Saturday, September 12, 2009

'Shwa KISS Tickets Snapped Up

'Shwa KISS Tickets Snapped Up
By DON PEAT, SUN MEDIA

Tickets to rock and roll all night with KISS in Oshawa have sold out.

The GM Centre's box office phone line confirmed today that all the tickets for the Oct. 7 concert are gone.

"Every single, solitary, last one is gone," Oshawa city councillor Robert Lutczyk told the Sun today. "Everything, not one is left."

Tickets went on sale to the general public this morning at 10 a.m. The centre was expected to hold around 5,600 people for the concert.

Members of the KISS ARMY and GM Centre's Backstage Pass were able to take advantage of pre-sales earlier this week but Lutczyk said he's heard every batch of tickets went like hot cakes.

"They all went in minutes," he said. "There was a huge demand for these things."

At least 100 fans spent two days lined up outside the GM Centre waiting for tickets. Early this morning, the line had grown to a few hundred.

"I doubt that the 10th person in line got tickets," Lutczyk said.

The Oshawa concert, a special premiere of the band's new album Sonic Boom, has been a long time in the making.

Fans flooded an online contest to put Oshawa at the top of the list for a fan-routed tour.

When the tour dates were announced in the summer, Canada's Motor City wasn't on the list. That led to a public outcry and a quick announcement by the band the next day that they would perform in Oshawa in October.

KISS frontman Gene Simmons blamed the media for the perceived 'Shwa snub.

"I'm really pissed off at the media for creating this nonsense," Simmons said in an interview with The Canadian Press in August. "Now the story's going to come out as a kind of, 'Gene is complaining about the media' (story) -- you're goddamn right I am."