. That’s a testament to director Sam Wrench’s bold move to shoot every song as an intimate single take, alternating Steadicams and cranes. But of course it’s really a testimonial to Carlile’s ability to create real intimacy wherever she goes, amid the coyotes or in a cinematic attack of the 50-foot woman. (Read Variety ‘s original coverage here .) — Willman

Paul McCartney at SoFi Stadium (5/13/22)

Paul McCartney  has something to prove. What that is is between him and his shrink, but what we do know for certain is that, in the year of our lord 2022, McCartney was doing two-hour-and-40-minute sets that encompass 36 songs… on top of maintaining his custom of doing separate-admission VIP soundchecks with different setlists. At SoFi, he was just days away from turning 80, and few would begrudge McCartney if he cut a few corners: cutting the set length to a reasonable two hours here, lowering the keys a little there, or dropping some of the vocal ad libs to save his voice for Syracuse. But McCartney was not about to use this milestone finally half-ass it, or even three-quarters-ass it. On top of the sheer quantity of catalog, he still  howls . Yes, if you listen carefully, it’s maybe a softer, less throat-ravaging version of the howl than he used to do, but that’s more of a technical adjustment than anything that is going to stand in the way of anyone enjoying a balls-out resurrection of “Helter Skelter.” Will he continue to be able to keep coming around for stadium tours in years to come? Only Mama Nature knows, but for now, there was reason to be grateful that he just can’t stop going back to the top of the slide. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Willman

Björk’s ‘Cornucopia’ at the Shrine Auditorium (2/1/22)

This stage show reimagined Björk’s 2017 album “Utopia,” twisting the batch of love songs into a plea for the environment. Björk twirled and danced around a crowded stage filled with flautists, a harpist, a choir and a cutting-edge light spectacular which painted the Shrine’s gorgeous interior with morphing floral and fauna, some real, some imagined, some merging with Björk’s masked face. As the band — which included hypnotic percussion from Manu Delago and dense arrangements courtesy of musical director Bergur Porisson — moved around the stage for each song, it evoked faeries pirouetting through the forest, more ethereal in movement than, say, David Byrne’s lo-fi marching band in “American Utopia.” — William Earl

Joni Mitchell MusiCares Person of the Year Salute at Las Vegas' MGM Grand Conference Center (4/1/22)

No, it was not filmed for broadcast (apparently), so you had to be there to see Mitchell feted for three solid hours by Beck, St. Vincent, Yola, Mickey Guyton, John Legend, Lauren Daigle, Allison Russell, Cyndi Lauper, Sara Bareilles, Lucius, Chloe Bailey, Black Pumas, Herbie Hancock, Pentatonix, Violet Grohl and musical co-directors Brandi Carlile and Jon Batiste. Billy Porter got got a standing ovation for a very dramatic and slowed-down rendering of “Both Sides Now,” but the most riveting reading of the night’s voluminous covers was Yola’s stunning “Urge for Going,” with the instrumental assistance of Wendy & Lisa. Also slaying: Christian music star Lauren Daigle’s “Come in From the Cold,” with Carlile and Lucius providing stacked backing vocals that were a marvel in themselves; Carlile doing a “Woodstock” that started out in spooky, ruminative territory before suddenly exploding into full-bore rock ‘n’ roll mode with Stephen Stills coming out for a guest shred on guitar; Beck turning a song as strange as “The Jungle Line” into something stranger still, and also strangely exhilarating. Please, someone, tell us that the word that this show wasn’t recorded for public airing was just a dirty lie. (Read Variety ‘s original coverage here .) — Willman

Jack White at the YouTube Theater in L.A. (5/31/22)

The YouTube Theatre, a new mid-size theater built next to SoFi Stadium and the Kia Forum in L.A.-adjacent Inglewood, almost felt too gleaming and spanking-new to offer the proper vibe for a down-and-dirty White gig. Yet he had a way of making even this suddenly feel like a classic old-school rock hall like the Fillmore West, or at least become our imagined version of what it might have been like to see a classically lead-guitar-fueled show from back in the day when T-rexes and Hendrixes still walked the earth. Touring behind two world-class 2022 albums, “Fear of the Dawn” and (the then-not-yet-released) “Entering Heaven Alive,” White led his band through paces that might have woken up and thrilled the ghosts of horse racing fans who hung around the Hollywood Park track that was demolished on the site. Fifty years after Ten Years After, he’s a conduit back to how it must’ve felt to be part of a Woodstock and Bill Graham genre-mixing generation in which rock could hit as hard as it was ever going to and still feel smart, spontaneous and proficient, as well as primal. If he can sound a little like a carnival barker when he’s doing callouts to the crowd, that makes sense — he’s out there putting on the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Show on earth. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Willman

Pavement at NYC's Kings Theater (10/3/22)

Back in the day (“the day” being the 1990s),  Pavement  became so typecast as a cliché-lambasting, anti-rock band that they never really got credit for what a great rock band it was — and, as its 30th-ish anniversary tour showed, still is. Although the members always downplayed their ability to “rock out” and still do, when the band locks in on hypnotic grooves while singer-guitarist Stephen Malkmus plays solos with a Lou Reed-ish combination of soaring melodies and brittle squall (usually finishing with some self-mocking gesture), it can hold its own with virtually any rock band. Although their current tour — their second reunion trek, following one in 2010 — consists entirely of songs dating from their 1989-1999 recorded career, for this stand, the group mixed up the setlists every show, playing between 25 and 30 songs in just under two hours, on four consecutive nights. To be seeing this band playing in a gorgeously ornate venue like Brooklyn’s Kings Theater as middle-aged men, Pavement truly delivered. Hopefully, it won’t be another 12 years before they tread the boards together again. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Aswad

Allison Russell at the Troubadour (11/15/22)

The title of one of Russell’s signature songs, “Joyful Motherfuckers,” provides an apt description for just about any audience that comes to see this riveting breakthrough artist as a headliner. She’s been out enough as an opening act (coming through town with Lake Street Dive in 2021 and Andrew Bird at the Greek earlier in 2022) that it took till this Troubadour show for her to make it to L.A. under her own top billing, something that felt especially well-earned in the wake of her “Outside Child” solo debut having deservedly won album of the year a few months earlier at the Americana Honors. Getting a deeper exploration of that album, with its harrowing themes of abuse, was an emotional experience unto itself, and her revival of the slavery-themed “Quasheba, Quasheba,” a song she first sang as part of Our Native Daughters, was a stark reminder of just how far and severely back abuse runs in North American Black families. But she didn’t skimp on joy (and not even because she has Joy Clark in her band) — from a Sade cover to her own brand new semi-political anthem “Georgia Rise,” Russell brings a brand of feel-good that’s never felt more well-earned. (Read Variety ‘s commentary on her award wins and nominations here .) — Willman

‘Quentin Tarantino: Cinema Speculation Book Tour’ at the Theatre at Ace Hotel (11/3/22)

Quentin Tarantino went the rock star route to promote his new book, “Cinema Speculation,” holding sold-out live events at Los Angeles’ Ace Hotel, San Francisco’s Castro Theatre and the Town Hall in New York City with fellow film brains. The Bay Area event was a dud (Tarantino was sick and the host reportedly stoned), but the SoCal crowd went wild for a deep dive into the director’s ’70s obsessions, as Rotten Tomatoes awards editor (and longtime pal) Jacqueline Coley got personal, grilling QT about his influences. After two hours of banter, Tarantino gave a colorful, anything-but-sober reading of the final chapter, about Floyd, the Black family friend who took “Little Quentin” to outrageously inappropriate (yet formative) screenings. Never shy about the “N word,” Tarantino channeled the man who inspired several of Samuel L. Jackson’s most iconic characters. — Peter Debruge

Lady Gaga at Dodger Stadium (9/10/22)

Surrounded by brutalist architecture and rocking other-worldly outfits, Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball finally landed at Dodger Stadium. Rather than save her biggest hits till last, Gaga had everyone on their feet as she front-loaded her setlist with a trifecta of smash tunes that included “Bad Romance,” “Just Dance” and “Poker Face.” Dodger Stadium had become a dance floor with the biggest party in town that would last over two hours. The stripped-back ballad section was another spectacle, a highlight showcasing just Gaga at a piano, belting out her Oscar-winning tune, “Shallow.” It was quite a unifying moment, an escape from the pandemic era we were all going through, as all 52,000 attendees joined in a sing-along, maskless and forgetting about all our worries. It was also mesmerizing to look around in any direction to see fans dressed up recreating her looks… think Comic-Con but Gaga-Con. How did Gaga cap the night off? With mile-high pyrotechnics that could burn toast if you stood too close as she sang her soaring ballad from “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Hold My Hand.” The show was worth the wait — coming after a full two-year pandemic delay — and a reminder of her artistic range, not that we ever needed it. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Jazz Tangcay

The Smile at NYC's Hammerstein Ballroom (11/20/22)

The Smile is a band formed during the pandemic by the most public-facing members of Radiohead, singer Thom Yorke and lead guitarist and musical wizard Jonny Greenwood. Their debut album “A Light for Attracting Attention” causes a racket, blending the primal power of axe-heavy Radiohead albums (think “The Bends” blended with “In Rainbows”) with the songwriting precision of post-punk, sprinkled with the experimentation of Greenwood’s solo compositions. Along with drummer Tom Skinner, the group bounded through standouts including the piano ballad “Pana-vision,” which devolved into a noisy outro, complete with Greenwood attacking his electric bass with a bow; “Bending Hectic,” an experimental and extended jam which could live alongside “A Thousand Leaves”-era Sonic Youth; the slinky, minimalist “The Smoke,” and set-closer “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” a rousing, pissed-off rocker. — William Earl

Billie Eilish at L.A.'s Kia Forum (4/9/22)

Here’s a hot take: Eilish’s 2021 album “Happier Than Ever” was every bit as strong as 2019’s “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” So what a hell of a set list Eilish had coming into her 2022 tour, just two albums (or two and a half, if we count her 2017 EP) into a career that’s amassed a library of songs for her, at 20, that almost any other performer would envy at 50. Maybe nothing can live up to the shock and awe of her coming out of the gate on Coachella 2019’s second stage with a show that proved she was as captivating a live performer as she was a recording artist, but consistency trumps even the excitement of initial flashpoints. Going into a headlining slot at Coachella 2022, Eilish and her brother  Finneas  preceded that locally with a sold-out three-night stand at L.A.’s Forum that established she’s in a sweet spot where a performing maturity has set in before the first, most glorious flush of youth has waned. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Willman

