July 21, 2023

i went to 4 big time rush concerts in 6 days

PART ONE: ALREADY YOU HAVE QUESTIONS

Question One: Why?

So, in 2020, two of my friends and I started a podcast about both the show Big Time Rush and the band Big Time Rush, the latter of which very conveniently reunited at the end of 2021. Since then, they have been hellbent on touring constantly, only pausing briefly to release a new album last month. All three of us saw them a very normal singular time last summer on the Forever Tour, and then they announced this year’s Can’t Get Enough Tour, kindly stopping nowhere within a three-hour drive of us. And my friend (and cohost) Maggie was like, “Do you know what would be really funny?”

See, they weren’t stopping anywhere within a three-hour drive… but on several occasions they were stopping within a four-hour drive. And really, four hours is just three hours plus one additional hour, if you think about it. What kind of Big Time Rush podcast would we be if we didn’t go?

Our friend (and cohost) Haleigh wasn’t able to join us, so in an effort to bring her the most complete possible anecdotal experience, we went to as many shows as we could justify. Which was four of them. Four shows, all around four hours away, to see four guys. Do not dwell on the fact that four means death. I didn’t.

And for my final excuse, as those four upstanding young men once told me, it’s the only life I got so I gotta live it big time.

Question Two: What the fuck is a “Big Time Rush”?

Once upon a time, Disney acquired the souls and livelihoods of up-and-comers the Jonas Brothers, who made them such obscene amounts of money that a Disney Channel original series starring the band members as fictionalized versions of themselves was almost immediately greenlit, and competing children’s entertainment giant Nickelodeon was like, “Oh, fuck,” and scrambled to assemble an equivalent boy band. Or so my theory goes.

What actually happened is that Nickelodeon had a sitcom called Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide that had just ended, and its creator Scott Fellows decided he wanted his next project to be a Monkees pastiche. So he cast four guys named Kendall, James, Carlos, and Logan as four guys named Kendall, James, Carlos, and Logan who get recruited by a washed-up record producer to become a boy band called Big Time Rush. The show ran for four seasons and a movie, throughout which the band also existed in a defictionalized state, touring and performing songs from the TV show, but as their regular, human selves. (Like Hannah and Miley did that one time.) And when the show ended, so did the band. Unofficially.

Then, in 2020, a strange year that compelled a lot of people to do a lot of things they wouldn’t normally do, (e.g. start podcasts about Big Time Rush) the band members released a socially-distanced acoustic rendition of their ballad “Worldwide” and sparked reunion rumors, which weren’t confirmed until 2021, when they announced December performances in Chicago and New York. Also that December, they released a comeback single. February 2022 saw the release of another single, and a tour announcement! Leading up to and during the tour, they released three more singles, plus a rerecording of one of their Nickelodeon-era songs.

In early 2023, they released “Can’t Get Enough”, their sixth single since reuniting. And you’re thinking, “Wow, six entire singles, that’s surely indicative of an upcoming album!” NO. It was indicative of the Can’t Get Enough Tour, which they announced before the South American leg of the Forever Tour had even concluded. They did finally announce one with the release of their next single, “Waves”, and Another Life, their first album in ten years, came out on June 2nd. (It’s considerably better than The Album.) The Can’t Get Enough Tour began in Dallas on June 22nd, and this is where you came in.

Question Three: Is this a good idea?

Yes.

Question Four: Should I do this?

Definitely.

PART TWO: BIG TIME ROAD TRIP

Our plan was to drive around New York, Pennsylvania, and Ontario, sightseeing cool natural phenomena (mostly waterfalls) during the day, and attending four shows on the Can’t Get Enough Tour at night. The shows were as follows:

• Sunday, July 2nd, in Hershey, PA

• Monday, July 3rd, in Saratoga Springs, NY

• Wednesday, July 5th, in Toronto, ON

• Friday, July 7th, in Bethel, NY

Even if you’re unfamiliar with this area of the continent, you may be thinking to yourself, What the fuck? They put the show in another country between two shows in the same state?! Yes! Yes, they did. It wasn’t even that bad of a commute, since we were able to stop at home and decompress on Tuesday and Thursday, but I still can’t think too hard about it or I’ll get really mad.

