On Stage Horror Stories

[bloozetubes]

Got one, heres one of mine...

July 4th 1976
Boston Harbor Blues Cruise
Boston, Ma.

The blues cover band i was in got the gig to open the show playing on the deck of a cruise ship out in Boston Harbor. There were 1000 people on the ship and an estimated 1 million on Bostons shore waiting for Arthur Fieldler and the Boston Philharmonic to sync up with the fireworks for the 1812 Overture at the Esplinade. Earlier in the evening i dropped a hit of acid(Do Not Do This, Ever!) we sound checked last as we were going on first. The guys in the band new something was up, they were just not sure. I was tripping my face off and was in a paranoid cartoon state. We were 3 beats into the first tune when the fireworks started.I FREAKED!!! I ran screaming at the top of my lungs, arms flailing, Travis Bean and cord in tow pulling my Twin off the top of the 2x12 cab it was sitting on and crushing the SM58 that was micing it and smacked right into a pole face first, broken nose, 2 black eyes, blood everywhere.If the Bean did not have a aluminum neck thru it surely would have snapped in half. My friends still talk about it to this day.

[superrock]

that is a horror, albeit incredibly hilarious... thanks for sharing... i got nothing on that...

[]-[ @ n $ 0 |v| a T ! ©]

1st live gig ever. High School Talent Show. Song: Fade to Black. I was so nervous, I broke my E-string (was playing bass) when the song got heavy and didn't have the skills to work it out, seamlessly, in the upper register.

It was @#$% humiliating.

Discussions afterward suggest thated no one noticed but me. I suspect many of us suffer from being our own worst critic.

[boldaslove1977]

that first one is a classic... hard to top that.

my first "gig" ever... at a music festival at my high school. i was a sophomore when i was basically drafted by a bunch of seniors who wanted to do a couple of blues brothers songs but they didn't have a guitar player.

i changed the strings on my cheap superstrat copy the night before... and didn't touch them at all until we went on. you know... because i wanted them to be as fresh as possible. oh... and i didn't have an electric tuner. what a mess... that left a mark.

[giltgitguy]

I remember a New Years gig where our drummer got hit with the flue and ended up doing the gig with a bucket next to his hi hat to puke into. Two songs into the last set, a horrible odor wafted toward the front of the stage. The poor guy crapped himself while in the throes of a violent puking episode. He kept on playing through it all! Now that's professionalism.

Can't say I ever did acid on stage like the OP, but I do have an odd LSD story to contribute. The keyboard player in a band I was in and I used to play tennis a lot, especially when we were on the road. (This was the era of endless 6 night club gigs) He always beat me,as he was tall and lanky and had played for years and years. On a Saturday night, someone gave me a hit of acid, so Sunday being a day off, I took it first thing the next morning. A couple hours into it, the keyboard player suggested we play tennis. I didn't tell him I was high, and thought,what the hell? That day I trounced him on the court. Tennis is a game of focus and concentration. Every cell in my body was focused on that yellow ball. For three sets, I never broke my concentration. After we were done, I told him how I'd managed to beat him. Never tried that performance enhancer again. Maybe I was on to something.

[george nada]

i was trippin one time when the guys picked me up to play a biker party. it wasn't something planned. i got out of the car a few blocks before we got there, so i could run into the corner store and get some smokes. i got hit by a car and didnt realize it. i just got up, walked into the store and asked for some marlboro reds. everyone ran up to ask if i was ok, and i had no idea what made them so concerned. then we went to te party and the other guitarist's amp died, so we both plugged into mine. then mine caught fire, and everyone thought it was part of the show. they all cheered.

[Rod]

Originally Posted by george nada

i was trippin one time when the guys picked me up to play a biker party. it wasn't something planned. i got out of the car a few blocks before we got there, so i could run into the corner store and get some smokes. i got hit by a car and didnt realize it. i just got up, walked into the store and asked for some marlboro reds. everyone ran up to ask if i was ok, and i had no idea what made them so concerned. then we went to te party and the other guitarist's amp died, so we both plugged into mine. then mine caught fire, and everyone thought it was part of the show. they all cheered.

Wow

[rspencer]

Played a local fair/festival. The "stage" we were told would be there turned out to be a trailer made into a flatbed with plywood. The PA stacks were on the front corners of this "stage," corners that extended past the trailers frame & were unsupported. Monitors were on the front of the stage & one each on top of the PA stacks, pointing inward. Our drummer was precariously perched on the back edge behind his kit.

As we started playing, the vibration of the amps & PA, combined with our movements (especially the drummer) set everything in motion. It was like doijng a gig in one of those inflatable bouncy rooms.

Then a monitor started feeding back. The one pointed at my head, lucky me. And not just a squeal here & there. Unholy shrieks that drowned out the band, and we played loud. Signal to sound man to kill it. He turns it down. Next song, a shriek so otherworldly it nearly tears my head off. Again, signal him to kill it.