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss at the Greek (8/19/20)

In the annals of popular music, has there ever been a more successful confluence of two existing solo brands than  Robert Plant  and  Alison Krauss ? Theirs seemed to go down as a one-and-done in the late 2000s, but after 2021’s reunion album, they were back on the road this year for the first time in 14 years. These two feel born to be together … occasionally. This tour felt like home, and like Halley’s comet. As a bonus, this time around,  JD McPherson  is the lead guitarist  and  fantastic opening act; while that’s quite a break for him, it’s also a boon for the audience, many of whom are getting their first exposure to one of the best there is in American rock ‘n’ roll. You could see Plant’s and Krauss’ admiration for McPherson in how, after usually singing apart from one another, they’d step back together into the shadows to look at him like proud parents. The highlight of the show for many was surely a version of Zeppelin’s classic “When the Levee Breaks” that managed to cleverly interpolate some of the instrumental parts from a separate Zeppelin song, “Friends”; it turns out Krauss is capable of making her instrument feel as much Middle Eastern as middle-Tennessean. But the real high point was the Zep cover that immediately preceded it, “The Battle of Evermore,” in which it was Krauss’ voice making the substantial contribution to a ’70s rock standard. She so made it hers, Zeppelin’s recorded version feel forever like it’s missing something going forward. (Read Variety ‘s full review here .) — Willman

Bob Dylan at the Terrace Theatre (6/21/22)

It’s almost comical to compare what Dylan is doing at 81 with what Paul McCartney has been doing in stadium shows just on the cusp of 80. One’s a people-pleaser, and the other is a walking Rorschach test, or hall of mirrors. But they’re putting on what may be the two most reliably great shows of 2022, despite flying or bussing in from opposite ends of the solar system. You don’t want McCartney to act his age, but to defy it. On the other hand, it’s fantastic that Dylan is putting on what absolutely amounts to a rock ‘n’ roll show where nonetheless you  can  believe how old he is, because the depth of his performance is heightened by our awareness of the years he’s logged, which add to the palpable mythos that’s already there in the music. The barely death-defying danger of “Crossing the Rubicon,” or the fountain-of-youth giddiness of “Coming Up”? Listen, it’s OK to want both from our favorite octogenarians! At 81, Dylan is acting his somber age, and yet, in the fun of the arrangements, you sense him deep at play in the fields of the Lord. (Read Variety ‘s full review here .) — Willman

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis at NYC's Kings Theatre (3/25/22)

Commensurate with the empathetic lyrical vibe of Nick Cave’s most recent studio albums (“Ghosteen,” “Carnage”), the praying mantis-like vocalist presented a live show in Brooklyn that was equal parts quiet sermon and communal fireside chat. Aided by the Kings Theatre’s shrine-like design, Cave’s usual menace disappeared, leaving in its wake an intensity borne of the wealth of deeply-felt emotion and fellowship. The reverie of Cave’s live, prayer session was nearly broken when the audience spilled from the theater to the shock that Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins had died. Somehow, Cave’s message lingered in the air as fans struggled to process the tragic news. — A.D. Amorosi

The Mars Volta at NYC's Terminal 5 (9/29/22)

This reunion tour, in support of a new self-titled record that marks the end of a decade-long hiatus for the Texas rockers, is a reminder not only that the group itself is back but keenly aware of their legacy as a taut, adventurous live act ready to blend genres at a breakneck pace. Their musicianship was jaw-dropping on standout tracks like “L’Via L’Viaquez,” a classic rock collision where a Zeppelin-esque rager abruptly swerves, dipping into a Latin jam out of the Santana playbook. Toggling back and forth between the styles could be whiplash-inducing, but there was enough talent and communication on stage to keep the complex song structures crisp and flowing. — Earl

Father John Misty at Hollywood Forever Cemetery (8/20/22)

Father John Misty sang “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” early on in the show nearly every night on his 2022 tour, but when he deigned to sing it at Hollywood Forever during a two-night stand at the mortuary/outdoor concert venue, thinking about how meta that was made him momentarily flub the words. But a lot of his songs are at least that life-and-death. “It didn’t occur to me till last night, my first time playing in a graveyard, that my catalog has quite a serious body count,” he said on night two. “We’re, like, five (songs) in, and quite a few dead.” The songs with mortal coils ranged from “Chloë,” which ends with the effervescent starlet of the title throwing herself from her balcony, to “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” a song about a dead cat (or, really, the death of the relationship between its two owners). He also made a joke out of saying “I’d like to dedicate this next one to all the dead people in introducing “Please Don’t Die.” But the song itself is no gag — for all his elusiveness and wryness, Misty has his hand on the throbbing pulse of anyone who ever suffered such anxiety or existential terror that they let themselves bottom out, or worse. Meanwhile, the new album, which ventures more into short-form narrative, strictly fictional songwriting than he has in the past, has some of the best orchestral arrangements that have been put to a pop record in years, by Drew Erickson — and against all odds, those were carried over to the tour, thanks to a substantial string section and horn section Misty took out on the road with him. It was a show that, in its catharsis, felt positively death-defying. (Read Variety ‘s original review of the Hollywood Forever concerts here , and of his appearance earlier in 2022 with the LA Phil at Disney Hall here .) — Willman

The Who at the Hollywood Bowl (11/1/22)

The Who — aka surviving members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend — was touring with an orchestra, just as the band did a few years earlier, pre-pandemic. If anyone thought that particular deja vu was a valid reason to pass on picking up a ticket this time around, the Who’s Hollywood Bowl season-capping show proved this music and these arrangements make for as mandatory a visit as ever. Daltrey sounded in impossibly fine form, and Townsend seemed fully invested, wanton windmills and all (he’s claimed that his cartilage is so damaged it’s easy to do them again). And hearing the full symphonic take on a generous selection of “Tommy” at the beginning and “Quadrophenia” at the end? That’s a catalog and a combination that rock-estras will still be trying to pull off long after you and I and Rog and Pete are gone, so what joy to get the full package now. It doesn’t hurt that Zak Starkey pulls off replicating Keith Moon’s unmistakable style in a way that we probably wouldn’t let anyone but the scion of rock royalty get away with. The show-closer offered a special treat: young lead violinist Katy Jacoby putting a literal spring in the step of “Baba O’Riley.” (Read Variety ‘s 2022 interview with Townshend here .) — Willman

‘Homeward Bound: A Grammy Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon’ at the Pantages (4/6/22)

On the recent television special as well as at the original taping at the Pantages last spring, the unmistakable highlight of the Simon tribute was having Rhiannon Giddens join Simon for the penultimate number, “American Tune,” which she sang alone to his guitar-picking accompaniment, with slightly altered lyrics that spoke to a non-white legacy of these United States. But the entire evening was a feast fit for the king of American tuneage, including, of course, a generous swath of “Graceland,” arguably the most important album of the ’80s. Besides Simon’s own version of “Graceland’s” title track near the end, the record was represented by Take 6 channeling Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the a cappella “Homeless” and West African native Angélique Kidjo and South African native Dave Matthews bringing figurative swagger and literal strutting to “Under African Skies” and “You Can Call Me Al.” Other testimonies to Simon’s multi-cultural interests included Jimmy Cliff and Shaggy’s “Mother and Child Reunion” and the also mama-deifying “Loves Me Like a Rock” from Take Six and Billy Porter. With Irma Thomas, Trombone Shorty, Susanna Hoffs, Garth Brooks, Eric Church and others on board, the show did Simon proud, no easy feat. The only performers cut for the telecast were Eric Idle and Puddles Pity Party, but we can’t always send in the clowns. (Read Variety ‘s original coverage here and TV review here .) — Willman

The Weeknd at SoFi Stadium (11/26/22)

Would “House of Balloons”-era Weeknd ever believe that he would be able to rock out NFL stadiums like he consistently did throughout 2022? While SoFi Stadium was the site of his loss of voice and concert postponement in early September, the Weeknd found personal redemption after Thanksgiving across two nights of rescheduled shows. Immersive stage and light design supplemented the storytelling of recent records “After Hours” and “Dawn FM,” but the real star of the show has always been Abel Tesfaye’s astonishing vocal capabilities. The irresistible momentum of hits like “Blinding Lights” and “Can’t Feel My Face” were electric in a stadium atmosphere, but moments like the particular roars of dedicated fans across the crowd when the opening guitar and synths signaled playback of longtime favorite “The Morning” were simply unforgettable. — EJ Panaligan

Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples at the Greek in L.A.(9/24/22)

If the planet was under threat of annihilation from beyond, and we had to present our divine or interplanetary overlords with just two musical emissaries to make a case that humankind is worth being spared as a species,  Bonnie Raitt  and  Mavis Staples  might be the couple we’d want to pick. Raitt had several different worthy opening acts for her 2022 tour, but the segment of it that had Staples in tow made for a two-sided portrait of what heart, soul and understated heroism look like in music. Their Greek stop was a show where you  could  think about what Staples meant during the civil rights movement, and since, or about Raitt’s role as a warrior without uniform in the early days of women fighting to get their due in rock. Or you could just enjoy the chops and grease that feed into the respective performances of historically significant figures who wear their mantles as lightly as anything else they’d need to peel off upon stepping into a humid roadhouse. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Willman

Paramore at the Belasco (10/27/22)

After a four-year hiatus from performing, Paramore’s enthusiasm to return to the stage was further heightened by the intimacy of the Belasco, a too-rarely-utilized small-scale downtown L.A. venue. With fellow musicians like Billie Eilish, Jesse Rutherford and Finneas in attendance, vocalist Hayley Williams, guitarist Taylor York and drummer Zac Farro gave a heartfelt performance that took audience members on a journey through the band’s genre-non-conforming discography. The setlist featured a blend of older fan-favorites like “Misery Business” and “Decode” along with newer works such as opening number “This Is Why” and “Simmer,” Williams’ 2020 debut solo single. — Katie Reul

Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe at the City National Grove of Anaheim (9/1/22)