The most significant thing you will notice about Pennsylvania as a New Yorker is that their highways are really, really nicely paved! Way nicer than ours! And their backroads are horribly nightmarishly paved and feel totally unsafe to drive on, but Pennsylvanians are so used to these conditions that they pass you on a double solid for having the audacity to drive any slower than 50 mph so you don’t BREAK YOUR CAR. I wasn’t even driving for this leg, and I’m still haunted by it.

We hit four waterfalls in eastern Pennsylvania on Sunday, two of which were at Lehigh Gorge State Park. The coolest thing there (in my humble opinion) was this random, unassuming cave on the way to the parking lot.

We did not enter the cave because it smelled inauspicious and I am somewhat uneasy about caves (put a pin in that). Plus, it didn’t even go anywhere. But look at it.

After that, we went to Jim Thorpe, a borough in the Poconos, to try to tour an abandoned prison, but there were no less than nine hundred trillion cars in the area, so we left. Like, there was not enough room in town for all of those cars. We never figured out what everyone was there for, (I guess maybe some sort of Fourth of July thing) so I hope they had fun and are not still stuck in traffic trying to escape.

What we toured instead was the No. 9 Coal Mine and Museum in Lansford, where you take a train into a defunct mine shaft, look at some old mining equipment, and hear a lot of sobering facts about child labor.

Despite the depressing subject matter, the tour guide was really engaging, and it was quite literally a super cool place to visit — the mine is perpetually 50 degrees.

The tour was about an hour long, so in the interest of time we had to scrap our other scary mining-related destination (the Centralia steam vents) and head directly for BIG MINE RUN GEYSER.

This very orange, perpetually active geyser is situated above an abandoned, flooded mine. It’s called Big Mine Run because of the road it’s on, and not because it sounds anything like Big Time Rush. But we can pretend.

And then we drove to Hersheypark and saw the first of four BTR shows (I’ll expound in Part Three).

Our first stop on Monday was Dunkin’ Donuts A CAVE. Specifically, the Secret Caverns — a cave with a natural underground waterfall.

This is obviously the coolest thing on the entire planet Earth, so I think I am good on cave exploration forever. No more caves for me. Nothing personal — they’re just very scary and slippery and dark and don’t Google the Nutty Putty Caves incident your phone doesn’t work so you can’t call for help if you get stuck down there and ANYWAY.

While you are awaiting the start of your trek down the “petrified escalator” they call it, (the stairs into the cave) you can also check out the Ice Cave, another geographical feature located at ground level with the least comprehensible accompanying plaque of all time.

After that, we had lunch in Sharon Springs, where we’d been before for that Schitt’s Creek popup they did in early 2020. I have pictures of a waterfall from that previous trip, but it either dried up or just disappeared, because I couldn’t find it.

Our final stop before the concert was Lester Park to see some fossilized stromatolites. I felt kind of bad walking on them, even though they were extremely dead. Like, the absolute most dead.

After the show, we had a super long drive home, and I spent our so-called nation’s so-called birthday just. Totally asleep.

On Wednesday, we went to two more American waterfalls before crossing the border to see those really big ones. Of which the U.S. and Canada have joint custody.

We didn’t stay long because the town of Niagara Falls has mutated into an uninhabitable tourist trap that makes Las Vegas look like fucking Bordeaux. And I say this as someone who really, genuinely enjoyed it there as a little kid.

Despite extremely spotty coverage from our very American phone plans, we navigated to Ball’s Falls in Lincoln to see two more waterfalls. There was a heat advisory in southern Ontario, so afterwards we abandoned the whole “being outside” thing and found a restaurant in Hamilton to get lunch IRREFUTABLE PROOF that we were in Canada.

