I equate opening acts with rice cakes: both are highly unsatisfying and therefore useless.

I never try to make it to shows in time for opening acts, nor do I care to learn their names or songs. The bassist might be cute, and the band might have a catchy song or two, but I’ll stand there unaffected until the main act stumbles onstage and slings their guitars over the backs.

But this weekend, I did something crazy: I got to the Pabst before a show even started.

Crazy, right? I thought so, too.

Until I saw the opening act, Ben Kweller, who came onstage wrapped in a parka, clutching a teacup and trash can, to tell the crowd that he’d been puking, but was still going to sing for us.

In a matter of seconds, I was stripped of two things: my self-satisfaction and my opening act apathy. I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of admiration and acute nausea at the thought of Kweller throwing up in front of a dozen microphones.

He strummed out a couple songs and then gravitated toward the piano, trashcan in hand, telling us about some other less-than-graceful stage moments of his, like dual-nostril nosebleeds and near-fatal falls. (And no, he never ralphed onstage at the Pabst.)

“You know what?” his frail voice coursed through the sound system. “I’m just gonna play like we’re in my living room, like I just invited you guys over and you’re like, ‘Okay, I guess he doesn’t feel well, but whatever.’ Hope you don’t mind.”

Honestly, who would mind? When artists so commonly and nonchalantly delay and cancel shows for reasons we’ll never know, why should we have been anything but ecstatic that Kweller pushed through his travel-sickness, or whatever it was, to play for us? The rest of the set was no doubt a chore for him, but for everyone else, it was fully satisfying.

Post-concert, there’s usually a bass line or a song lyric I can’t get out of my head, and although this particular concert was stimulating in every sense of the word, the only thing I was craving for the rest of the weekend was another dose of honesty.

I got what I was looking for. One of the best examples of modern day candor is Gov. Scott Walker’s prank call dilemma. We rarely get to see our politicians vulnerable and exposed to the public eye, and seeing their plans as they are on the drawing board is overwhelming. We’re used to being fed sugar-coated versions of the truth. In this case, some directness is more refreshing than a run-around, as uncomfortable as that experience might be initially. Slip-ups like Walker’s are PR nightmares, but why?

Because the truth has been written off as something the human race can’t handle. The idea of political correctness is stuffed down our throats daily in a trickle-down effect.

But, have we taken that act too far? Have our expectations for politicians and opening acts infiltrated our own code of honesty?

Politeness has an important role in the way the world works, but maybe we’ve let it take the place of bluntness. In a culture where saving face is the name of the game, I can’t blame us for craving no-frills relationships and straightforward conversations. We’ve been starved of them.

It’s strange to think about it, but before we had PR firms and political correctness, all we had was the truth. And even stranger than that? People survived on it.

So, let me be frank. I was wrong about opening acts; they are just as worthwhile as the headliners. They can also be entirely satisfying. They’re nothing like rice cakes, really. Forget I ever said that. And one-person opening acts who take the stage with the stomach flu? You’d better respect them.

Maybe we can say the same thing about the truth. It’s an easy thing to miss, to be too late for, to avoid. Sometimes the truth, just like an opening act, is nowhere near as attractive as the main act in big letters and bright lights. But then it comes and steals the show, and you realize what you’ve been missing.