With Costello performing on tour with his former producer Lowe as opening act, the two teamed up as a duo on some nights and not on others. Alone among their several L.A. area dates, their Anaheim show had them not just sharing the stage for one number but joining armed forces for three — “Indoor Fireworks” (written by EC, covered by Lowe), “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” (written by Lowe, covered by Costello) and, possibly for the first joint time ever, “Alison,” with Lowe, for his part, giving maybe the tenderest reading of that Elvis standard ever. Costello did his extra bit to make it a more Lowe-centric night by opening his part of the show with his never-recorded, 120-mph reading of Nick’s “Heart of the City.” As headliner, Costello, one of rock’s all-time great singers, was in peak form, never more than in the five songs from this year’s “The Boy Named If,” his most energized and maybe just best album since the ’90s. One of the best things about Costello’s recent touring is that, while he won’t ever go up against that other EC, his shows have gone from having virtually no guitar solos to being filled with them, between his own and new Imposter Charlie Sexton’s. Who would ever have expected to see Costello and Sexton jamming out — just infrequently enough that you don’t get too used to the idea — like they were a 2020s Allmans? — Willman

‘The Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert’ at the Kia Forum (9/27/22)

“It’s a revolving door of rock heroes tonight,” Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl said during the Los Angeles tribute concert for late drummer Taylor Hawkins, and he couldn’t have been more accurate. The impressive lineup was practically a lesson in rock ‘n’ roll history, including the likes of Joan Jett, Travis Barker, Josh Homme, Wolfgang Van Halen, Alanis Morrissette,  Pink , Miley Cyrus, Stewart Copeland and Chad Smith as well as members of Queen, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Soundgarden, Rush, Metallica and Black Sabbath. There was also comedic relief in the form of Jack Black and  Dave Chappelle , who covered “Creep” for the occasion. But perhaps the most special guest was Shane Hawkins, the 16-year-old son of Taylor, who joined Foo Fighters on drums at the end of the show for an emotional performance of “My Hero” and “I’ll Stick Around.” (Read Variety ‘s original coverage here .) — Ellise Shafer

Olivia Rodrigo at NYC's Madison Square Garden (4/27/22)

For all the teen-leaning concerts we’ve attended in the past few years — Harry Styles, Ariana Grande, Jack Harlow, Dua Lipa, Eilish, BTS and more — Rodrigo’s was the most laser-focused on speaking to and for her audience and age group. For all of their differences in sound and imaging, it was most similar to Billie Eilish circa 2019, which isn’t surprising: both are (or were) teenagers themselves. But whereas Eilish’s appeal at the time was more like the cool, creative friend from art class, Rodrigo’s is a more situational relatability: “I wrote this song in my bedroom when I was feeling like I was falling short for this guy I really liked” was her spoken introduction to just one song, but could have been for many. There’s no question that the audience was with Rodrigo before she’d even set foot on the stage, but living up to it is a different story. Filling a room on the scale of Radio City is a challenge, and she did it with an easy grace, using poses both natural and trained — outstretched arms, a lighthearted skip or purposeful strut across the stage, hair flips, hunching over for emphasis and scowling on the heartbreak lyrics while beaming on the happy ones, and most of all, connecting with her audience. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Aswad

Amanda Shires at the Troubadour (10/10/22)

Amanda Shires isn’t always determined to drive an audience in a frenzy. Much of the setlist for her 2022 tour was taken from “Take It Like a Man” — one of the year’s finest singer-songwriter releases — which reaches deep into the lonely or insecure moments that can creep into a long-term relationship, as well as the emotionally fulfilling and carnal ones. That fiddle of hers can be as plaintive as her voice, and the newer stuff nicely balances Americana heartbreakers with light-R&B uplift. But watch out if she puts on a pair of black wings over her bodysuit; that may be a sign that she’s about to bring the show to an extended climax with an older song, “Look Like a Bird,” that establishes she and her crackerjack band would fare just fine on the jam-band circuit. — Willman

The Killers with Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden (10/1/22)

Very few modern bands have a “Mr. Brightside.” Even fewer are able to whip it out in the first five minutes of a show and continue to entertain an arena for another 90 minutes. And even fewer are those who can hold their own in a three-song duet with  Bruce Springsteen  as he beams with excitement announcing their name to the crowd: “ THE KILLERS !” “Everybody knows God made Saturday nights for rock ‘n’ roll,” frontman Brandon Flowers declared toward the beginning of the band’s set, the second of two consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden. And the Killers delivered on that, taking New York City on a tour of its greatest songs from “Hot Fuss” to “Pressure Machine.” As the set wrapped up, an attentive audience member might have sensed a surprise was in order, as it wasn’t entirely clear how the band could top closers “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “When You Were Young” with an encore. Oh, of course, just bring out Springsteen for “Badlands,” “Dustland” and “Born to Run.” (Read Variety ‘s full review here .) — Shanfield

Muse at the Wiltern (10/4/22)

Muse has been relying on massive production design in its touring for so long — nearly putting Pink Floyd to shame — that the idea of a no-frills tour seemed as unlikely as a Roger Waters solo acoustic outing. But the band did a few global small-hall shows to herald the coming of its “Will of the People” album, free from drones or giant puppets, and they’ve never sounded better. (“Sounded” being the operative word, since sightlines at the SRO Wiltern are non-existent except for the balcony and a chosen few on the floor. Is there a worse place to see a show in L.A.?) The set was especially heavy on the band’s earliest and, yes, oft-heaviest material, when Muse sounded more like the love child of Metallica and prog; it was a lovely, headbanging place to revisit before the “real” tour comes around to arenas this spring. — Willman

Patti Smith at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa (5/6/22)

When the Bob Dylan Museum opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May, the festivities included three nights of affiliated concerts at the legendary Cain’s Ballroom around the corner, with three headliners worthy of a bard: Elvis Costello, Mavis Staples and Patti Smith. Each of them brought their own historic connection to Dylan, which they did or didn’t play off of during their Tulsa performances. Costello covered “Like a Rolling Stone” and “I Threw It All Away” and interpolated a snippet of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” into his own “Pump It Up.” Staples didn’t sing any Dylan songs at all, but given a 60-year history with the man that speaks for itself, she didn’t need to. But Smith really went the extra mile, opening her show with a quiet “Boots of Spanish Leather,” later doing an equally acoustic “One Too Many Mornings,” and in-between those taking her Dylan covers electric with a howlingly fierce “Wicked Messenger.” Dylan didn’t show for any of these activities, of course, but Smith made sure that his ears were burning up, wherever he was. (Read Variety ‘s coverage here .) — Willman

Grace Jones at the Hollywood Bowl (9/25/22)

Dancing on towering heels for more than an hour, changing costumes every other song (of course including one recreating Keith Haring’s iconic body paint), and singing her cathartic finale, “Slave to the Rhythm,” while effortlessly navigating a hula hoop, 74-year-old Grace Jones commanded the cavernous Hollywood Bowl stage — and moved around on it — like a performer half her age. But even if shuffling through a murderer’s row of her most enduring hits (“Nightclubbing,” “My Jamaican Guy”) somehow wasn’t entertainment enough for an absolutely mesmerized audience of fans, late in the show she enlisted a group of them for a dance party during “Pull Up to the Bumper” that unexpectedly featured superfan and disciple Janelle Monae, who paid appropriate tribute by crawling between Jones’ legs while her idol spanked her behind. — Todd Gilchrist

‘Katy Perry: Play' at Resorts World Las Vegas (1/12/22)

If you’re easily triggered by 30- to 40-foot props, dance routines with dozens of performers, childish wonder, juvenile humor, vivid drug-trip simulations or just, you know, color , by all means avoid “Katy Perry: Play,” the Las Vegas residency that began just before last New Year’s Eve and is continuing into 2023. To be sure, talking poops, dancing mushrooms and anthropomorphic toothbrushes and tube socks are not for all tastes or tolerance levels. But what giddy fun this show is, if you love old-school Vegas showmanship, movie musicals and pop art or any intersection thereof. Think “Toy Story” as an acid trip, or Busby Berkeley meets “The Incredible Shrinking Man” meeting Peter Max in “South Park”… with a healthy dose of Sin City’s classic headdresses and tuxes toward the end. It’s not all about the wild production design: There could be no better hostess with the most-est for this campy but clever madness than Perry, who has the hooks to go with the pop-a-top on her beer-dispensing brassiere. (Read Variety ‘s coverage of the residency here .) — Willman

Feid at Columbia's La Macarena (9/9/22)

La Macarena in Colombia has a long history of hosting boisterous energy. The stadium has served as a venue for both concerts and bullfights since 1945, but on the weekend of Sept. 9, the ring was populated by Medellín native Salomón Villada Hoyos, otherwise known as  Feid . The reggaeton singer-songwriter sold out three consecutive nights at the stadium – a feat that not even two other hometown heroes, J. Balvin and Karol G., can claim (yet). Feid has been an active and successful songwriter for years, penning songs for Balvin and fellow Colombian reggaeton star Reykon, Sebastián Yatra and more. However, Feid has grown into somewhat of an emblematic figure, representing his home city with an alluring and emotive sound that’s idolized far beyond the forests of Antioquia. If this string of shows is of any proof, it’s clear the Medellín hero is just getting started. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Garcia

My Chemical Romance at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center (8/29/22)

For a band that split nearly a decade ago, My Chemical Romance — the burning toast of 21st century emo-glam-empowered power-pop — never lost the flame when it came to reuniting. Vocalist-lyricist Gerard Way and the rest of MCR (original members guitarists Ray Toro, Frank Iero and brother-bassist Mikey Way) performed as if they were a ticking time bomb. Dedicating themselves to the disenfranchised and the outliers with material from 2002’s “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” and 2006’s “The Black Parade,” their speedy riff-heavy songs never lacked for intense, contagious choruses and bold, theatrical bridges worthy of a James Bond theme. But each MCR moment of the past spoke boldly and loudly to the present-day concerns of mental health, self-awakening and freedom from fear and shame. (Read Variety ‘s full concert review here .) — Amorosi

Bomba Estéreo at Ohana Fest (10/2/22)

Bomba Estéreo is not exactly an obscure band among Latin music fans — especially not after collaborating with Bad Bunny for his blockbuster album as a cherry on top of an already long career for the Colombian crew. But at Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Fest — where, however notably diverse the lineup, a Latin act is still going to count as an outlier — there were no guarantees how they’d go over in an afternoon set. No worries. Li Saumet’s rainbow-cape-flashing, pretty-in-skintight-pink was like a visual siren song to draw audiences over to the second stage, and the music kept them there — especially the younger demographic portions of a festival whose crowd can skew a little dad-rock-y. Besides adding some global flair, Saumet’s presence as a magnetic frontwoman was right in keeping with Vedder’s emphasis on having strong female representation throughout the whole festival, which is far from a given at these things. Ohana was special in that regard from the top down — from Pink, Stevie Nicks and St. Vincent on down to Joy Oladokun, Brittany Howard, Madison Cunningham, S.S. Goodman, Grouplove and Broken Social Scene. (Read Variety ‘s Ohana Fest coverage here .) — Willman

