Sebber
Worst gig moments... can think of a couple...
The first is way back, probably circa 1991: the band I was in at school (in the UK) had been invited to play at a local music festival, about 7 or 8 bands in total were lined up to play, the venue was a theatre with "security" apparently in place to stop back-stage access. We were playing 2nd or 3rd from last, and by the time we got onstage the crowd (of around 400-500 in quite confined conditions) had got quite frisky. We were playing great and having a great time, having mustered (with great assistance from previous acts) a pretty decent mosh pit in front of the stage, when suddenly, about four numbers before the end of our set, I find myself getting shoved out of the way... as members of the crowd had evidently found the door back-stage and obviously the first thought that materialised in their idea-holes was to have a go at stage diving! Quite a few people ended up doing it over the last 10-15 mins of our set, and a number of them didn't give one solitary flying frigg that there was a band playing on the stage, and inconveniently in their way.
Another one is more recently, a few months back. It starts with the drummer realising that he's left the desk's power supply brick-thing at home (which is north of Fourways) and it's 18h00 on a Friday evening in Sandton, and the venue wants us to start at 18h30. After making arrangements the power supply finally arrives at around 19h15, the venue management isn't best pleased with the delay, so we decide to make the first number in the first set our sound check song...
We were kicking off with a blues-in-E thing, JLH's "Hug You, Squeeze You" I think it was, which has a short guitar intro then everyone's in, so I do the little intro and just as everyone else is meant to come in I turn around to make sure the drummer's in on the whole deal and on that first beat, as I signal with my guitar's headstock so everyone hits it right, I catch one of the cymbals with the headstock (pretty restricted space) and it knocks the D string tuner, quite hard, and suddenly the D string tuning is way out of whack.
Now of course everyone's playing, and I realise my guitar is very low in the mix. All I can hear is drums and the rhythm guitarist. I also realise that something... something... goddamnitsomuch... something in the mix isn't right... someone's out of tune or playing out of key... of course being an arrogant douchebag it doesn't occur to me that it's me, so I turn on the bass player and not so politely remind him that the song's in E, and he nods at me furiously like "I know I know I know", and then suddenly I heard it, my D string gone way flat. Because its tuning was suddenly so far out, and I'm playing lead and vocals, I didn't have the opportunity to try an in-flight adjustment to correct it like I would if it was only slightly out of tune. I just finished the song by avoiding the D string entirely. Anyway, of course, it was our first number, and because we were late in starting, quite a lot of the audience noticed something, whatever it was, had gone wrong, and very likely saw me ripping the bass player a new one... what they didn't see was me privately apologising to him in the first break for blaming him for my cock-up. So +10 extra douche points for me that night.
The rest of the gig went great but I still cringe when I remember that opening number.
VellaJ
We've only played one gig, a Band Battle a couple of months ago. 'Twas my first gig, and was pretty amped. They had lights and all, which made things look impressive, until they got it wrong... ?
While the bands were playing, they'd switch between the coloured lights to match the mood of the music. Obviously the operator decided that the most complicated part in the middle of my most complicated solo of the night was a good time to change them. Problem being, instead of the lights changing colour, they just went off completely, leaving me to feel my way away around the fretboard in total darkness for about 2 seconds (a lifetime!). And I was wearing sunglasses for that song ?
I'm told I nailed the solo, but I suspect that's because nobody knew what it was supposed to sound like ?
ActionArnie
This is more like worst moment inflicted on another band's gig...
My brother-in-law was a budding bass player in a band with some of his high school buddies. Anyway they were at a pub in Maritzburg to watch another band play. The live band for the night took a quick break and my brother-in-law hopped up on the stage to catch their bassist to ask if he could have a go on his guitar. He tried to noodle a few notes and realised the guy's E-string was way out of tune so he attempted to tune it. He started cranking it up and up and eventually the string snapped. The owner of the bass rushed up on stage in a bit of a rage shouting 'what the hell are you doing?'. Turns out he'd tried to tune the top string of a 5-string bass up to E and it didn't like it, he sheepishly got off the stage and left.
vic
Donovan Banks wrote
I found I had too many bad moments with a particular band. sometimes you just need to cut your ties. alcohol and drugs get in the way.
This was fun though;
=
So Don,....what did your Mom in Law want ? ?
FruitarGeek
VellaJ wrote
And I was wearing sunglasses for that song ?
