Phil Lesh concert review
Rumsey Playfield in New York (NYC), US
Sat, 31 May 2014

The music was as amazing as ever. Thank you Phil! Awesome show!

My "Great" (less than "Amazing") rating is related to the sound engineering, crowd management and hospitality services of the venue.

We paid $99.00 plus $20.00 service fee for Reserved Bleacher seating in the back. The seats and view were amazing, but the volume of the sound was too low during the earlier hours of the show. We learned that the sound technician was not allowed to turn up the volume due to a Park Ordinance which has a decibel limit. If there is a Park Ordinance to keep the decibel limit down, then there should be speakers throughout the venue so that customers who paid the highest ticket amount have as a good or better sound as the GA customers. As for the crowd management; the way the barriers were set up caused unnecessary people traffic making it very difficult to maneuver throughout the venue. Another issue was the line for the Porta-Potties on the left side facing the stage. The line extended into the crowd of people waiting in line for beer. People were constantly trying to figure out where the end of the line was. The set up of the line needs to be re-engineered to that it is not in the crowd and is clear for customers. Speaking of the Port-Potties, there wasn't any waterless disinfectant for people to use for their hands after using the porta-potties. This increases risk for spreading diseases and is perceived as inhospitable. Then, there was the long beer lines due to poor management of cash collection. The cashier was over-taxed with having to figure out how many beers were sold due to poor communication between the person selling the beers and the cashier. This was because the person selling the beers was also responsible for taking orders, retrieving the beers from those pouring, putting the beers into the cardboard holders and for collecting the money. The staff pouring beers could have been assembling into cardboard holders in the back. It also seemed as though they could have used one more person to help. At $8.00/beer, I think they could have afforded one more person per register to assist with making it a seamless operation and reduce wait time (20 minutes to get a beer is ridiculous.) It was truly a mess of an operation. But other than all of that, we still had a blast. Thanks for asking.

show was good fun, but the sound in the 1st set was terrible. way to soft, had to strain to hear what was going on. thankfully 2nd set was much better, sound wise