Feist at the Shrine Auditorium (4/27/22)

When  Feist  took to the stage for four shows over two nights at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium , some burning questions were raised. Like: Where  is  the stage, exactly? Her experimental, very intimate, limited-run tour — which, like a forthcoming album, is titled “Multitudes” — had the smallish crowd sitting in a circle around her in a space that the audience had been led into from a side entrance, and was clearly not the main, massive, fixed-seat auditorium of the Shrine. Most attendees probably figured out that they were actually seated on the venue’s stage before the raising of a curtain near the end proved it. It could have just been an intriguing stunt, but Feist’s collaboration with designer  Rob Sinclair  — of David Byrne and “American Utopia” fame — resulted in a show that plays with the separation between artists and their audiences in any number of meaningful ways. Feist will likely follow the release of the “Multitudes” album some time in 2023 with a more traditional tour, but for anyone who appreciates artists playing with the concert form in thoughtful ways, these shows represented some kind of Canadian-American utopia of their own. (Read Variety ‘s preview of the show here .) — Willman

‘Juneteenth: A Global Celebration for Freedom’ at the Hollywood Bowl (6/19/22)

Chaka Khan, Khalid, Billy Porter, Mickey Guyton, Bell Biv DeVoe, Earth, Wind & Fire, Robert Glasper, the Roots, Michelle Williams and Ne-Yo helped bring the party for the day that honors Black emancipation, in a multi-artist, multi-genre show that was broadcast live on CNN. Although the concert spanned almost as wide an array of musical and performance styles as could be packed into a single prime-time slot, from soul to classical to country to jazz, the lineup had a special emphasis on artists that ruled the R&B world of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, leading an emcee to joke to the sold-out audience about a time “before all those knee replacements out there.” Even with EWF, Khan and others getting the crowd on its feet, there may have been no greater eruption of joy during the three hours than the one that occurred during a short set by Bell Biv DeVoe. Socially conscious anthems had their day, too, with Guyton especially spanning eras in reviving Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” right alongside a recent power ballad of her own, “Black Like Me,” that put Nashville and the world on notice that so-called color-blindness is hardly the answer. (Read Variety ‘s original coverage here .) — Willman

Lorde at the Shrine Auditorium (5/6/22)

On “Solar Power” opener “The Path,” Lorde declares: “If you’re looking for a savior, well that’s not me.” But during a two-night stint at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in May, the 26-year-old singer seemed to be doing a whole lot of saving. Putting forth the perfect alchemy of a set list that represented the very best of her three-album discography, Lorde took an energized L.A. audience on a musical journey that excited, jubilated and maybe even healed many in attendance. Rarely do you ever get the chance to feel like your teenage self again, but when tracks like “Ribs” and “Perfect Places” come on, I found it impossible not to scream along to every word — tears of joy streaming down my face, of course. — Panaligan

Rakim at NYC's Sony Hall (11/21/22)

In the wake of the success of recent tours like the one where fellow emcee Nas performed his debut album “Illmatic” from start to finish, “An Intimate Night with Rakim” could easily have been a low-effort cash in for the legendary lyricist, even backed by a live band. But even after breaking his foot just days beforehand, requiring him to sit (appropriately in a throne, flanked on both sides by beautiful, stone-faced women) for the entirety of the show, Rakim seemed to feed on the energy and affection of the crowd in New York’s Sony Hall while he rattled through a nonstop string of hits that included “Paid in Full,” “Microphone Fiend,” “Know the Ledge” and “Don’t Sweat the Technique.” A high energy lead-in DJ set by Funkmaster Flex further helped by starting the night with a proper party vibe, which Rakim capitalized upon to preside over the club like its king, revisiting and reminding fans of a hip-hop heyday when razor-sharp verses and irresistible beats went hand in hand. — Gilchrist

Loudon Wainwright III, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Judd Apatow and Beck at Largo (10/11/22)

Wainwright’s appearance at Largo would have been just fine as a proper solo headlining gig, given that he was on tour behind a wonderful new album, “Lifetime Achievement,” that greets the prospect of getting older with as much wry humor and humanism as you’d expect from his 50-year career. But as often happens at Largo, and always happens at the Judd Apatow-hosted “Juddapalooza” benefit concerts, the cast list tends to grow. On this night, Beck and Greg Kurstin sat in, but Wainwright was also joined by  Michael McKean  and  Christopher Guest . It wasn’t quite a Spinal Tap reunion, but Wainwright did have a cameo as that band’s supposed keyboard player in an early short — but more importantly, he just ran in the same theatrical/satirical/musical circles back in their fresh-faced days. Guest and McKean revived Tap’s pre-metal songs like “Listen to the Flower People,” Beck sang Neil Young’s “Old Man” and Wainwright sang about being an old man: “I’ve got pieces of me strewn around the globe / There’s not much left, I’m lightening up my load.” Thanks for the mortal detritus. (Read Variety ‘s original coverage here .) — Willman

Kelsea Ballerini at the Greek (10/6/22)

If you went to see Kelsea Ballerini at L.A.’s Greek Theater in October to see her perform her biggest hits, you may have been bummed. But only for a second — her show didn’t allow for that as she played multiple new songs from her fourth album, “Subject to Change,” and had the crowd on their feet for nearly the entire show. By sprinkling in medleys of her past hits (“Dibs,” “Hole in the Bottle,” etc.), performing a fan-favorite but rarely sung live track, “L.A.,” and combining her “Love Is a Cowboy” with the Chicks’ “Cowboy Take Me Away,” it was impossible not to have a good time. The cherry on top? Her “Half Of My Hometown” collaborator, Kenny Chesney, showed up for the duet and she was genuinely surprised, just like the very excited crowd was. —Emily Longeretta

The B-52s at Atlantic City's Ocean Casino Resort (10/15/22)

So maybe the B-52s are claiming that their 2022 tour would be their last lengthy go-round. That didn’t mean that Fred Schneider, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson were going to go quietly or without their patented angularity high in its live mix. Peppering their set with punky B-52’s oddities featuring Schneider’s dry-ice cackle (like a searing, syncopated “Mesopotamia”), nothing could compare to hearing pop’s most unique harmonists, Wilson and Pierson, do their thing on “Roam” and “Deadbeat Club.” And yes, the crowd did fall on its back,  en masse , to “Rock Lobster” for the last time. Fantastic. —Amorosi

'Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Celebration of the Life & Music of Loretta Lynn‘ at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry House (10/30/22)

The memorial concert for Loretta Lynn went out live over CMT, so you didn’t have to be there to catch it. That is, unless you wanted to experience it amid the sniffles and tears of real country music fans who’d been waiting in line outside the Opry House for hours for a shot at drowning their sorrows in harmony and recreations of Lynn’s signature sweet feistiness. The Highwomen’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Brandi Carlile’s “She’s Got You” (in honor of Loretta’s bond with Patsy Cline), Margo Price’s “Fist City,” Tanya Tucker’s “Blue Kentucky Girl” and Wynonna Judd’s “How Great Thou Art” were just a few of the highlights for an audience that came to the show with mournin’ on its mind. (Read Variety ‘s coverage of the memorial here .) — Willman

Khruangbin at NYC’s Prospect Park (8/4/22)

Khruangbin, a trio from Houston that plays mostly instrumental music, is a band as unusual as its name, and what was perhaps most remarkable about the concert was the size of the densely packed crowd — there aren’t many bands like it that are popular enough to sell out Radio City Music Hall, which they did earlier this year. While they were originally (broadly) categorized as an alternative act and quickly embraced by the Pitchfork contingent, the easy groove of their music — highlighted by Mark Speer’s effortlessly stunning guitar playing — and a series of high-profile festival appearances soon brought them a big following with the jam-band crowd. Both audiences were out in force at this concert and grooving joyfully to the group’s headlining set. (Read Variety ‘s full review of the show here .) — Aswad

‘The Town Hall and T Bone Burnett Present a Tribute to Bob Dylan’ at NYC's Town Hall (9/30/22)

To celebrate Dylan’s 1963 rise from Greenwich Village coffee houses to Manhattan civic centers like Town Hall, T Bone Burnett threw a party last autumn. Praise was paid to Dylan’s ‘63 show with Sara Bareilles and Margaret Glaspy harmonizing warmly through a folksy version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” But with actor Oscar Issac, Joe Henry, the McCrary Sisters, Punch Brothers, Lizz Wright, guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, et al., the event transcended its “tribute” tag. There was a feeling of forward motion and even raucous fun during moments such as the mass singalong of “Rainy Day Way Women #12 and #35.” And yes, T Bone joined in for the “everybody must get stoned” bit. (Read Variety ‘s original review here .) — Amorosi

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The 10 best concerts and shows in the US you won’t want to miss in 2023

Jan 1, 2023 • 7 min read

Lizzo’s Special 2our makes stops throughout North America in 2023 – and promises to be one of the top shows of the year © Scott Legato / WireImage

The roar of the crowd. The resonating beats that can’t be reproduced with headphones. The thrill of seeing your favorite music artist live and in the flesh.

The greatest live-music events are transporting experiences.

Whether their songs have been the soundtrack to your life or you just can’t help but bust a move when they play on the radio, many of music’s biggest acts are heading out on tour for 2023. You’ll spend the night in very good company as you see living legends of the music industry live, at these 10 top concerts set to tour the US in 2023.

Lizzo: The Special 2our

The three-time Grammy winner and recent Emmy recipient Lizzo returns to American stages in 2023 with the second leg of The Special 2our. The multi-hyphenate’s tour will make stops at 17 cities throughout North America , bringing all of Lizzo’s chart-topping hits including “Good as Hell,” “About Damn Time,” “Juice” and “Boys.” Expect an electric evening of female empowerment as Lizzo gets support from her troupe of “Big Grrrl” dancers, DJ Sophia Eris (who joins the star for a rousing rendition of Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop”), backup singers and an all-women band. No Lizzo concert would be complete without Sasha Flute, Lizzo’s prized woodwind, which she deploys several times each concert, including during “Truth Hurts” and “Juice.”

Where to get tickets: Tickets to see Lizzo live on tour are available through Ticketmaster .