Ok, there is your problem! ha ha ha
Chabenda
I remember my first gig in Mazabuka, Zambia Playing New years Eve with 'C'est La Vie' when I lived in Zim. We were met at Chirundu by a wealthy farmer who had a Land Cruiser VX - With a fridge in the console nog al ( we were real dumbass, deliverance, bumpkins)! Our first Mozi Oa Tuna - uuugh....! That night at their club we saw our first canned beers! They gave us a case of 24 to take to our 'cottage' - a full size house, complete with an enormous scalectrix track. Myself and the bass guitarist walloped the 24 Black Labels, on top of all the other beer and ouzo that we had been generously supplied earlier. Playing racing cars. Our drummer, much older than us, wouldn't drink! I began to develop a brain tumour of a hangover whilst I was still drinking! Boy, was I sick. Our drummer, a seriaaasly rough, tough and hard biker, was spongeing down my head. I was extremely weak the next day but was back to full power by 7pm, New Years Eve. Sadly, it was our drummer's time to misbehave. By the time we were half way through the first set he had finished a bottle of 'Pirate Rum' (this stuff had a caricature of a rather effeminate pirate with an eye patch on the label - there was nothing effeminate about the contents!). Boy, was his timing off, he was playing diarrhoea all over the roto toms and getting really agro when we asked for a bit of snare and bass drum. He wasn't the kind of guy you wanted to get agro with! It was bloody horrible!
On top of all of this we had a gentleman, well over 70 years old, come and request AC/DC's Thunderstruck. It all became a bit too much for me. We battled our way through the gig after a very embarrassing spat on stage.
The next day, at the after party, sure as shiRt, the drummer wouldn't drink. He had organised the gig and as we went to collect our money, at the gates, he told us that he had made a blunder and that instead of the USD1200 each that we were expecting, he had erred and we were only getting USD200 each. As you can imagine we were subdued and ungracious as we received our money.
On lighter note I recall him getting electrocuted when he tried to move his drum stool after plonking it down on top of the extension cable - that was great!
Chabenda
Donovan Banks wrote
I found I had too many bad moments with a particular band. sometimes you just need to cut your ties. alcohol and drugs get in the way.
This was fun though;
=
Groupies!! :roflmao:
ZarK
Alan Ratcliffe wrote
I've posted some of my misadventures at length before, but there's a few I haven't posted before...
~~ Cue wavy lines ~~ and a lap dissolve to dim and distant memories being dredged up...
I played drums for a grunge band in the mid/late 90's (name withheld to protect the guilty - but Simon "Fuzzy" Ratcliffe [no relation] used to call us Achmed Papadopoulos, which is similar). One of our regular gigs, which shall remain nameless here due to being a complete and utter dive (although "Newlands" and "railway carriage" might bring up memories for some) had a stage between two rooms, one in front of the stage and the other behind, which basically meant the stage was a simple riser with no wall behind us.
One night I set up my kit a bit too close to the rear of the stage and when we started playing I found I was squeezed in way to close to the kit. There was no way to move the kit forward while playing as it was big and heavy, mounted on a rack and with serious spikes in the kick drum legs and kick pedal. So I did what I usually did in that situation, and moved my throne back a couple of inches while playing... Now this was not usually a problem, but I was already too far back and there was no rear wall and my throne's one leg went off the back of the stage, tilting me precariously over the edge. I coped briefly, balancing and playing, but eventually gravity won (as is its wont) and I fell off the back of the stage in the middle of the song (fortunately the stage was only about 75cm high). I missed a couple of beats and finished the song standing on the floor behind the stage with a stick in one hand (could just reach the snare rim) and playing the kick pedal with my other hand. Best part? The vocalist and guitarist didn't realise this was all going on behind them (although that says more about them than my skills as a hand operator of drum kits). Apparently looked quite impressive from the front of the stage.
:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:
eric-vaxxine
Playing 'Hot Stuff' one gig, the guitar solo was coming up
for our other guitarist....my bassplayer mouthed something to
me...I went 'What...?'
BassPlayer 'Go up a semi tone for Jo's solo....'
Jo launches into his solo and soon senses something is
not right. He looks back at his amp, his fretboard position and
glances over to us....and seeing us holding back laughter, puts
his hands in the air ... saying something like..'You BASTARDS!'