Toronto is a very awesome city that it is almost impossible to drive into and out of in a timely fashion, so we just headed straight there, and made it by 6:30. The show wasn’t until 8:00, so we found a bar and pregamed. On the way home, we stopped at a Canadian McDonalds, where Maggie got poutine again, and I still wasn’t able to try anything because I’m a vegetarian.

Thursday was another chill day at home, and then we decided to drastically alter the Friday agenda to account for our total exhaustion, so in lieu of hiking, we saw Insidious: The Red Door. It was fine.

We drove down to Bethel, where the original 1969 Woodstock Festival took place, and where a modern amphitheater now stands. And maybe it was just the edible I took before the show, but there was something tangibly evil about such hallowed ground hosting Live Nation concerts. That’s not what it’s for. Nobody at Woodstock paid $27 for prickly pear margaritas.

And then we attended our final Big Time Rush concert of the adventure. Let’s get into it.

PART THREE: AN EXHAUSTIVE RECAP OF THE CAN’T GET ENOUGH TOUR

I have now seen Big Time Rush live more times than I have seen any other artist, which is really hard to contemplate, and so I won’t. And like, I don’t regret doing it. It’s a really fun summer concert with a way better setlist than last year. I was worried it would depreciate in value with each show, but I got pretty much the same enjoyment level all four times.

They swung two (2) opening acts for this tour, and their names rhyme! One was MAX, [Schneider; no relation to Dan, thank god] another Nickelodeon alumnus about whom I knew absolutely nothing. And the other was JAX, MY OLD FOE!!!!! We actually parked really far away in Hershey, so we were late getting to our seats and had to walk across the arena during “Cinderella Snapped”, and it felt like ritual humiliation that I was undergoing as punishment for being mean to her on my Substack. And I wouldn’t be that mean to her again, because she’s good live! She played an unreleased song called “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (no, not that one) that I am genuinely excited to hear when it comes out, because I could not stop singing what little I retained of the chorus on my day off.

MAX is also really good, it turns out, and I think HBO’s streaming platform should be forced to sign over exclusive name rights. He’s a really fun, energetic performer who clearly loves what he does and calls everything in his sightline spicy and zesty. He has a song with SUGA from BTS, and instead of cutting the rap, MAX just went for it. And like, I don’t speak Korean and I didn’t know the song, but I think he did okay!

As for Big Time Rush, every performance was fundamentally the same, so I’m just gonna go through the setlist and interject show-specific commentary and/or footage where I see fit. The latter only applies to Toronto and Bethel, though, because our seats in Hershey and Saratoga were… well…

8:59 P.M. (8:16 P.M. in Toronto): The stage turns purple. The band members perform some disembodied “Oooh”s from underneath the stage, like they’re Phantoms of the Opera. And then they RISE.

The first song of the Can’t Get Enough Tour is of course “Can’t Get Enough”, with an extended intro and outro. I was very neutral about the studio version of this song, but the addition of live instruments made it pretty great.

Since I couldn’t really see anything in Hershey and Saratoga, I was totally blindsided by most of the visuals on the diamond-shaped screen behind the band when we got to Toronto and Bethel, and this was none more apparent than when the second song, “Elevate”, (also fine; better live) featured this astronaut, by whom I was so stunned and concerned that I just started taking pictures as, I don’t know, self-defense? I was not sober for either of these shows.

Next up is “Song For You”, which is Maggie’s personal favorite. The album version has a rap verse by Karmin, (of “Brokenhearted” fame) but the Big Time Rush guys are not as courageous as MAX, so they just replace it with a little bass solo.

Everybody disappears for a costume change, so to make time for that, they sort of haunt the introduction to “Waves”, the second single from the new album. They make it very spooky.

I loved “Waves” anyway, but it’s so much better live. Here’s a full version from the Saratoga show if you are inclined to check it out. Put instruments in your studio recordings, cowards!