Stevie Nicks and Billy Joel: Two Icons, One Night

Two of music’s most iconic living legends will share the bill for five rousing evenings of classic rock and soul at stadiums across the country. The Two Icons, One Night tour is a rare double bill of two legendary touring acts, Stevie Nicks and Billy Joel. The limited concert series will open March 10 at Los Angeles ’ SoFi Stadium, followed by one-nighters in Arlington, Texas ; Nashville ; Columbus; and a final evening in Kansas City , on August 19. Both musicians have continuously toured throughout the decades, with Nicks most recently wrapping up a sold-out tour in summer 2022, and Joel touring the world in addition to his record-breaking residency at New York City ’s Madison Square Garden .

Where to get tickets: Tickets to see the iconic duo are on sale now through Ticketmaster .

P!NK: Summer Carnival 2023

Buy a ticket to see P!NK in person, and you know the glam rock diva will soar – figuratively and literally. The singer/songwriter returns to the touring circuit with P!NK’s Summer Carnival 2023, an all-new stadium spectacular with musical guests Brandi Carlile, Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo set to open on select dates, with Grouplove and KidCutUp performing at all shows. P!NK concerts offer a thrilling blend of her power vocals and cutting-edge stagecraft as the star can often be seen dangling upside over the crowd or crooning effortlessly from a trapeze swing. The pop legend’s tour arrives in US on July 26 in Cincinnati , followed by 20 performances across the country, concluding on October 9, 2023.

Where to get tickets: Tickets for P!NK’s upcoming Summer Carnival tour are available through Ticketmaster .

Adele: Weekends with Adele at the Colosseum, Las Vegas

Adele’s new residency at the Colosseum is the hottest ticket in Las Vegas – and for good reason. The singer/songwriter is at the top of her game in a new production featuring her golden voice plus plenty of Vegas spectacle. The 20-song set list compiles her most popular hits, including a most appropriate opening of “Hello,” as well as such instant classics as “Rolling in the Deep,” “Set Fire to the Rain” and “Skyfall.” This residency is the rare chance to see the megawatt performer in a smaller venue – while there are 4000 seats, this is positively intimate compared to the large arenas she has played in the past.

Where to get tickets: The entire run of Weekends with Adele is sold out. If you’re looking to purchase tickets off a secondary market, make sure the secondary ticket vendor offers a 100% guarantee on your purchase to avoid scams.

Taylor Swift: Eras Tour

With Ticketmaster reporting “historically unprecedented demand,” Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour is one of the most sought-after concert tickets of just about any era. The highly anticipated 52-night stadium tour is the singer/songwriter’s return to the stage after her 2018 Reputation Tour was the highest-grossing of any in US history. Expect records to be shattered again, with tickets having sold out for the new tour in record time during the presale, alongside reports that demand “could have filled 900 stadiums.” Since Swift has released four albums since she last set out on the road, it’s anyone’s guess as to which songs will make the cut. Still, you can expect a lineup of megahits including “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” to be a part of the set list for certain.

Where to get tickets: Tickets on Ticketmaster were gone in a flash during the presale. Those seeking tickets through a secondary market should stick to a platform like StubHub and VividSeats that offers a 100% money-back guarantee in fraudulent scalping.

Usher: My Way – The Vegas Residency

Legendary singer/songwriter Usher is one of the greatest R&B showmen of all time. So there’s no question that his latest Vegas residency spanning his remarkable 20-year music career will be a spectacle of epic proportions. Set to return to the Dolby Live theater at Park MGM for 25 new dates from March through July 2023, Usher’s show will offer a rousing set list including many of his hits, such as “My Way,” “OMG” and “Yeah!” The high-voltage evening features plenty of spectacle, including a supporting cast of 23 dancers, roller skaters and pole dancers.

Where to get tickets: Tickets and premium packages can be booked through Usher’s Vegas Residency website .

Dead & Company: The Final Tour

Spanning more than five decades as the quintessential jam band, Dead & Company will hit the road for one final foray last time this summer. The Dead & Co. ensemble – currently led by original Grateful Dead members Bobby Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, joined by Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and John Mayer – has continued the long legacy of the Grateful Dead by touring for each of the past eight summers. This summer, their final tour will serve as a bittersweet farewell as the band hangs up their guitars and tie-dye after having played more than 2300 concerts as the Grateful Dead. Expect Deadhead groupies from all around the world to descend for many nights of peace, love and happiness.

Where to get tickets: Tickets for Dead & Company’s final tour are available through Ticketmaster .

Marc Anthony: VIVIENDO Tour

Don’t expect to be sitting down for most of Marc Anthony’s wildly energetic VIVIENDO Tour, set to tour the US in 2023. The three-time Grammy and seven-time Latin Grammy winner Anthony delivers a high-energy spectacle, the kind that gets you dancing along from the first down beat. Chart-topping hits fill the set list, including “Pa’lla Voy,” “Vivir Mi Vida” and “Valió la Pena.”

Where to get tickets: Tickets for Marc Anthony’s VIVIENDO Tour are available through Ticketmaster .

Beyoncé: Renaissance Tour

While details have yet to be fully released, Beyoncé will be celebrating her new album Renaissance with a live tour. The pop megastar is truly the first lady of music, having won 28 Grammys – the most by any female artist. If previous tours are any indication, Beyoncé will be making stops at major stadiums throughout the US, bringing with her a larger-than-life spectacle with dozens of backup dancers, pyrotechnics and stunning stagecraft. Renaissance was built with the dance floor in mind – so get ready for a party like no other.

Where to get tickets: Dates and details for the tour have yet to be released. Sign up for Beyoncé’s newsletter on her official site to be among the first to know.

The Phantom of the Opera : final months on Broadway

In between the many A-list music acts playing the country, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more searing night of high drama and theatrical magic than the original Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera . After 35 years, Broadway’s longest-running show will take its final bow on April 16, 2023. Hal Prince’s original staging remains as impressive as ever, featuring top-notch Broadway talent, a lush 27-piece orchestra and the iconic chandelier that crashes to the floor, night after night. Expect tickets to sell fast as “phans” fly in from around the world to hear the glorious “Music of the Night” one final time.

Where to get tickets: Telecharge is the official ticketing website for The Phantom of the Opera . Every night, a limited number of $45 tickets are available through a digital lottery, which you can enter here .

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Best concert ticket sites: your all-access pass to that once-in-a-lifetime experience

Line up your next gig with the cheapest prices, rare tickets, and more

• 1. Best overall
• 2. Best customer-guaranteed
• 3. Best rewards program
• 4. Best for ease of use
• 5. Best for international
• 6. Best for booking
• 7. Best value
• 8. Best for sellers
• 9. Best search engine
• How we choose

If you're eagerly anticipating the chance to attend your favorite artist's next concert or your next comedy show, the best place to start your search is on the top concert ticket websites. This guide will provide you with all the information you need to know about ticket hunting, including the most reliable websites to find what you're looking for.

When it comes to purchasing concert tickets online, there are numerous options available, each with its own unique features. To save time, it is essential to determine what you are looking for before beginning your search on a specific site. Consider the type of events you enjoy attending, such as theatre, music concerts, or stand-up comedy shows, before selecting the best concert ticket site.

It's important to consider a few things when buying tickets online. Firstly, think about whether you prefer to sit or stand, and also take into account the availability and price of the tickets. If the show is sold out, you may need to look at resale rates. Some ticket sites allow you to buy tickets directly after they are released, while others specialize in obtaining tickets after they have sold out. It's crucial to prioritize reliability and safety when making significant online purchases to minimize the risk of being scammed.

Remember, with the holidays and after-Christmas sales on the horizon, there may be a number of great deals on the best concert ticket sites, meaning you can get a bargain experience. 

Luckily, we've done the leg work for you and rounded up this list of the best concert ticket sites to find the ultimate option for the tickets you're looking for. And if you want more specific picks, then take a look at the  best sports ticket sites and  best online auction sites , too.

The best concert ticket sites we recommend

Why you can trust Top Ten Reviews Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test .

We're on a mission at  Top Ten Reviews  to review everything we feature in our buyer's guide. While we haven't been able to test every entry in this guide in person, we've instead honed in on top-rated brands and used our knowledge of the best concert ticket sites to help you make the right decision.

The best concert ticket site overall

Specifications

Reasons to buy, reasons to avoid.

StubHub claims the top spot thanks to its clear emphasis on concert tickets, with various genres and options to sort through as you enter via the website's landing page. 

You can filter by lowest price, best location, and best deal, as well as specific seat types and types of ticket delivery, meaning everyone's preferences are covered. Moreover, the FanProtect promise offers peace of mind so you can shop with StubHub confidently. This ensures you receive valid tickets before the event; if you don’t, you will either be refunded with comparable or better tickets or receive a full refund. Using a reputable secondary broker like StubHub is a fast and secure way to buy and sell concert tickets, and that’s why we think it is the best service for most people.

Many positive five-star reviews commented on how easy it is to use the mobile app and website. However, there are some negative reviews. One customer complained that after buying tickets through a reseller on StubHub and flying interstate for the concert, the tickets were canceled, and there was little support from the company. 

If you don't have one of the best home computers or prefer browsing on your phone, the mobile app is easy to use and lets you access tickets on the day of the event. Once you purchase the ticket, a bar code on your phone will get you into the venue, so you don't have to worry about having access to a printer. You can also follow your favorite artists on the app and receive instant alerts about upcoming shows in your area. 

Not only does StubHub allow you to buy tickets, but you can also use the platform to sell any tickets to shows you can't attend. You can use either the computer application or mobile app to sell your tickets, and StubHub will collect 10% of the sale price. 

The best customer-guaranteed concert ticket site

2. Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster is one of the most well-known ticket sites and is most likely people's go-to destination for confidently purchasing concert tickets. The web interface is easy to use, with clear markers for different genres, and it will give you recommended concerts based on your purchase history. 

Thanks to its return policy, it's also a great place to shop for tickets. The site gives you three days after your purchase to change your mind when you purchase tickets for events at venues participating in the website's Fan Guarantee program. It's also the only site we reviewed that lets you return tickets for events that have been rescheduled and not canceled, which is great for added peace of mind and avoiding losing any money unnecessarily.  

Across the sites we reviewed, the prices on Ticketmaster were average, and you get the benefit of buying tickets from a primary seller. This means tickets for in-demand concerts may be cheaper on Ticketmaster than elsewhere if you can buy them in time. 

