On Sunday, the sold-out crowd at Chase Center raised their phones as if by compulsion when Charli XCX emerged on the stage, yelling into a mic with so much Auto-Tune that she sounded like an outdated android embarking on a sermon.
The moment had become one of the viral treats of her Sweat tour, and like everyone else, I stood ready to capture Charli’s newest rant about life and society and cocaine and the urge to inject more filler into her 32-year-old face.
But as she started to riff, I realized that I couldn’t hear a damn thing Charli was yelling (I would later learn via TikTok that the night’s rant had been about broken friendships and reconnecting with your ex-BFF). The audio farted out at me as a muddy mess, courtesy of San Francisco’s newest, and most expensive, “state-of-the-art” entertainment venue.
Chase Center opened on September 6, 2019 — a phoenix rising from a landfill, if you will, soaring on the winds of $1.4 billion in private capital, with capacity for more than 18,000 fans. The Golden State Warriors remain the main draw, but Chase Center also hosts topline musical stars from around the world, including Taylor Swift and Elton John.
Charli XCX shot into superstardom earlier this year, when her album Brat emerged as the sound of the summer. It inspired an endless fount of memes for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, as well as a critically acclaimed tour in a partnership with Charli’s BFF, the blooming queer icon Troye Sivan.
Given how much money was poured into SF’s flagship venue, it’s infuriating that music lovers in the Bay still have to settle for mediocrity when they want to see the biggest acts.
Some of the problems are fixable. A lot of them are not.
I’d like to believe the venue’s crappy sound falls into the former category. Pro audio experts have lauded Chase Center’s acoustic design. Its architecture is designed to dampen echoes, and the arena deploys a cutting-edge array of JBL speakers, allegedly suited for both game days and nightlife. While many major acts bring their own speakers, in theory, they’re plugging into one of the most streamlined sound systems in the country.
But somehow, garbage audio prevails — all the time in the cheap seats, and sometimes even in front-row territory.
I’ve attended shows at Chase three times in the last two months, to see Kacey Musgraves, Kygo, and Charli. Three different genres and vibes, yet the result was the same: Plenty of volume, but bloated bass and muddy mids. It was better for me during Kygo, where I copped 100-level seats, than Charli, where I sat in the nosebleeds. But paying more doesn’t guarantee you can hear anything: My colleague Joshua Bote was standing in the 100 section for Charli, directly opposite the stage, and still couldn’t make out anything the singer said.
I understand the challenge at hand. Sports arenas, by design, are tough spaces for aural precision. Wondering whom to blame, I spoke with a friend, Kyle Omar, who works as a tech on tour with artists like Billie Eilish and Roger Waters. He told me there are a lot of possible suspects, including the venue’s audio system, the artist’s sound engineers, and even the speakers that touring acts bring to Chase.
But he put the most blame on the venue itself. A talented audio team could theoretically work wonders in Chase, Omar said, but not when they’re already rushing all-out to put on a show and depart the next day.
“Chase could’ve been designed better for concerts,” he told me. “Audio doesn’t have 12 hours to fix an arena… It’s more of a workaround.”
In other words, there might be hacks to mold a better sound — if anyone actually prioritized sound quality.
The physical experience of being in the nosebleeds, on the other hand, is permanent. For Charli, I bought my upper-deck seat for $85; scalpers were listing tickets in the same section at an eye-bleeding $400 on the night of. I wondered how much my neighbors had paid as I squeezed myself like toothpaste into the eighth row of section 208. There were maybe two square feet of space in which to dance; getting too excited would mean risking a face-first topple down the seats, straight toward a thin piece of glass that maybe came up to the middle of my thigh.
There is a good reason why the seats are so steeply raked, and the “rail” in the 200 section of Chase Center is a clear partition seemingly designed for toddlers: Watching sports is superior when you have a clear line of sight to the court. But it also can contribute to freak accidents, including a fatal fall at a 2021 Phish concert at Chase. Attendees have complained about feeling uneasy around the partitions for years.
The downsides make it all the more ironic that, just two nights prior to Charli at Chase, I stood in the middle of the venerable Cow Palace, wondering how an ancient hangar for cattle could still be one of the very best places to hear a live artist.
John Summit, the frat-boy king of house music, was in town for a two-night stay at the Palace. It wasn’t a perfect experience; the number of drunk high schoolers made me feel like a chaperone at prom, and some stranger with massive pupils tried to fight me, incorrectly convinced that I owed him money.
But as I wandered between the main floor and the raised “bowl” around it, I could feel the punch of the speakers reverberating through the crowd, with a sparkle of treble and decent clarity in the vocals of anthemic Summit hits like “Where You Are” and “Shiver.” People were grooving freely in the cheap seats. Nobody seemed aware of the 83-year-old venue’s limitations, including a near-absence of amenities and aesthetics.
Chase Center may be a gleaming mecca of late-stage capitalism, and one of the coolest basketball venues I’ve ever experienced. But when it comes to the pure thrill of dancing to music at wicked volumes, San Francisco deserves better for its showcase acts — even if it’s something as old as Cow Palace.
