The good- Cargo does great with their sound in a way that comparable size venues rarely do. They hit the right balance of loud but not too loud, and was great about appropriate sound baffling so no echo off the walls. Leaps and bounds above the knitting factory- and the sound guys are in appropriate locations rather than blocking the middle of the room like Knitting Factory, huzzah!
I like the raised stage. Under other circumstances that would have been cool.
The bad- I think their room capacity must have been based on including a side isle section where you cannot see the stage thanks to sizable pillars- so no one in their right mind stands there.
A sold out show is sardine packed to very uncomfortable, no hope of standing somewhere (even in the back) without having people touch you from every direction, having to physically move people to go get a drink or go to the restroom.
Strangers pressed against your butt, strangers pressed against your sides. Like a cow in a pen for slaughter, I can literally smell random people's farts. This isn't normal. 1,000 capacity? Nope! Unless they had sold more than 1,000 tickets (their listed capacity, the show was sold out), they are mistaken on what their capacity should be for a show.
Being packed that tight also means if someone tall is in front of you, you can't see. With the raised stage, if you could be a foot back you'd be able to mostly see, but since you are only about 6 inches from the back of their heads, a tall person in front of you means no view for you. Seeing the stage remained a problem all night for me, and I heard many other shorter women having the same complaints.
100 less people would have made all the difference- and allowed us to buy more drinks. We couldn't get to the bar, and I couldn't have held a drink without people forcing me to spill it because you are constantly pushed around!
As soon as the encore was done we wanted to leave, and they clearly wanted us to leave as they began playing a song with lyrics that include "get the f out of here". I believe it was Red Peters "closing song".
I'd love to Cargo staff- a few of which kept yelling at people to go, but it took 20 minutes for us to be able to physically remove ourselves from the building as they only had a couple small doors open and 1,000 sardine packed people trying to squeeze out them.
Which leads to the biggest negative (I'm not knocking any stars for because it's beyond their capacity to control):
The crowd- wtf Reno? I attended a Reel Big Fish show, and I have been to this band's shows in the ballpark of 60+ times, I am familiar with what the typical show is like.
Every time I watch them in Reno though, there are people determined to get into fights, this has been true at the knitting factory and was true at Cargo. Not like your typical moshpit shovers and kickers who really only involve other moshpit types and are mostly having fun- but actual fighting. I've seen more fights at the handful of Reno shows I've attended than all the other ones combined- I typically attend in Sacramento, but also have attended in San Francisco, Chico, Las Vegas.
This Reno crowd oddity is amplified by overfull venues. When a couple of bros next to you decide to try and knock each others teeth out, crashing into everyone around them there is nowhere for non-involved parties to retreat to. Bouncers can't get through to throw them out.
At Cargo, the bouncers never showed up for the worst incident I saw that night. The fight was taken care of by the crowd who held involved parties until they calmed down and then released them in separate directions.
Then the rest of the show, you keep an eye on them, waiting for it to start back up again because both the man-children who can't resolve their problems with words are both still milling about, still drunk, still angry, still stupid, still oblivious to how they were ruining everyone else's night.
If I have the choice of two locations to hit up a tour, I'll choose the one that is not Reno for this reason. It happens every damn time in Reno- but all the venues I've attended at Reno have been packed too tight, sold out shows with venues that need capacity revisions.
This makes people uncomfortable and sends grumpy folks off the deep end because persevered slights like bumping into people is a constant.
It's really too bad. Minus the capacity problem and crowd behavior problem, I do think it's a nice venue.
The Whitney Peak hotel was awesome, and the restaurant was nice. If they altered crowd size I'd be quick to make a weekend of it- but if they are going to continue to pack the crowd so tight, I'd rather drive an extra couple hours to attend a show that may still be sold out and packed tight, but doesn't have such a douchebag crowd (sorry non-douches who are from Reno, I know you exist too, but a turd in the punchbowl still ruins the punch!) read more