Some concerts are special because of the band on stage. Others carry a little more personal history, a reminder of how far you’ve come and the opportunities that have opened along the way. For me, Godsmack’s stop at Pinnacle Bank Arena on October 13th was both. Less than a year ago, this was the venue where my journey into the concert photography industry began, thanks to my first photo pass approval for A Day to Remember. Returning to the same arena, this time to photograph a band that’s been part of my playlists since high school, was priceless.
Godsmack brought its Rise of Rock World Tour to Lincoln with Dorothy in support, promising a night of hard rock from two acts that know their way around a big stage. Godsmack has spent decades building a catalog of radio staples, while Dorothy has carved out her own place in modern rock with a gritty vocal delivery and songs that lean into bluesy, Southern flavored rock. On paper, it was an easy combination to get excited about.
The room itself, however, presented an immediate challenge.
The first thing I noticed walking into Pinnacle Bank Arena wasn’t the stage setup or the anticipation of seeing a longtime favorite. It was the seating. This was an entirely seated show, with no standing room area for the crowd to gather and move freely. My mind immediately went back to the Sevendust show at Grand Falls Casino in April, where a similar arrangement made it difficult for a high energy rock show to reach its full potential.
To be clear, the audience wasn’t sitting quietly through the performances. People stood, sang along and did what they could with the space they had. But there’s a difference between standing in front of a stage with room to move and trying to throw yourself into a rock show while boxed in by rows of chairs. For a genre built around movement, heavy riffs and the collective release of a crowd losing itself in the music, the arrangement felt limiting before the first note had even been played.
Fortunately, neither band seemed interested in letting the seating dictate the quality of the night. Dorothy brought the opening punch, and Godsmack followed with decades of hard earned hits, giving the audience plenty of reasons to make the most of what it had.
Dorothy starts things off strong
The last time I saw Dorothy live was in May 2023, when she opened for Disturbed. Clearly, sharing a stage with established names in rock isn’t new territory for her. With more than a decade of touring behind her and a growing catalog of releases, Dorothy knows how to command a room, and her appearance in Lincoln was a reminder that an opening act doesn’t have to play second fiddle in the attention department.
I absolutely love a good female lead singer. There’s something about a woman’s voice cutting through a wall of distorted guitars, especially when that voice has the grit and power to match the instruments behind it. Dorothy has that quality in abundance. Her vocals can carry a rough edge without losing their clarity, giving the songs a character that fits comfortably alongside the heavier acts she’s shared stages with.
Despite being founded in Los Angeles, Dorothy’s music often carries a distinctly Southern flavor. The bluesy foundations and hard rock swagger give the songs a lived in quality, as if they’re just as comfortable in a smoky bar as they are under arena lights. That truly works in the band’s favor, helping it stand out without needing to reinvent the genre.
For me, the highlight was “Rest in Peace,” a personal favorite that gets plenty of play on SiriusXM Octane. Hearing a song that’s already worked its way into your regular listening rotation in a live setting is always a treat, particularly when the performance gives you another reason to return to it later. The song landed as the set’s high point for me, but the audience was pulled into Dorothy’s world throughout the performance.
The band members were constantly moving, visibly feeling the music rather than simply standing in place and playing through the set. From a photography standpoint, that presented a challenge. When everyone on stage is moving, finding the right moment to focus on becomes a game of anticipation, timing and trying not to miss the next great expression or pose. I wasn’t always sure where to point the camera next.
For the audience, though, that movement was part of the appeal. A band that looks like it’s having as much fun playing as the crowd is having listening creates a connection that doesn’t need to be explained. You can feel it in the way the performance unfolds, in the musicians feeding off the songs and each other rather than treating the stage as a place to stand until the set ends.
And honestly, that’s what makes seeing shows live so important. As photographers, we can only capture so much. A frame might preserve a singer’s expression, a guitarist’s movement or a perfectly timed burst of light, but it can’t contain the sound filling the arena or the feeling of watching an entire band throw itself into a performance. The photographs are a way to hold on to pieces of the experience. The experience itself is so much bigger.
