Concert Venues

Because we haven’t run enough argument-generating music lists today, here’s another, from Paste magazine (via Stereogum), citing the best live music venues in America. Quibbles first: glad NYC’s Bowery Ballroom is there, but where’s the nearby Mercury Lounge? Up in Cambridge, Mass., Club Passim gets in over the Middle East? (Passim would deserve inclusion if it were still 1962, when Bob Dylan used to play there.) On the plus side, I’m thrilled that Colorado’s Red Rocks amphitheater made the cut; best concert I ever attended was the landmark U2 show there that was recorded and filmed as Under a Blood Red Sky. (I’m not too sure, though, about Paste’s command of geography: Red Rocks is properly listed among venues in the Southwest, but Boulder’s Fox Theater, just 30 miles north, in the same state, is listed in the Midwest.) Anyway, here’s where you weigh in on whether or not your regional favorites made the list. Let your fellow PopWatchers know where they should go to hear live music when they visit your town.