With that said, I am shocked at the hypocrisy demonstrated by Tom Petty over the past six years. In 2002, around the time of The Last DJ, Tom was featured in a column for Rolling Stone magazine entitled "Tom Petty Is Pissed." It included the following excerpt:
The album, meanwhile, featured the song "Money Becomes King," which dealt with the same subject matter, featuring lines such as "And they raised the cost of living / And how could we have known / They'd double the price of tickets / To go see johnny's show / So we hocked all our possesions / And we sold a little dope / And went off to rock and roll."Only a complete greedhead would charge $150 for a concert ticket
"My top price is about sixty-five dollars, and I turn a very healthy profit on that; I make millions on the road. I see no reason to bring the price up, even though I have heard many an anxious promoter say, 'We could charge 150 bucks for this.' I would like to do this again and maybe come through and not leave a bad taste in people's mouths. I was at one of our gigs recently, and I was just stunned driving in that it cost thirty dollars to park your car. It's so wrong to say, 'OK, we've got them on the ticket and we've got them on the beer and we've got on everything else, let's get them on the damn parking.' You got to care about the person you're dealing with."
Fast-forward to 2008. In the aftermath of their lacklustre half-time show at the Super Bowl, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers are charging $115.50 for anything remotely close to the stage. I was considering paying $75 for "cheap seats," but considering how far away such cheap seats were, I decided not to support one of my favourite artists on his upcoming tour.
This article says it better than I could:
http://channel-surfing.blogspot.com/200 ... -king.html