Dorothy was the perfect start to the night, giving the crowd a taste of the show ahead while reminding everyone that the opening set deserves its own attention.
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Anticipation and fist bumps
During the set change, while the photographers waited to take our places in the photo pit, an audience member decided to make his way around and fist bump every one of us. He counted each bump as he went, eventually landing on 52. His goal, he told us, was to reach 100 by the end of the night.
I have no idea whether he made it. I do know that, after we had all contemplated how this was one of the strangest interactions we’d had while waiting for a band to start, it was time to get back to business.
Then the curtain dropped.
Three decades of Godsmack
When Godsmack took the stage, I immediately flashed back to October 2018, when I saw the band opening for Shinedown. That was another chapter in my history with the group, long before I started photographing concerts. Coming back nearly eight years later, now on the other side of the camera, made the experience feel a little different.
Sully Erna and the gang have spent decades proving they belong among hard rock’s most durable live acts. The band formed in 1995, and the longevity is audible in a catalog built to fill large rooms. Godsmack doesn’t need to rely on one era or one hit to carry a show. There’re too many familiar songs, too many riffs that have become part of the genre’s vocabulary, and too many opportunities for the audience to recognize a favorite before the opening line even arrives.
As a longtime fan, one of my favorite parts of the night was seeing how much of the discography made it into the set. The band’s self titled debut and Faceless represented earlier chapters, while When Legends Rise and 2023’s Lighting Up the Sky brought more recent material into the mix. The result felt like a look across Godsmack’s history.
And with a catalog this extensive, there’s always the fun of waiting to see which songs make the cut. You can have your own wish list going into the arena, but the setlist belongs to the band. Part of the experience is discovering where the night will take you, whether that’s a deep pull from the earlier albums or one of the songs that helped define Godsmack’s later years.
Then there’s the moment when a familiar song begins and an entire arena reacts as one.
Usually, it’s a recognizable guitar riff or chord progression that sets off that immediate roar. With “Voodoo,” the response was a little different. The crowd erupted at the first word, even though the song hadn’t reached a note before its first hook was already finished. That kind of recognition is difficult to manufacture. It comes from years of listeners carrying a song around with them, knowing it so well that the smallest cue is enough to bring the whole thing rushing back.
It’s one of the reasons a live performance can feel different from listening to the same track at home or in the car. You aren’t just hearing the song again. You’re hearing thousands of people recognize it with you, each bringing their own memories to the moment. In a room full of seated sections, that collective reaction cut through the limitations of the setup. The chairs might have restricted movement, but they couldn’t stop the audience from responding.
Godsmack’s strength has always been its ability to make heavy rock accessible without sanding down its edges. The riffs remain muscular, the hooks memorable, and the songs direct enough to bring a large crowd along. That formula has served the band well since the 1990s, and the Lincoln performance showed why it continues to work.
Sully has something to say
If you know Sully, he’s is a talker, and on this particular night, he had plenty to get off his chest.
From early in the performance, something seemed off. Rather than leaving the audience to wonder, Erna acknowledged it was simple. He was just having a bad day. He didn’t go into specifics, but he made it clear that he was irritated by just about everything and was close to breaking every instrument on stage.
It was an unusually candid admission, and it added a different dimension to the evening. Concerts can make it easy to imagine that musicians step on a stage and leave the rest of their lives behind. But the people performing are still people, and not every night is going to arrive with everything neatly in place and Erna didn’t pretend otherwise.
The most entertaining part came when he turned his attention to the crowd. Between his frustrations and the all seated arrangement, the commentary started to feel less like standard between song banter and more like a comedy set. He roasted the audience, and the contrast between a frontman known for heavy rock and someone essentially working the room with a microphone made for a memorable stretch of the show along with a few laughs.
It also gave the seating issue another moment in the spotlight. I’d already been thinking about how much the arrangement dulled the physical side of a performance designed to get people moving. Erna’s reaction made it clear that the limitation wasn’t lost on the stage, either.
To help bring back some of that rock and roll atmosphere, he asked the men to put the ladies on their shoulders for a song, leading into “Something Different.” It was a playful attempt to get the crowd involved in a way that went beyond simply standing in front of a chair and singing along. For a moment, the audience had a new way to participate, and the show leaned into the kind of communal spectacle that makes arena rock fun.
Erna’s comments didn’t derail the performance. If anything, they made the night feel less scripted. The songs still carried, but the exchanges between them offered a glimpse of a frontman who wasn’t going to pretend he was having a perfect day just because the lights were on.
From bass lines to a battle of the drums
Thirty one years into Godsmack’s history, bassist Robbie Merrill remains the only member besides Erna to have been there throughout the band’s entire run. That’s a remarkable stretch of time to spend building a musical identity together, particularly in a genre where lineups, projects and careers can change considerably over three decades.
And Merrill certainly didn’t look like someone content to coast through another night on stage.
There’s something about a bassist who seems to be having the most fun in the room. Vince Hornsby of Sevendust and Ryan O’Leary of Fit for a King are two examples that come to mind. Both have that animated stage presence that makes it difficult to look away for fear of missing something entertaining. Merrill brought a similar quality to Godsmack’s performance.
His movement and enthusiasm made him a natural focal point, even with Erna commanding so much of the audience’s attention. As a photographer, those are the kinds of moments you learn to watch for. The frontman may be the obvious subject, but the musicians around him often provide some of the most memorable frames of a set. A bassist getting lost in the music can communicate just as much about a band’s live personality as a dramatic pose at the microphone.
I found myself keeping an eye on Merrill, never quite sure when he might do something worth capturing next. It was another reminder that a concert is made up of more than the biggest name on the bill. The chemistry between musicians, the way they occupy the stage and the enthusiasm they bring to familiar material all help keep a performance alive.
By this point, Godsmack had given the crowd the career spanning selection of songs I had hoped for, along with the humor and personality that made the evening feel like more than a greatest hits run through.
Then came the drum battle.
The now traditional showdown between Erna and Mike Mangini was underway as the set moved toward its closing stretch. It was the sort of spectacle that fits Godsmack’s larger than life approach to live performance, turning musicianship into a centerpiece rather than simply another element of the show.
Unfortunately, that was where my night had to end.
Afterglow
The downside of covering a rock show three and a half hours from home on a random Tuesday is that the night doesn’t always end when the band finishes playing. Sometimes it ends when you have to make the call to get on the road so that work the following morning doesn’t become an absolute failure. With the drum battle underway, I made my exit, knowing there was still plenty happening on stage but also knowing that the drive home wasn’t going to get any shorter.
Even so, I spent much of that drive replaying the night in my head, already excited to get home and work through the photographs I’d captured. That’s one of my favorite parts of concert photography. The show itself is only the beginning. Once I’m home, I get to revisit the moments I managed to preserve, see which expressions and movements I caught, and discover which frames best represent what it felt like to be there.
Dorothy started the night strong, with powerful vocals and a band that never stopped moving. Godsmack followed with the sort of hard rock that’s kept audiences coming back since 1995, drawing on a catalog that spans generations of fans. The seating arrangement wasn’t ideal for a show built around movement, and Erna’s admission that he was having a rough day added an unexpected wrinkle. But neither took away from the musicianship or the moments when the music brought the arena together.
For me, returning to Pinnacle Bank Arena also meant returning to the place where this chapter of my life began. My first photo pass approval here came less than a year ago. Now I was back, photographing a band I’d listened to since high school. The distance between those two experiences might not seem like much on a calendar, but when I think about how much has happened in that time, it feels significant.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to keep doing this, to see the bands that have soundtracked different seasons of my life, and to preserve a little piece of those nights for others to enjoy. There are only so many moments a camera can capture, and there are only so many hours in a Tuesday night, but I’m thankful for every chance I get.
The Rise of Rock World Tour still has more stops ahead. Check Godsmack’s official tour dates to see when the band is coming to a city near you, and make time for a night of good old fashioned rock and roll.
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