Ticketmaster has many positive reviews around buying tickets in the first initial sale, but some customers complained about their re-selling process. One person commented that they would get charged a fee to buy and resell and a fee for the buyer, which increases the price significantly. 

It's worth noting that Ticketmaster recently saw a lot of backlash concerning Taylor Swift tickets. They were chosen as the sole provider of the in-demand tickets and, due to unprecedented demand, had to cancel the sale of thousands of tickets, leaving many fans devastated. The site also glitched when customers were putting tickets into their baskets, causing a lot of confusion over whether they had actually secured tickets. 

With this in mind, you might avoid relying on Ticketmaster as a one-stop shop for in-demand tickets, but it is still one of the most reliable websites regarding price and customer support. 

The best rewards program for a concert ticket site

3. VividSeats

VividSeats didn’t have the cheapest tickets of the sites we reviewed, but concert lovers might be interested in shopping here regardless due to the impressive rewards program. You can get up to 8% credit on tickets depending on how much you spend, and if you’re a ‘Hall of Famer’ (meaning you spend over $2000 annually), this credit won’t expire.  

Like some of the complaints about Ticketmaster above, there's a lack of transparency about fees on VividSeats. Sometimes, the added fees could be almost as much as the tickets themselves. The only saving grace in this is the rewards scheme that could help you save money over time, but if you're not a frequent buyer, this won't benefit you. 

If you haven’t the budget to splash $2000 annually on tickets, don’t worry; your credit will last a full year. You can buy your tickets through the easy-to-use app or online, and if you have any questions, a customer service representative can answer them through the website’s live chat feature.   

Customers noted that the VividSeats support network is quick to point out that they are a middle man, and this is an issue between you and the originating source of the ticket. Also, if you order in enough time, you can react and/or make alternative plans if necessary. If you make a last-second purchase, you are putting yourself at risk.

VividSeats also has a 100% buyer guarantee, making the site much more tempting. It guarantees your tickets will be valid and arrive in time for the event, and you'll get a refund for canceled events. Unlike Ticketmaster, however, VividSeats acts as a middleman between sellers and buyers, so ticket prices are set independently by the reseller and based on current "market value." This might mean that ticket prices are a lot higher than on other sites due to sellers wanting to maximize profits, which could also change quickly. A website that acts as an intermediary also poses issues in not taking responsibility for any issues that may arise, which is something that has been noted in some customer reviews. 

The best concert ticket site for ease of use

4. See Tickets

See Tickets actually originated as a record shop in Nottingham, in the UK. It then grew in the digital age and, as a result, became an internationally respected ticket-selling site. It has kept its simplistic roots, with a super minimal site that's efficient and easy to handle. This is super useful in the ticket-hunting world, as it can often be a stressful and daunting task.

See Tickets has an overall rating of four stars on Trustpilot, which is much higher than some other sites. Out of the negative reviews, most mentioned difficulty when checking out for in-demand concerts, which is often a standard experience across the board. 

You can search by artist, event, venue, general location, and music genre. The top navigation ribbon allows you to browse by music, theatre, festivals, dance and clubs, events, comedy, sport, and attractions so it's not difficult to find tickets for events other than your typical concert. This category system allows you to discover gigs you might not have been aware of, which is a great way to find gifts for others. It's also an easy way to search generally through a certain event type if you've decided you want to go to a sports match but don't have any preferences outside of that.

You can sell tickets to your event if you are a music star. And while the site does say it will offer refunds if the event has "significantly changed," this refund policy is pretty strict compared to a lot of the competition. Currently, See Tickets doesn't have the option to resell tickets you bought, so you'll want to choose a more dedicated ticket reselling site for this.

The best concert ticket sites for international music options

Viagogo is based in London, so it caters to the UK music scene well, but it’s also an international platform, offering tickets for US gigs and covering more than 50 countries. You will find a wide selection of music types on this site, making it great for discovery – did you know C Pop was a thing?

The interface isn't as simple as some other sites, mainly due to its cluttered look. However, it has clear signposts to different events, such as concerts, sports, theatre, and festival tickets. Viagogo is a secondary ticket sale site, meaning they only sell re-sale tickets rather than having direct relationships with artists and events companies to sell the initial batch.

Viagogo is primarily a resale site, so it's harder to monitor the reliability of tickets. As a result of this, there are a lot of poor reviews that complain about tickets being invalid or substantially higher prices than they should be.

The tickets may be more expensive than other websites as sellers can put the prices above face value if they want. This does pose an issue with events that are really sought after (cough, Beyoncé), but it's pretty standard practice across resale sites. The good news is that you can also sell your own tickets on this site. All you need to do is create an account and search for the event you have tickets for, and then you can set your own price as advised by previous sales. You can do this from any device, too, so it's good if you're on the go and need to buy or sell last minute.

While resale tickets can often feel risky, you are covered well should the event be canceled and not rescheduled, as you get a massive 125% refund on what you spent. There is also a guarantee from the company that you will receive your ticket before the time of the event. Tickets are sent via tracked courier services, so you don't need to worry about being left in the lurch minutes before the opening act.

The best website for booking

6. SeatGeek

SeatGeek has a clean website, making it incredibly easy to navigate and find exactly what ticket you're looking for. You can browse tickets by city, date, or genre. There's also a category for trending events, so if you don't know exactly what you're looking for but know you're keen to bag tickets to the hottest gig, it makes it quick to locate.

SeatGeek’s transparent fees are a big draw here, making it easy to know you’re getting the best deal possible and avoid a nasty surprise when you checkout. What’s more, fees were some of the lowest we found - making SeatGeek a great all-rounder if you’re after a good price. 

SeatGeek has a high four-star rating on Trustpilot and many five-star reviews. Customers enjoyed the lack of fees and ease of shopping, but some have noted that the tickets they bought were invalid at the point of entry, causing disappointment. 

You can sell your own tickets on SeatGeek, too. So, if you can no longer make a gig, setting up an account and helping them find a better home is quick. The site offers dynamic pricing, so you can choose the price you sell depending on demand. This is great if you want a bit more cash in your pocket, but it does mean that those Taylor Swift resale tickets will skyrocket quickly.

Like many top concert ticket sites, SeatGeek assigns a deal score to each ticket, marking it with a color and number on a scale of zero to ten. This results in a straightforward and visually compelling arena seating chart. 

We liked SeatGeek’s shiny website and modern feel. It also has a great app available to Apple and Android users. Overall, a great choice if you’re after a bargain and a choice you can feel confident about.

The best value concert ticket site

7. TickPick (previous Razorgator)

TickPick's (previously Razorgator) selling point is no hidden fees. With complaints on other sites in this roundup that booking fees can often almost equal the same price as the ticket, this is a major win. It's easy to underestimate how expensive tickets can become when you add insurance, tax, and booking fees, so it's a great way to save a little bit of cash.

The site is great for its unbeatable prices, reasonable fees, and numerous search filters to help you find the perfect seat. The grading system offered by the site is helpful for people willing to compromise on price when it comes to seat value, and we found the claim of an average 15-20% saving to be accurate. 

TickPick is a lesser-known concert ticket site, so there were far fewer reviews online. Many customers were noting the severe cost increase, which is the downside to purchasing them on a resale site that lets sellers select their own price. 

The customer guarantee is a fairly standard offering, and there are some good options for support, so you can be confident that there's someone to talk to if anything goes wrong. If you're selling on the ticket, you can put tickets as 'open to bidding.' This is great if the tickets are really in demand and you're looking to make a few bucks, or you can select an outright price if you want the tickets snapped up quickly. TickPick will take a substantial 10% commission, but you can always factor this into your ticket pricing.

This is our pick of best-value ticket services, as the prices were consistently the lowest in our testing. We’re confident that you’ll snap up a good deal with TickPick.

The best concert ticket site for sellers

8. TicketCity

As opposed to some of the bigger names that made the best concert ticket sites list, TicketCity wasn’t our first choice of ticket sites. However, its ticket prices were lower than some competitors, and we liked its unique approach to helping you sell tickets fast. 

The site is a bit outdated, and the navigation ribbon has small text pushed to one side, but there are line-ups of the top sporting, music, and theater events for easy access. It's unclear what parameters you can search events by, so there's less chance of you stumbling across events you weren't already entering with the intention of shopping for.

Many customers were impressed by TicketCity's fair prices despite allowing sellers to pick their own. Some people, however, commented on the lack of refund when they had ticket issues out of their control, so they dock points for customer support.

Most websites let you post your tickets and set your own price, taking a cut of the money when you sell. TicketCity buys your tickets directly from you, so there’s no waiting around to see if they will sell. This is made even easier by how easy it is to sell your ticket to TicketCity, which can be done over the phone or on an online form. A great option if you’re looking to sell unwanted concert tickets. This is a benefit depending on how much time you have and how much control you want over the price of your tickets. If you're looking to maximize cash in hand, then selecting a site with dynamic pricing and bidding might be better suited for what you want.

Regarding customer support, the website has a live chat function that makes it quick and easy to find assistance. The cancellation policy is pretty standard, too, offering a refund if the event is canceled but not if it's rescheduled.

The best concert ticket site for search engine functionality

9. LiveNation

Ticketmaster owns LiveNation after being bought back in 2010, and it has more of a music focus. Unlike others on this list, it's more of a search engine than a dedicated ticket agency. We clicked through to buy tickets, and the site redirected us to SeeTickets to actually make the purchase, so it's important to know that it's mainly performing as a route to finding events.

LiveNation had the largest negative views, with many mentioning bad customer service. As LiveNation is a third-party site that puts your purchases through Ticketmaster and SeeTickets, it seems like they push the burden of customer support away, too. 

With this in mind, it's a fantastically streamlined place to search for gig tickets, browse by location, genre, or date, and search directly for bands. The hero images are really helpful in making certain shows stand out and offer a visual experience that is easy to follow. The landing page also has many different trending events, so if you want to initiate the idea of buying concert tickets but aren't yet set on a specific gig, then LiveNation will be a great place to start.

Buying Guides

Best sports ticket sites: the hottest events for the lowest prices

Vivid Seats review

TicketCity review

Ticketmaster review

Razorgator review

SeatGeek review

Coast to Coast Tickets review

StubHub review

TicketNetwork Review

TicketsNow Concert Tickets Review

There isn't much to report on the refund policies or the buying and selling experience on LiveNation, as it performs as a search engine. It redirects to Ticketmaster, too, so it's important to remember the policies of these sites you are actually shopping from.

