Keith Urban at Roanoke Civic Center. Eric Brady photo
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Now on to consumer matters:
Maybe you're heard the Frank Zappa song, "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow."
At Roanoke Civic Center on Friday night, the theme was: "Don't Buy The Green Tickets."
Markie Fenton and Suzi Glowaski did. They had traveled together from the Philadelphia area to catch Keith Urban on Friday -- one of 12 times they will see Urban this year, they said. They bought their tickets through a fan club promotion handled by Ticketmaster.com, which mailed them to Fenton and Glowaski.
But those tickets, bordered at one end by the color green, would not scan into the civic center's system. Fenton, Glowaski and at least 748 other people making their way through the long queues outside the building had prepaid -- they should've had no trouble getting inside.
Instead, they spent long minutes wondering whether they would even get their seats.
"Nobody cares -- that's the problem," Fenton said.
Fortunately for them, civic center staff did care. The staff figured out early what was going on, and employees were busier than a sack of cats getting fan club members' green-stub tickets, running them back to the box office, exchanging them for civic center tickets with the same seat listed and handing them back to the buyers.
Still, the snafu made plenty of people late for Dierks Bentley's opening set.
An exasperated Chris Connolly, who manages the venue for Global Spectrum, said that almost everyone was inside the auditorium before Bentley's set was over.
"We did the best we could do with the situation we had to deal with," Connolly said. "Ticketmaster screwed up."
The civic center works with Tickets.com, but made an exception for the Ticketmaster-dispensed fan club tickets, Connolly said. He expected that Ticketmaster would send the civic center a list of those who bought tickets through their site, for the venue to print out its own tickets and hold them at the will call booth. That's how it usually happened, he said.
"They made a mistake, because obviously, their tickets won't scan in our building," Connolly said.
Just as Connolly finished explaining the problem to me, a woman walked up with this opening line: "We are very upset ... So we're missing half the concert because we have to stand in line?"
He started in again on the explanation to the woman, Nina Goggin of Richmond, and her friend Nancy Pope of Norfolk, fan club members who had driven into Roanoke on Friday to see the show.
Urban alluded to the trouble during his set.
"I want to thank everyone that came a long way to get here tonight ... [people who] had to jump through a lot of hoops" he said from the stage.
