I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.
What I love about my audience is it's extremely diverse as far as the ethnicities and the ages that show up.
Our audiences were always the most bizarre mix. You'd have a thousand screaming girls in the front of the stage and then ten very serious rock critics in the back of the room going, 'Uh-huh, I think we understand this.'
I want to make music for everyone. I'm not trying to start a super exclusive group. I don't want a clique of people where you have to wear a certain type of clothes to come to our shows, or you have to be the ages of this and this.
... a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.
Adams was the lawyer who defended the British troops of the Boston Massacre. He described the crowd as:
They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the hardest people to make laugh.
I think looking at the front row of a Chvrches show is really diverse. It could be 50-year-old dudes who love Depeche Mode or teenagers or teenage girls and their dad.
I think it's pretty dynamic. There's a lot of energy there and life, and you'll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they're listening in Spanish.
You look at my audience, and it proves what Congress thinks America is, is wrong. I get people across the political spectrum. Parents and kids come and they're all punked out, and there are these other guys in John Deere caps.
50 percent of the people I perform for have come to scream at me and the other 50 percent have come to listen to the music.
Now look at the crowd. We’ve got everybody here tonight: Black, white, Asian, Latinos—and guess what? President Obama says we can all stay! God Bless America!
It's a mixed crowd at the dogs - black, white, hispanic - but to Walt they all look like Jackie Gleason. Heavyset guys with big plans and polyester souls.
Our fans are made up of different groups of people: people who enjoy this Japanese idol scene, versus metal fans. The crowd is disorganised because everyone is reacting to the band in a different way.
Our shows have always been sort of an all-generations thing, people from 6 to 60. The other night, we played a show and we had a woman who was probably 70 to 75 years old, and she was there alone and she was singing every song. On the other end of the spectrum, there was a 7-year-old on his dad's shoulders and the dad is singing along.
I love to play for audiences that are simply made of people rather than so-called special people.
Every single rally is a different character.
My American audiences are pretty mixed. I get all sorts of people, old and young. It's nice.
Now we have an audience that is so very eclectic. Big, tremendous fans.
For me to go back and to play for audiences some of whom have been following me for thirty years and some who have found me in the last five or six years, that's really an interesting thing. I have an audience that goes from kids to seventy year olds.
Each artist attracts his own different set of fans. And G3 over the years has created it's own audience as well... they know it's something unusual and special that they're not going to get anywhere else ... young and old, both sexes, all come out. They all look at each other like, Wow, what are those people over there ? ... They're surprised at their own diversity.
I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square. It's such a mix of people, like a party. There's always an errand you can do along there, whether it's picking up contacts or buying poker chips.
In Vegas, you have an audience you can't find anywhere else. It's from all over the country. You play Seattle, everyone's from Seattle. But in Vegas, you have six from Seattle, a bunch from L.A., some local Las Vegans and maybe a farmer from Iowa. In Vegas, you learn the ins and outs of holding a room because of that great spectrum of folks.
I like Las Vegas because it kind of gives me a chance to gauge my material in front of a very diverse group of people. There are a lot of different people in the audience, and you can kind of get a barometer for how your material plays throughout the country.
And with this sort of increased visibility, there's more money going around in the industry, and it changes a lot, in terms of who gets into the business as a creator, who sticks with it, and who gets pushed out. And I do think it's sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing. But there are definitely pros and cons. You could also look at it as bringing in a more diverse crowd.
I think the New York theater audience is very savvy. Sometimes you get newbies who think they're going to be watching Smash onstage, and sometimes you have people who have been coming to theater for years. It's the combination of those people in an audience that makes for a pretty amazing night - their ability to give each other permission to react and enjoy, in a way that maybe they wouldn't if they weren't sitting next to each other.