They follow that up with “Weekends”, another new song that I um. I don’t like it. It’s fine. It’s one of those “Why are you stringing me along, do you like me or not?” songs, but the lyrics just make it sound like they’re negging some girl with a 9:00-5:00 for having the audacity to add to her Instagram story but not respond to texts. The album version clocks in at just over three minutes, but the live version adds a solo Carlos ukulele coda. I wish that was the whole song, actually.

Now it’s time for the ACOUSTIC SECTION. If you are a hater and a slowsongphobe like me, this might be when you’d consider going to the bathroom or getting a $17 refill on your $25 alcoholic beverage. If you are not slowsongphobic, this is a good part of the show that you will enjoy. Up first is “All Over Again”, which was born a dance song, but functions much better as an audience participation-based acoustic affair.

What doesn’t function better acoustically — so much so that there is an entire episode of the TV show about it — is “Any Kind of Guy”. I love this song and its hilarious music video, and I don’t think it should’ve been acoustic’d! They’re hurting it! They also elongated this one in an attempt to make all the men in the audience sing it by themselves, but the guys in Toronto did such a good job that they did not attempt to replicate their success in Bethel.

Rounding out the acoustic section is new song and pseudo-marriage proposal “Ask You Tonight”, which they took great care to explain was written at 2:00 in the morning in Big Bear with the slight aid of tequila. I was fine with this one until Toronto, where the indoor venue and my closer-than-usual proximity to the stage made the end of the song feel like church. In the scariest way possible. I was this close to fleeing Canada prematurely.

Except I never actually would’ve done that, because I knew that “Forget You Now”, cornerstone of C# Minor Summer 2023, my favorite song from the new album, and my favorite performance of the show, was imminent.

Your reward for surviving the acoustic section is a phantasmagoria of green lasers, ghostly vocalizations, and synth that kind of mimics an old theater organ. At a Big Time Rush concert.

I felt like I was at a Hex Girls concert, especially when the band got trapped in individual laser prisms after the second chorus, as though imprisoned there by a Monster of the Week.2

At this point the show could’ve ended, and I would’ve been like, “WHOO, BEST CONCERT EVER.” But it doesn’t end! Next up is “Love Me Love Me”, a throwback where they scare me to death with more lasers.

Additional throwbacks (“Paralyzed”, “Nothing Even Matters”) follow, but they do not make direct attempts on my life. Then there’s the obligatory performance of “Worldwide”, an immensely popular song that I didn’t like that much anyway, but now it’s more of an Event than a song, because they’ve started letting audience members join them onstage to be serenaded. So now a three-minute song takes like, ten minutes to introduce, set up, and perform. This is when you should actually go to the bathroom or refill your drink — I’m sorry, acoustic section. Which is where “Worldwide” should’ve gone!

After “Worldwide” I get punished for my haterism once again, because it’s time for “Invisible!” I talked about this briefly when I realized there are actually no good songs called “Invisible” at all, anywhere, ever, so I won’t spend too much time on it, but I do not like this fucking song. James plays a piano that ascends slowly from the floor, and to each their own, but as a piano bitch myself, this is not when I’d bust out that particular skill. I think I’d take a power nap backstage.

The next costume change takes so long that they play a music video of new song “I Just Want To (Party All the Time)” and hope you won’t notice. That song is of course built around a sample of the 1985 James Brown-penned Eddie Murphy hit “Party All the Time”, but with all of the menace removed, so it’s just an actual party song now. I still haven’t decided how I feel about that.

You may have noticed that the majority of the setlist has been Nickelodeon-era songs with the occasional new release (though, curiously, none of the singles from last year) peppered in for variety. THAT’S ABOUT TO CHANGE. No more new songs for you (RIP “Work For It”, my other favorite from Another Life). THROWBACKS ONLY.

And the first of these throwbacks is “Famous”, a song so old that it predates Kendall’s membership in the band and had to be rerecorded to include him. “Famous” is very dear to me because it has like, guitars and shit, and I thought this was an unpopular opinion, (I have been known to have those about Big Time Rush songs) but everybody went so hogwild for this one that the band was consistently taken aback. Nickelodeon very evilly made Logan rap at the end of the song, and a few shows into the tour, they started including the rap, which he delivers through a microphone with an audio filter on it that makes him sound like (as Maggie put it) GLaDOS dying in Portal 2.