Concert ticket site FAQs

How much do concert tickets cost.

The price of concert tickets can vary depending on who is performing, where they're performing, and how in demand the event is. Service and shipping fees differ by event and website, but our research shows the average service fee is about 23% added to the ticket cost. Standard shipping costs can also run you an extra $15, although sometimes the company wraps this into the service fee.

Most websites take about a 15% commission if you want to sell tickets. However, with websites that offer you to pick the price, you can factor this into how much you sell the ticket for. Some websites don't take a commission, and others will buy them outright to save you the trouble.

What are the ticket service’s fees?

All the online ticket brokers we reviewed charge service fees. Some also charge convenience fees, shipping, and e-ticket delivery fees. We found that e-tickets were the most cost-effective, with the delivery fees around $5 versus the $15 average fee for delivering physical tickets. Our top pick, Razorgator, doesn’t charge delivery fees for e-tickets, which is a great way to save on additional costs. Fees are unavoidable, so you might want to consider shopping around before you make your final decision. 

What's the difference between primary and secondary sellers?

This is a big distinction worth knowing. A primary ticket seller is a website, like Ticketmaster, that works directly with the event to sell its tickets. That means they work out a deal based on a price that works for both. From a buyer's perspective, this is the most secure way to buy, with tickets right from the seller, meaning you get them officially. The downside is that the price might already be high, despite no official markup, since the seller and event organizer decide this and control the first batch of tickets.

Secondary ticketing sites are those that re-sell tickets for an event. This is a great option if the event is a sell-out and you still want to get a ticket or two. These will be charged at a markup, which will cost you more than the face-value ticket price in most cases. However, you can sometimes find that these are actually cheaper than primary pricing. In most cases, these come with guarantees, so even though you're buying secondary tickets, they should still be secure, get to you in time, and actually work on the day.

Which concert ticket sites can you trust?

There are a lot of horror stories involving people buying concert tickets from fraudsters or unreputable sources. Don’t worry - we wouldn’t recommend any sites we don’t think can be trusted. However, sometimes things go wrong, especially when buying through an online marketplace instead of the site itself. That’s why every site we’ve recommended has a 100% ticket guarantee. 

This is a standard feature across ticket resale sites, which promises your money back if your tickets don’t arrive in time, are invalid or are not what you were promised. With the exception of Ticketmaster, they won’t give you your money back if your concert is rescheduled and you can’t make the new date. However, some will help you resell your tickets, and if an event is permanently canceled, you should expect to be refunded.

In every review, we’ve extensively checked the customer guarantee of each site and given you all the information you need to make an informed decision. We’ve also taken this into account in our ratings. 

Which sites have an interactive seating chart?

All the services we reviewed allow you to click on various sections in the venue and compare prices. An interactive seating chart makes it easier to visualize where you’ll be sitting in relation to the stage. Some services offer point-of-view pictures from larger stadiums and venues so you can check out the viewing angle from the seats you’re reserving, and with some sites, this function gives you a 360-degree view. 

What about concert calendar apps?

The use of calendars, which can be searched, is a helpful addition that the sites listed here offer. That allows you to search by date to find events, or certain dates for an event, to suit when you can make it.

Many apps offer personalized alerts for bands, venues, and concerts, which are also a helpful way to get a heads-up on events you can go to that interest you.

The best app on the sites reviewed here was StubHub, so if you plan to use alerts like this, that could be the ideal option. It even lets you sync your music to make suggestions based on the artists you listen to most.

We’ve also looked around for other concert calendar apps:  

Songkick's free concert calendar app

This concert calendar app is free and available for  iOS and Android devices. It searches services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Deezer to find out what music you listen to and curates a personalized concert guide based on your playlists. Songkick sends notifications about concerts and festivals near your current location, allowing you to set a reminder to buy a ticket. This app also recommends bands and comedians not on your playlists to help you discover new and emerging artists. It displays pricing information, but we suggest using one of the licensed ticket broker sites we reviewed to ensure your transaction is secure and that you can get help and support if something goes wrong.

Bandsintown's concert planning app

This app has similar search capabilities as Songkick – it can sync to your playlists on popular streaming services and send notifications about bands you follow. However, because it allows artists to post tour dates free of charge, Bandsintown is a better option for searching for and discovering smaller local acts. It also has better social media features. For example, you can invite friends to a concert with a Facebook post, view tour news and updates, and post photos of yourself dancing or attempting an epic stage dive. Bandsintown is available in the Google Play and Apple App stores free of charge.

How we choose the best concert ticket sites

To find the best ticket sites, we checked prices for local and national concerts and events on the same day and noted the lowest prices available, as well as compared overall value for money. We also ranked sites based on price, availability, website and app features, and various events. We went through every step of the buying and selling process for tickets to ensure there were no hidden fees or issues with these sites, so you can be confident in picking the right concert ticket site for you. 

We’ve reviewed concert ticket websites for several years and know what to look for in the guarantees and money-back promises these companies offer. We’ve made sure to compare them all on guarantees for peace of mind and compare customer experience and customer service options to ensure that even if you experience difficulties, there’s a team you can trust to set things right. 

There's much to consider when determining the best concert ticket sites. When finalizing this selection, we looked at features such as pricing, availability, usability, mobile experience, and the entire end-to-end buying process. We then scored them, ranking the best experience at the top to make it easy to explore.

There can be a lot of hidden fees and other customer support issues, so we looked deeply into these, too, trawling through the companies' FAQs and guides to analyze how each site will work with you should there be any problems that arise in the buying process.

We also focused on delivery, checking how tickets were delivered, by whom, and how long you can expect to wait before your event starts.

Security and fees were two other areas we explored. We took your bank details, the website's build, and aftersales support into account to assess the reliability of the sales platform. When selling using these options, we found that selling online is more expensive than using a listing or social media as they take 10 to 20% of the sale price. We did, however, find them to be a safer option where your audience of buyers is far greater than it would be otherwise.

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Millie Fender is Head of Reviews at Top Ten Reviews. She also works on our sister sites: Real Homes, Ideal Home, Homes & Gardens, and Livingetc. As Head of Reviews, Millie is on a mission to make sure that we are reviewing all of the latest and greatest products for you and your home, whether it's a vacuum cleaner or an inflatable hot tub.

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Most anticipated concert tours of 2024: taylor swift, bad bunny, olivia rodrigo and more.

The Rolling Stones, Drake, Noah Kahan, Madonna, Nicki Minaj and Morgan Wallen are also among artists who are set to hit the road this year for highly anticipated tours.

By Carly Thomas

Carly Thomas

Associate Editor

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From the looks of it, 2024 is going to be another year full of memorable performances from some of the biggest artists in the industry.

However, it’s following a record-breaking year for several top performers, including Taylor Swift, who embarked on the first U.S. leg and Latin America leg of her Eras Tour, as well as Beyoncé, who performed across the globe for her Renaissance World Tour. Harry Styles’ massive Love on Tour also wrapped last year, as well as tours from Karol G, Doja Cat, Janelle Monáe, John Mayer and more.

Those are just a few of the tours throughout 2023 that brought millions of fans together for great vibes, memories and music. Concert tours serve not only as an opportunity for artists to promote their latest albums or highlight their entire music catalogs, but it’s also a time for their fans to celebrate their favorite performers all together under the same roof.

But the new year is fully packed with even more concerts, tours, festivals and events for music lovers all around, no matter what genre they’re interested in. Just some of the artists hitting the road in 2024 are Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Noah Kahan, Madonna, The Rolling Stones, Morgan Wallen, Blink-182, Red Hot Chili Peppers and, of course, Swift, who is finishing out her Eras Tour.

Ticket site Gametime also highlighted some of the most anticipated tours this year, based on median ticket prices, and to no surprise, artists including Swift, Rodrigo, Bad Bunny, The Eagles, Wallen and Billy Joel are in the top 10.

Although they’re not touring across the country or globe, several artists also have Las Vegas residencies this year, including Adele, Maroon 5, Christina Aguilera, Miranda Lambert, Mariah Carey, Carrie Underwood, Rod Stewart, Kelly Clarkson, Luke Bryan, Shania Twain, Bruno Mars, Kylie Minogue and U2.

As you are planning out your busy year ahead filled with new adventures, The Hollywood Reporter  has compiled a list of some of the most anticipated concert tours happening in 2024, below.

Taylor Swift

Tour:  Eras Tour  (March 2023 – December 2024) 

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the singer’s sixth headlining tour, is described as a journey through all of her musical eras, including  Fearless ,  Lover ,  Evermore ,  1989 ,  Speak Now ,  Reputation  and more. After touring across North America and Latin America in 2023, she is set to continue making her way through Asia, Europe and Australia in 2024, before returning to the U.S. for the tour’s second leg in October.

Tour:  Most Wanted Tour  (February – May 2024) 

Following two tours in 2022, Bad Bunny is taking his Most Wanted Tour across the U.S. The tour is in support of his latest studio album, Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana .

Olivia Rodrigo

Tour:  Guts World Tour  (February – August 2024) 

Olivia Rodrigo is heading out on a tour in support of her second studio album, GUTS . The tour will include performances across North America and Europe. Openers also include The Breeders, Chappell Roan, PinkPantheress and Remi Wolf.

Tour:  It’s All A Blur Tour – Big As the What? tour  (January – March 2024) 

Drake is hitting the road again, but this time with J. Cole. The new tour is in support of his eighth studio album,  For All the Dogs . It follows his and 21 Savage’s co-headlining It’s All a Blue Tour in 2023 to promote their collaborative album,  Her Loss , with 56 shows across North America.

Morgan Wallen

Tour:  One Night at a Time tour (April – August 2024) 

Country music star Morgan Wallen extended his latest tour in support of his third studio album of the same name. He is set to make his way across the U.S. for 29 tour stops.

Tour:  Celebration Tour  (October 2023 – April 2024) 

Madonna, who initially had to postpone the July 2023 start of her Celebration Tour as she recovered from a bacterial infection, kicked off her tour in London in October and will continue into 2024 with stops across North America.

The Rolling Stones

Tour:  The Hackney Diamonds tour  (April – July 2024) 

It’s been some time since The Rolling Stones toured across the U.S. but the band is set to play 16 cities across North America this year, in support of their latest album, Hackney Diamonds .

Noah Kahan 

Tour:  We’ll All Be Here Forever Tour  (February – August 2024)  

Following his successful Stick Season Tour in 2022 and summer 2023, Noah Kahan is getting back on the road for his We’ll All Be Here Forever Tour across North America and Europe.

