Record Store Day Problems, Acid Bath Memories & Why Concert Tickets Have Gone Too Far

READ MORE: https://www.thesonicroad.com/p/best-albums-of-2026-so-far-plus-why-the-music-business-needs-to-change Host Beau and returning guest Becky Franzel — Milwaukee author and lifelong rock fan — cover a lot of ground in this highlight reel from Episode 32 of The Sonic Road Podcast. They start with Record Store Day — the concept is great, supporting independent stores matters, but the economics have gotten complicated. Stores have to buy all the stock upfront with no ability to return unsold copies, and the prices on the floor have gotten out of hand. A single album in a regular sleeve going for $65? That's a hard pass. From there the conversation moves through: The Black Crowes recording A Pound of Feathers in just eight days, memories of seeing Acid Bath play small clubs in the nineties and hanging with Dax before anyone knew who they were, the idea of sequencing an album as one 45-minute song so nobody can skip it, the pop music debate and why Britney Spears' "Toxic" is genuinely a great song, Fred Durst and the strange chapter in rock history that was the late nineties/early 2000s, why Brazil has one of the most passionate Limp Bizkit fanbases on earth, and what it was like to watch Clutch and Sevendust blow the doors off a venue before anyone else had to follow them. Plus: listening to All Them Witches' "Sunrise on Slaughter Beach" 40 times in one day, dealing with intense rock fanbases who take things too seriously, seeing The Black Keys at the Cleveland Agora when they were just starting to blow up and the show was sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, what European rock festivals do differently than American ones, being the person at a venue who actually went to the show on the vintage shirt a teenager is wearing, refusing to pay Ticketmaster prices on principle even when you can afford it, and a genuine defense of Yoko Ono. Full episode out now on YouTube, Spotify & Apple Podcasts. 🔔 SUBSCRIBE to The Sonic Road Podcast: https://linktr.ee/thesonicroad 📚 FIND BECKY FRANZEL: beckyfranzel.com | awshuckspub.com 📲 FOLLOW THE SONIC ROAD PODCAST: @thesonicroad Instagram | TikTok | Facebook | X ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #RecordStoreDay #BlackCrowes #AcidBath #LimpBizkit #Clutch #AllThemWitches #BlackKeys #TheSonicRoadPodcast #RockPodcast #VinylCommunity #RockMusic2026 #MusicPodcast #HeavyRock #BeckyFranzel #Ticketmaster #ClevelandRock #RockHistory #Sevendust #BritneySpears #IndieMusic ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Follow The Sonic Road Podcast on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook & X: @thesonicroad Subscribe on Youtube, Spotify & Apple Podcasts: https://linktr.ee/thesonicroad