Following that, we get a medley of old fan favorites, including the never-released “Shot in the Dark.” Kendall plays guitar for that one, and ends the segment by dramatically “murdering” the rest of the band.

“Confetti Falling” is up next. I don’t know anyone who particularly loves “Confetti Falling”, but it’s a perfect excuse to have confetti cannons at the show, so they always play it. (The cannons were absent in Toronto. I wonder what happened there.)

Closing out the main setlist is of course “Big Time Rush” by Big Time Rush, the theme song to the show Big Time Rush. You know this one.

Then they pretend to leave, which prompted some girl sitting near us in Hershey to yell, “I WAS WAITING FOR ‘BOYFRIEND.’” Apparently there are some people walking around this green Earth living very different lives from me, i.e. not Googling setlists. They just go in blind. They do not pre-plan their bathroom or food/drink refill breaks. They don’t know if and when their favorite songs will appear. They don’t know what encores are.

The first song of the encore is “Windows Down”, a party song that samples “Song 2” by Blur, and they run into the crowd for this one. Historically, this has been very dangerous for boy bands, but none of them have died yet, so directly in harm’s way they continue to put themselves!

They all walked behind us in Bethel, and I got footage of three of them. I missed James because I was too stoned to realize what was happening. Sorry, James.

Then, having survived the crowd, they play “Boyfriend.” You know this one, too. Snoop wasn’t at any of the shows we saw, unfortunately, but as of posting date, there are sixteen opportunities left for that to change.

One more song, and it’s my favorite. I hate when this happens, because I like to use the last song of the night to haul ass out of the venue so I can beat the traffic. So thrice I had to sprint away from my beloved “Til I Forget About You.” In Bethel we gave up on that approach and were rewarded for it by sitting in the parking lot for half an hour. And in Toronto I had to film it from behind this pole.

Maybe “Worldwide” should be the closer when they inevitably tour again next summer. Just a suggestion.

PART FOUR: MISCELLANEOUS

If you were to replicate this exact road trip, with or without Big Time Rush’s involvement, you might notice yourself driving across the Susquehanna River no less than thirteen (13) times. We started tallying crossings in a little notebook after doing it like, three times in under an hour. I don’t have anything to say about it, really. But now this random boy band and this random river are inextricably linked in my brain for all time.

Big Time Rush’s touring musicians are Cody Perrin, (guitar) Vicky Warwick, (bass and keys) and Greg Garman (drums). They are all very talented and hard to find on social media because the band gave them silly little nicknames like “Vic Vicious” and “Gucci Greg”, but I did my due diligence! And I gotta tell you, it’s weird to hear someone get introduced so consistently and so adamantly as “Gucci Greg”, only to find out that no one else calls him that professionally. It’s not that deep, but it did give me this brief nightmare fantasy of being someone’s touring keyboardist and having to answer to a moniker which is not my own. Does Gucci Greg’s family know he’s on tour with Big Time Rush? Would they recognize him if they went to a show? Or would they simply think, Yes. That is Gucci Greg, a separate entity from the Greg we know.

Jax and MAX’s sets were both canceled in Bethel due to inclement weather, and I was devastated. I really wanted to see Jax, to whom I was very mean on this blog and who I’d already seen twice before by that point. Call it a redemption arc. (Mine or hers? You decide.)

Speaking of which, I do not recommend getting high before a concert if there is a chance the concert could be delayed or canceled, because you will just have to sit there for an hour and a half while time becomes elastic. And you will worry that people around you know. As though you are the first person ever to enjoy the effects of marijuana at the site of fucking Woodstock.

I do recommend spending an hour in a coal mine before attending a boy band concert. Just for, you know, perspective. When you finally make it to your seats, after hours of driving, you can turn to your companion(s) and say, “We were in a mine today.”