Third song. Apparently every banshee from hell has assembled in this monitor and decided to scream at once. Finally, after going on-mic & telling the sound man that if he didn't kill the monitors I was going to be deaf or unplug it myself, and I was hoping to avoid deafness, he cut them off.

Finished the rest of the set. Minus the fact that I could barely hear with my left ear for the next day, overall it was cool.

And then the MC/promoter came up & asked us to play another song...
so they could do the cake walk.

Whatever. Play, stop, call out a number between 1 & 10. No biggie, this gig has been odd from the start.
Not having honed our cake walk repertoire, and not knowing what constituted the cake walk genre, we figured we'd just do a shuffle. No problems. They had 3 to give away, so 3 20-second shuffles & we're done.

We start, stop after 20 seconds or so, 20 seconds in which I am trying not to lose it laughing while watching people try to walk/dance around a ring of paper plates while we play what was apparently too fast of a shuffle for a cake walk.

Our singer calls out "7."
Confusion ensues, as whoever had written out the numbers on the plates, & placed said plates in the circle, did not see fit to include the number 7 in the series from 1 to 10. So he calls another number, we do two more, and then haul outta there.

Let's just say that we turned down the offer to play when they called the next year.

[DrumBob]

First gig in 1966 was an almost disaster. It was a CYO dance, and my garage band was playing Paul Revere & The Raiders/Stones/Yardbirds/Who covers when a large majority of the a-hole greasers I went to school with wanted "In The Still Of The Night." Lots of boos and stuff thrown at us. We went off, came back for a second set, and they had all left by then. No more incidents, but I heard a lot of flack at school on Monday.

For some reason, it made me stronger, and in my next band, I liked it when the greaseballs gave us a hard time. It just proved what d-bags they were, and how irrelevant they had become by then.

[kasperjensen]

I once played in this pop band, and we had a nice gig. We all had in ear systems... And everything went through the PA, no amps.

Dark stage... walk out.... band starts with a bang, smoke comes out, lights on, girls come on dancing singing... the whole works.

Halfway through the song, one of the singers noticed something... No sound was going out.
I had forgotten to turn on the power amps before going on.

I was wondering why people were just staring at us!

[Smakutus]

Our drummer didn't show up for a NYE job and the other guitar player and I ended up playing drums (depending on the song) for the first set before a bad fill in guy showed up.. What a nightmare.

The drummer ended up telling us he got pulled over by the police and was thrown in jail for the night.

I still don't believe him. I think he threw us under the bus because his then new girlfiend didn't want him out playing that night.

Jeff

[guitarjazz]

Originally Posted by Smakutus

Our drummer didn't show up for a NYE job and the other guitar player and I ended up playing drums (depending on the song) for the first set before a bad fill in guy showed up.. What a nightmare.

The drummer ended up telling us he got pulled over by the police and was thrown in jail for the night.

I still don't believe him. I think he threw us under the bus because his then new girlfiend didn't want him out playing that night.

