Why Did Viagra Boys’ Sold-Out Dallas Show Start an Hour Early?

If you’ve ever wondered how to totally screw up one of the city’s most exciting concerts of the year, Live Nation presents a simple three-step formula. First, find a highly coveted headliner like Stockholm-based party-punk ensemble Viagra Boys and book their first-ever Dallas show, hot off the recent release of their fourth LP Viagr Aboys. Next, put tickets on sale almost a year in advance to guarantee a sell-out and leave fans positively edging in anticipation for all that time leading up to the Infinite Anxiety Tour. Then, when the big day finally comes on Saturday, Nov. 1, start the concert an hour earlier than scheduled without any notification to ticket-holders, leaving swaths of paying customers devastated (and furious) when they arrive just in time to catch the last few songs of the night. 

That’s exactly what happened at House of Blues Dallas over Halloween weekend, turning an otherwise incredible Dallas stage debut from Viagra Boys into an unprecedented, unorganized fiasco. And many attendees want their money back. 

When ticket buyers received their courtesy reminders from Live Nation on Thursday, Oct. 28, the first line of the email blast stated that venue doors would open at 8 p.m., with the show starting at 9 p.m., just as it had been promoted and sold. On Friday, Oct. 31, Dallas Observer received a direct email from Live Nation’s marketing department indicating a run of show with doors opening at 7 p.m., Black Lips scheduled to play from 8 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and Viagra Boys from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. That was the first sign that something was amiss.

Around 5 p.m. on the night of the show, @hobdallas posted an Instagram Story with the concert flyer edited to read, “Doors 7 p.m. | Show 7:30 p.m.,” with the show start-time emphasized in red text. 

Later by eyewitness accounts, at 7:30 p.m., as the first Black Lips song rang out across a largely empty venue, the Dallas Observer received another email from Live Nation advising that the Viagra Boys’ set time would actually be starting at 8:30 p.m., with apologies for the short notice. It was a sold-out show, but when the headliner took the stage, the House of Blues’ general admission section was only half full of attendees; others were still making their way into the building. The box office refused to hold tickets for pick-up, to the devastation of patrons holding passes for friends en route, and closed the window altogether soon after Viagra Boys started.

Kevin, a fan of the Viagra Boys from Arlington who purchased tickets via Ticketmaster in December 2024, left his house near AT&T Stadium around 8:15 p.m. According to his ticket, the show hadn’t even started yet and he planned to arrive at House of Blues shortly after the rousing garage-rock romp from opening band Black Lips was scheduled to start at 9 p.m. Kevin says he’s a frequent patron of Dallas concerts, and this wasn’t his first rodeo. He knew what kind of traffic to expect on I-30 East and all of the optimal parking spots off the 2200 block of Lamar Street. So by his logistical estimation, he was making great time. But when he walked through the doors of the mid-sized music hall, Viagra Boys were already halfway through their 90-minute set. 

As he squeezed into the back left corner of the venue, he texted a friend who happened to show up early enough to see the whole show, “This is so crazy, even the website says doors at 8 p.m, show at 9 p.m. on Ticketmaster… I’m so pissed.”

On @hobdallas Instagram comments, user @kitkat.richey wrote, “Yo what happened with Viagra Boys tonight? I showed up on time and only saw six songs,” adding, “I drove 4 hours [to Dallas] for 40 mins worth of music.”

Another user, @kidk0ta, replied, “I left a VM and a bad review on HoB Google page, Ticketmaster already said they won’t refund.”

On the Reddit page for Viagra Boys, several fans shared similar complaints.

Former Observer contributor Steven Monacelli of the Oak Cliff non-profit Apprentice Creative Space had been looking forward to seeing Viagra Boys for a while.

“I planned to show up toward the end of the opener because I’m a typical over-thirty concert goer who gets grumpy in crowds,” he says. “I bought my ticket on Ticketmaster… every source I checked on the day of told me that doors opened at 8 p.m. and the show started at 9 p.m. When my fiancee checked the House of Blues Instagram around 9 p.m., she saw [a video post that showed] Viagra Boys already started playing their set. So we had to immediately rush out the door and we ended up only catching about half of the Viagra Boys set. 

“I don’t know who was responsible for this, but it was a huge disappointment,” said Monacelli of the soured concert experience. 

There are many reasons a concert can run off-schedule with delayed set times, but it’s relatively unheard of for these kinds of issues to arise just before the audience is set to arrive. It’s reasonable to suggest there are four key stakeholders here that owe consumers an explanation for what happened on Saturday: the promoter (Live Nation), the ticket seller (Ticketmaster), the venue (House of Blues), or Viagra Boys themselves.

Did Viagra Boys’ live debut in Dallas live up to long-standing fan expectations? Absolutely. Their stage presence is a full-throttle force to be reckoned with, everything you’d expect from a band that sounds like Devo and Dead Boys in the throes of a ferocious bar brawl while the saxophonist from X-Ray Spex eggs on both sides to rip each other to shreds.

Does their new material sound better live, without the commercial-friendly and overly polished recording style on this most recent album? Most definitely. Is the dance pit during their raucous 2016 cut, “Research Chemicals,” really as fun as it looks in fan footage online? Moreso than you can imagine. Do we appreciate keyboardist Elias Jungqvist for dressing the part in a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader uniform? Obviously, of course. 

But none of that feels fair to unpack when the attendees who paid to be there missed out on the experience themselves.

In 2025, the hits keep coming for concert-goers. Ever since the live music industry came back from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, consumers have been subjected to outrageous price-gouging, mass ticket-scalping schemes, exorbitant transaction fees and an untrustworthy resale marketplace. Despite waves of customer backlash, Live Nation/Ticketmaster CEO Michael Rapino doubled down on justifying these practices in September. While speaking at a CNBC conference, Rapino stated that concerts cost so much nowadays because “music has been under-appreciated” and “tickets have been underpriced for a long time.”

The botched Viagra Boys’ Dallas tour stop cannot be redeemed for fans who were stiffed, many of whom have had no luck with refund requests over the last 36 hours. This was truly a “must-see” rock show, one of those “you-just-had-to-be-there” experiences that cannot be redeemed or corrected. At the very least, ticket buyers deserve to know why this happened.

On Nov. 3, Viagra Boys posted a statement on their Instagram Stories. “To our shrimpish friends in Dallas, we’ve looked forward to playing our first show in Dallas for a very long time, and we’re devastated to hear that there was a schedule miscommunication that caused some fans to miss part of the show,” they wrote. “We’re looking to a solution to make this right, and we’ll reach out to ticket buyers directly as we have updates.”

See more photos from Saturday’s show: