After our wait reached 45 minutes, my friend Nikki pointed out something that I missed. A fan who like us, had grown inpaitient waiting for Vampire Weekend to come out on stage, shouted “Usher would have been out by now.”
It wasn’t for another 20 minutes did we find out what happened. After 65 minutes (still, I guess, preferable than the exaggerated 90 that Seattle Weekly reported, twice), some poor sap had to be the one to tell the reported crowd of 4,000 people that due to an unspecified illness, the band wouldn’t be performing that night. He didn’t say who he was or where he was from, only that the band had to regretfully cancel the show and that a makeup date would be immediately forthcoming that night and to check Twitter and Facebook for it. I still couldn’t find any statement from the band and asked their publicist for one, and will, of course, update this page when I learn more (Updated, see below).
A few thoughts:
- Some people stated that some in the crowd were throwing beer at said poor sap after the announcement. I didn’t see that and tend not to believe it. While we were all pissed, this was still a Vampire Weekend show, not the Gathering of the Juggalos.
- This was a particular tone-deaf way for the cancellation to be handled and the crowd shouldn’t have been kept in the dark as much as we were. Once it was official that there would be no VW, the crowd should have been told and to be kept waiting for over an hour will only build resentment. Shouting “fuck Vampire Weekend” is totally fair. Cancellations suck. Yet, can we stop the trend of taking to social media to seemingly compete with who was put out the most. It’s not exclusive to VW. Few things are sadder than taking to Facebook with outrage over what is really a minor disappointment.
- A couple of young teenagers were in the crowd wearing Native American headdresses. It was, at best, in poor taste and overtly racist at worst at Sasquatch and at a show where the headlining band has been accused (unfairly, IMO) of appropriating other cultures in their music is unforgivable. That the dumb kids don’t know better or want to justify it with a clueless excuse is hardly an appropriate response. Stop it.
- Dum Dum Girls and Beach House both played good sets. I enjoyed Dum Dum Girls more but was glad to finally see Beach House live. Their stage presence demands a little more considering the attention they’ve gotten but the songs sounded nice outside in the cold, summer night.
Update: VW’s publicist returned my e-mail with a statement that the band also posted to their Facebook page. It reads:
Dear Seattle,
We are incredibly sorry about our last minute cancellation last night in Redmond – the decision wasn’t taken lightly. Ezra had some vocal issues earlier in the day, but felt like he was improving however, while he was warming up just moments prior to our set time he lost his voice completely and was unable to perform. He was then taken to the ER and diagnosed with inflamed vocal cords and the doctor ordered him to not perform for 48 hours. Even so, we still wanted to perform but by that point it was clear that any performance we could give would have been essentially instrumental and nowhere close to what we or the audience was expecting.
We know you all had to wait around for the announcement, and many of you came a long way to be there, and again – we truly apologize.
on 
on 
As always, thanks for the real and honest scoop!
I was in the front row to the right last night and can confirm that someone did throw beer or water or some kind of liquid on the guy who announced the cancellation.
Thanks Marianne. I wasn’t quite that close but it looked from my view like he was able to get on stage and off without any incident.
I’ll confirm the liquid hurling. I don’t think it was rampant, but a bottle or two were definitely thrown in the general direction of the stage post-announcement.
voice problems or not, i still think at the VERY least they could have sent another band member out to make the announcement. better yet though, lil jon could have made the annoucement and jake gyllenhaal could have passed out free pints of jim beam. (in short shorts of course)
yeah. I agree, after that wait it would’ve been nice to have someone from the band show up to apologize in person.