Jeff

I had a similar experience having to sub for a fairly famous mult-platinum bass player in a packed club 'cause got thrown in jail for brushing his teeth in the parking lot. The officer thought he was throwing up...he wasn't but he had had sake with dinner so he tipped the scale.
Here are some good ones from Tuck Andress:
"Borrowed guitar, different string spacing, bridge or nut sliding during string bending or vibrato, wrong strap length or strap breaking during solo, unwound guitar string used as backup strap gradually cutting through shirt and shoulder, sleeve snagging on bridge suddenly locking up hand, wrong pick, dropped pick, broken pick, no pick, pick stuck between strings, finger caught between strings, wrong strings, dead strings, sticky strings, blood on strings, broken strings, no extra strings, jar of honey spilled all over strings, vintage L-5's gig bag shoulder strap breaking immediately before album release concert for 5,000 people causing guitar to fall on concrete and creating crack from tailpiece to neck which gradually splits apart during performance with action getting higher and higher, amp too far away, amp too close, amp broken so play through bass amp or P.A., tone all wrong, overdrive bypass switch broken, cymbal in ear, band too loud, audience too loud, band downstairs too loud, bad monitors, no monitors, in-ear monitors broken so Patti is heard acoustically but Tuck is heard only through house PA 50 yards away resulting in Tuck being unavoidably out of sync with Patti by 1/6 second for whole show, guitar buzz, RF from nearby transmitter louder than the music itself, brownouts making organ pitch fluctuate randomly over an octave range, power outage, equipment plugged into 230 volts immediately before show, earthquake during show in high-rise, outdoor desert performance at 131 degrees with sand-blasting winds, sub-freezing outdoor mountaintop performance with snow storms and 40 mph winds, high altitude dizziness, no sleep, no food, too much food, wrong food, food poisoning, fever, locked bathrooms, way too many liquids before long show, nagging suspicion that zipper is down, contact lens falling out during moment of peak concentration, compromised hand position due to repeatedly sliding full width of stage while trying to keep playing but not collide with Patti on yacht in rough Finnish Gulf of Bothnia, charts blown away by wind, charts on thermal fax paper, charts in wrong key, charts without bar lines, charts with bar lines all displaced by two beats, charts in bass clef or C clef, chord charts with do/re/mi instead of C/D/E and everything else in Portuguese, realization that Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Pass, George Benson, Chaka Khan, Bobby McFerrin or Steve Gadd just walked in, drunks falling on stage, drunks disrobing on stage, drunks grabbing instruments or band members, band members falling asleep during song, pigs frolicking in sawdust-covered frat house knocking over band equipment, thinly veiled animosity between bride's and groom's families erupting into violence during heartfelt version of My Romance, nightly juggling of playing and operating the lighting console/footswitches and talking to audience members and trying to reign in tempos and egos of various fellow top-40 band members, arrival at duo gig with unbelievably loud, aggressive fuzz-wah hard rock bass player to discover that assignment is to back up elderly white-haired and white-suited gentleman singing unfamiliar country songs to unforgiving patrons, crowded upscale happy hour dance floor unraveling into pandemonium as normal-looking customers all collapse to the floor and writhe around on each other while astonished saxophone-playing duo partner walks out leaving helpless solo guitarist playing The Hustle for 25 minutes, funk bass player imprisoned in lounge band insisting on popping strings throughout sensitive ballads, accidental imprisonment of Patti in wine cellar out of earshot during guitar instrumentals, onstage and on-instrument living creatures with varying numbers of legs, belligerent drunken bowling alley lounge customer demanding that funk band play Debussy's Clair de Lune while remainder of band looks expectantly at guitarist, drummer watching ball game on portable TV with headphones throughout performance, guest singer repeatedly changing keys at random moments, realization that the people who have just boldly picked up instruments and are unexpectedly sitting in are Herbie Hancock and Wah Wah Watson, guns drawn at rehearsals to settle disputes about form of song, marginally famous singer resorting to the dreaded "Do you know who I am" line, drummer and delusional would-be front man jumping off the drums in the middle of a song and mistakenly chanting "we don't need no drummer to keep that funky beat" to a dance floor packed with suddenly hostile former dancers, unstable band member deciding that it is his responsibility to educate the audience over the microphone, bass player playing random notes and rhythms because he is not a bass player at all but nonetheless booked the gig, drummer announcing that he killed somebody just before the show, swimming pool party turning into orgy with splashing on inexperienced solo electric guitarist sitting beside pool doing his first solo gig and fielding endless requests for the same song he had just played yet again, bride's and groom's special song evaporating from mortified solo musician's mind at the crucial moment, band member disappearing suddenly when his chair falls backwards off riser, unstable enormous man peaking on LSD brandishing artificial limb removed from his companion at audience and threatening band to "sing with this", mirrors on back wall of club causing introspective young guitarist to question meaning of his life at early stage in career."

[RedRock]

Wow.
And I've seen about 70% of them.

[Seraphine]

Was the one about the Bass player needing an IV drip of Jack Daniels to play on stage in there? I forget....

The worse I've had wasn't a gig, but was a rehearsal with new drummer, who after a few fair warnings about murdering skins and playing way tooo loud... Played through a set so hard that NO OTHER Muso on stage could hear anything but the drums.... This was the last time he played with us... and it was also a lesson in psych and what I filed as nothing short of stupidity. Funny it was, as you really wouldn't expect it to happen.. yet it did....

*shakes head

[Rockledge]

About 23 years ago I was live on the radio doing lead guitar work for a band. One of the songs had a rather complex solo that I knew note for note and did exactly the same way every time.
The part of that song came for the lead and I completely lost the key, couldn't remember the key, the scale it was in, and couldn't find my place. My brain just suddenly decided it was nap time. No artificial euphoria, no hippie vacation dust or anything like that. I was sober as a baptist judge.
I wasn't nervous, wasn't having a particularly bad day, and was having a day of well being and good alertness. There was no explanation for it. and in fact what pissed the band leader off most was my rather cavalier attitude about it.
I didn't get upset when it happened ( I wasn't happy about it but I didn't freak out either) and in the great scheme of things knew that my momentary lapse of reality was hardly going to cause the apocalypse to start, but it certainly didn't win me any browneye points with the band leader.
But it did kind of suck.
I have been playing for so long that I could tell stories upon stories of bizarre events and fluke occurrences, but that is the only time I cant think of that I really crapped out, other than the to be expected sunspot el nino friday the 13th black cat walked in my path equipment failures, one of which I experienced past saturday night.