Nicki Minaj

Tour:  Pink Friday 2 World Tour  (March – June 2024) 

After releasing her fifth studio album, Pink Friday 2 , Nicki Minaj announced she would be touring across the U.S. and Europe.

Tour:  Unreal Unearth Tour  (February – September 2024) 

Hozier is continuing his Unreal Unearth Tour in 2024 with new dates across North America and Latin America.

Chris Stapleton

Tour:  All-American Road Show tour  (March – October 2024) 

Chris Stapleton extended his latest tour into the new year after releasing his new album,  Higher , in November. The country music singer will be making his way across the U.S. and Europe. He will also continue to bring out special guests on select dates throughout the tour, including Sheryl Crow, Elle King, Marcus King, Nikki Lane, Willie Nelson and Family, Grace Potter, Allen Stone, Marty Stuart, Turnpike Troubadours, The War and Treaty and Lainey Wilson.

Tour:  One More Time Tour  (February – August 2024) 

The pop-punk band, featuring Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker, is making their way across the globe again for a stadium and arena tour, this time in support of their ninth studio album, One More Time… . Blink-182 has tour stops across North America, Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand.

Tour:  Summer Carnival 2024 Tour  (February – November 2024) 

Pink extended her latest tour for another year and will be making stops across North America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. Not only does she perform some of her biggest hits but also songs from her latest album, Trustfall .

Rod Stewart

Tour:  2024 Tour  (February – August 2024) 

Rod Stewart is hitting the road again this year to play his biggest hits throughout his career. He will be performing across the U.S., Europe and Asia before bringing his long-running Las Vegas residency to an end this summer.

George Strait

Tour:  2024 Tour  (May – December 2024) 

After his successful 2023 stadium shows, George Strait added additional shows for the new year. The country music star will be making his way across the U.S. for nine performances with Chris Stapleton and Little Big Town.

Tour: Think Later Tour (April – November 2024) 

Tate McRae is heading out on a world tour this year in support of her sophomore album, Think Later . The tour spans 53 dates throughout Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Tour:  Unlimited Love Tour  (February – July 2024) 

The rock band, comprised of Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith and John Frusciante, extended their latest tour into the new year, adding 16 cities across North America.

Blake Shelton

Tour:  Back to the Honky Tonk Tour  (February – March 2024) 

Blake Shelton is hitting the road again for another North American leg of his Back to the Honky Tonk Tour in 2024. The country music star will be playing 17 shows, along with Dustin Lynch and Emily Ann Roberts.

Foo Fighters

Tour:  Everything or Nothing At All Tour  (May – August 2024) 

The Dave Grohl-fronted band is going on tour this summer in support of their 11th studio album,  But Here We Are . They are performing shows across the U.S. and Europe.

Bruce Springsteen

Tour:  2023 Tour  (March – November 2024) 

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are set to make stops across North America and Europe after postponing all of their 2023 tour dates to 2024 as Springsteen recovered from peptic ulcer disease .

Tour:  2024 Tour  (January – August 2024) 

In addition to his shows at Madison Square Garden, Billey Joel will be performing at other venues across the U.S., Japan and Europe. Stevie Nicks, Chris Isaak and Sting will also be performing at various stops.

Tour:  The Long Goodbye tour  (January – March 2024) 

After embarking on the farewell tour last year, the Eagles extended their tour into the new year. The rock band, including members Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit, Vince Gill and Deacon Frey, will be making additional stops around the U.S. with special guest Steely Dan.

Kid Rock and Jason Aldean

Tour:  Rock The Country Tour  (April – July 2024) 

This year, the two country music stars will be hitting seven towns across the U.S. for two shows in each city. Kid Rock and Jason Aldean are also bringing other artists along with them on select dates, including Lynyrd Skynyrd, Miranda Lambert, Hank Williams Jr., Koe Wetzel, Brantley Gilbert and more.

Tour:  M72 World Tour  (April 2023 – September 2024)

Metallica’s latest tour in support of the band’s 11th studio album,  72 Seasons,  is continuing into the new year with stops across Europe and North America. Throughout the tour, the heavy metal band will play two nights in every city it visits with two completely different setlists and opening acts for each No Repeat Weekend.

Kenny Chesney

Tour:  Sun Goes Down Tour  (April – August 2024) 

The country music star is embarking on a tour across the U.S. this year, making stops in 18 cities, with Zac Brown Band, Megan Moroney and Uncle Kracker also performing on select dates.

Tour:  Music of the Spheres World Tour  (March 2022 – November 2024) 

The members of Coldplay are continuing their travels across the globe for their eighth headlining tour in support of the band’s ninth studio album,  Music of the Spheres . They will perform 165 shows in total by the end of the tour, with stops in Asia, Europe and New Zealand in 2024.

Tour:  The Saviors Tour  (May – September 2024) 

Green Day, consisting of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool, are touring across North America and Europe in the near year. The Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and The Linda Lindas will make appearances at select dates in North America, while Nothing But Thieves, The Hives, Donots, The Interrupters and Maid of Ace will be at some stops in Europe.

Journey and Def Leppard

Tour:  Summer Stadium Tour  (July – September 2024) 

The two rock bands are teaming up for a summer tour, performing in 23 cities. To celebrate their five-decade career, Journey will also hit the road across North America for their 50th anniversary Freedom Tour from February through April 2024.

Tour:  +–=÷× (Mathematics) Tour  (April 2022 – September 2025) 

Ed Sheeran is continuing his trek across the world for his fourth concert tour, which draws from all of his albums since 2011, including  Plus  (2011),  Multiply  (2014),  Divide  (2017) and  Equals  (2021) and  Subtract  (2023). He will make stops throughout Asia and Europe.

Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin and Pitbull

Tour:  The Trilogy Tour  (January – March 2024) 

Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin and Pitbull extended their co-headlining arena tour into the new year, with 18 new shows across North America.

Jonas Brothers

Tour:  The Tour  (August 2023 – June 2024) 

The Jonas Brothers, comprised of Kevin Jonas, Nick Jonas and Joe Jonas, are currently on their 12th concert tour, which will span three continents. The Tour features songs from five different albums, including  The Album ,  Happiness Begins  and  A Little Bit Longer .

Tour:  Standing Room Only Tour  (February – June 2024) 

The country star will be making stops in more than 30 cities for his latest tour, in support of his album Standing Room Only . Singer-songwriter Carly Pearce will also join him throughout the tour.

Janet Jackson

Tour:  Together Again tour  (April 2023 – July 2024) 

After initially returning to the road last year, the singer has revealed that she extended her tour into 2024, with 35 new dates. Jackson will be making stops across North America and Asia.

Jewel and Melissa Etheridge

Tour:  Summer/Fall Tour  (July – October 2024) 

The singer-songwriters are heading out on a co-headlining tour this summer and fall, making stops across North America. But before their joint tour kicks off, Etheridge also has shows for her I’m Not Broken Tour , which runs from March through April.

Lionel Richie and Earth, Wind & Fire

Tour: Sing A Song All Night Long tour (May – June 2023)

Following the sold-out 2023 run of the Sing A Song All Night Long tour, Lionel Richie and Earth, Wind & Fire are returning for 13 additional dates this year. They will make stops across North America.

Jennifer Lopez

Tour:  This Is Me…  Live: The Greatest Hits Tour (June – August 2024) 

J.Lo has re-branded her first North American arena tour in five years to feature more songs throughout her career. The initial tour was in support of her ninth studio album  This Is Me… Now , but she has since broadened its scope, to celebrate her music career. This is the singer’s first tour since 2019.

On May 31, Lopez and Live Nation announced that the tour was cancelled citing, “Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends.”

Maggie Rogers

Tour: Don’t Forget Me tour  (May – June 2024) 

Maggie Rogers will kick off part one of The Don’t Forget Me Tour   on May 23, in support of her upcoming third studio album Don’t Forget Me . She will make stops across the U.S. The Japanese House will also support from May 24 to June 22.

Tour: Beautifully Broken Tour  (August – October 2024) 

Jelly Roll is set to head out on his biggest headlining tour to date starting on Aug. 27. He will be making stops across the U.S. before wrapping up on Oct. 27. Tour openers include Warren Zeiders and Alexandra Kay.

Kacey Musgraves

Tour:  Deeper Well World Tour  (April – December 2024) 

Kacey Musgraves is returning to the stage with her upcoming tour, in support of her forthcoming fifth studio album  Deeper Well . The tour kicks off April 28 and concludes Sept. 4, with stops across Europe and North America. Madi Diaz, Father John Misty, Lord Huron and Nickel Creek will also join Musgraves at concerts throughout the tour.

Tour:  Sting 3.0 tour  (September – November 2024) 

The legendary musician is hitting the road again for his upcoming tour with drummer Chris Maas and longtime collaborator and guitarist Dominic Miller. Sting will perform shows across North America.

Tour: Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour (November – December 2024) 

In support of her new album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran , Shakira announced her upcoming world tour during her surprise appearance during Bizarrap’s performance at Coachella. The first leg of the tour kicks off Nov. 2.

Troye Sivan and Charli XCX

Tour:  Charli XCX & Troye Sivan P resent: Sweat  (September – October 2024) 

Pop icons Troye Sivan and Charli XCX are teaming up for a co-headlining tour across North America. The 21-city tour will not only celebrate their individual successes but also their commitment to inclusivity and diversity within the music industry.

Stevie Nicks

Tour:  Stevie Nicks: Live in Concert tour  (February – June 2024) 

The legendary singer is making her way across North America this year and has several stops from February to June.

Tour:  USHER: Past Present Future tour  (August – October 2024) 

The singer is set to embark on a North American tour, which will feature music from his 30-year career, including his new album Coming Home .

Tour: Stairway to the Sky tour (Dates: TBA) 

Zayn Malik announced his 2024 Stairway to the Sky tour on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon , which will support his fourth studio album, Room Under the Stairs , released earlier this year.

Sabrina Carpenter

Tour:  Short n’ Sweet Tour (September 2024 – March 2025) 

Sabrina Carpenter is set to head out on her first arena tour, the Short n’ Sweet Tour, in support of her sixth studio album of the same name.

Gracie Abrams

Tour:  The Secret of Us Tour (September 2024 – May 2025) 

Gracie Abrams is performing across the globe on her The Secret of Us Tour, in support of her sophomore album, The Secret of Us, which dropped in June.

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