A New Hampshire music festival was forced to shut down a day early due to paltry ticket sales and nearly non-existent attendance — but that didn’t stop Ted Nugent from singing its praises.
The psychedelic rocker raved about the audience at his LaconiaFest performance Friday, even though ticket prices to his show dropped from $67 to $5 amid the festival’s financial struggles, according to the Laconia Daily Sun.
“There sure were a gaggle of beautiful, sexy, skinny gals out there tonight and as always, it is incredibly inspiring to see everybody smiling and dancing to my songs,” Nugent told the website Ultimate Classic Rock after the concert. “Tonight was an out of the park musical home run! Lucky, lucky me!”
It’s unclear how many people attended Nugent’s performance at the New Hampshire show. The festival, however, struggled as a whole, and ticket sales fell well below what promoters had anticipated, the Daily Sun reports.
Even plummeting ticket prices didn’t encourage more people to show up at the week-long event.
Attendance experienced a modest uptick for Steven Tyler’s show on Wednesday and Bret Michaels’ performance on Thursday, according to the newspaper. But even Tyler — the biggest name on the bill — only reportedly earned about 4,000 spectators.
Management for the event left the festival on Thursday, local TV station WMUR reports. One manager told the station that the issues stemmed from the city configuring unrealistically high projections for capacity at the event, making staffing more expensive than anticipated.
By the time new management took over, a wave of employees had been let go without being paid, according to the Daily Sun.
Rock group Sevendust, which was scheduled to headline the festival on Saturday, was one of several acts to cancel its gig before the final day of the festival was scratched altogether.
None of that, however, seemed to damper Nugent’s experience. He was still buzzing about his band as he left the stage Friday.
“We were crazy tight, ultra-high energy and the songs killed!” he told Ultimate Classic Rock, before adding: “I played some insane guitar stuff tonight that I have never played before and I can’t wait to see where this tour takes us! Musical adventure turns me on big time!”