Worst moment for Jo....but a great gig moment.
eric-vaxxine
In a pub in Uxbridge in 1986, my band Flexible were gigging
funky conga rhythm groove tunes....but the audience were
Depeche Mode, Duran, Spandau, Boy George type fans.
The landlord approached me after the first set and said...
"If you don't stop playing, you won't get paid"!
Malkav
Once did a gig at a place up North who shall remain nameless, and they had a sound guy who shall remain nameless but apparently has a good rep around our local scene, my band refers to him as W**** Sockbat. So we get there and setup without too many issues, then the place decides it's now business hours so during our soundcheck they have the PA blaring their chosen setlist for the night which to go with the type of club it is was some pretty heavy metal, this sound guy proceeds to continue with the soundcheck as if he can actually hear anything at all ??? He then proceeds to tell me to turn the gain down on my amp, which was weird given the clean sound I was using at the time, but he proceeds to insist I do this so I say "My amp doesn't have gain on this sound, it's got volume?" and he then responds (baring in mind I had heard this guy described by some other bands we had gigged with as being an industry proffessional) "Gain and volume are the same thing bru" I facepalmed...Keep in mind this whole time he had been mixing everything from the desk which was to the left of the venue, not in the middle so there was no doubt he was getting uneven dispersion but whatever, needless to say by this point I had given up any and all hope of having at least passable sound that night. Then my singer starts having this problem with feedback despite the fact that his voice is barely coming out of the microphone, Mr Sockbat proceeds to come up to him and grabs the mic, and then screams at full volume into it and tells us the mic is fine, despite the excessive gain riding he was doing to it. Add to all of this the fact that while we were warming up backstage, cause we do that, we had to sit and watch one of the other bands of that night straightening their hair, yes they were in fact using GHDs and getting their hair sorted out for the night as their female entourage sat praising them, not one warmup, no stretches, they got prepared for their gig by making sure that their emo fringes sat plastered to their foreheads at just the right angle...
Somehow we still managed to win the battle of the bands they were having that night, and then they lost the footage that was meant to be a part of the battle and the interview they did, and then in total over all the rounds they realised their funding wasn't good enough and their turn outs weren't either so they decided to stop, it then took almost 6 months for us to get their entry fee on the competition back.
The other one was at another Northern Suburbs venue, shorter story, essentially we were about to drop into one of the heavier moments in one of our tracks (Some lovely 7 stringed Bwow Bwow goodness) and I dropped with my guitar in a sort of headbang moshy thing, back when I still had long hair, needless to say it turns out that I underestimated the length of my guitar's top horn and smashed my nose into it, I then finished the gig bleeding down my face, into my hair and on/all around my guitar...I guess it was metal...
Chabenda
Another Zambia gig. We went through three first aid kits on this one. Our bass guitarist cracked his skull open at the Zambian border post in the rain, fighting with two busloads of returning residents to get some papers to me, at the front of the stampede. Whilst he was sitting in the front of the old '57 Landie , it got hit by a Freightliner and he got smacked on the back of his head by the rear windscreen, more blood! The guard on the booms then wanted to kill the truck driver with his Sterling sub machine gun. Eventually we got Greg to an Italian Mission hospital about 3kms of mud away. Our Italian drummer, who, once again, had caused the problems in the first place, was now inviting the young nuns to the gig. On the way back the weather had changed and after a lot of hassle with Zim customs, we finally got away. As it was now quite warm I decided to remove the top half of my door, simple in a Series 1 Land Rover, open it, shake and lift. As I lifted it the whole door came off and split in mid air. I was left holding the top half. The bottom half fell like a guillotine, landing on my big toe. My eyes were watering very badly. I had to drive back to Harare (70-80kms/hr) with a shoe full of blood and grumpy as hell 'to boot'
Banditman
Somewhere around 2006 I think? I'd come back from the UK, was between employment and bored. Got a call from an uncle (a pretty decent bassist) asking if I felt like sitting in on a gig - 70th birthday party on a farm, and they needed another guitarist.
'Sure, sounds like fun."
The shed/barn we were playing in was fine. The other guys were all old hands. Set up was running a bit behind, what with finding power points and sound checking etc. The problems started with the vocalist/guitarist (nice guy who will remain nameless) who'd neglected to tell us the set list. He'd also neglected to bring music for anyone but himself. We found this out just after the sound check - when the guests started sitting down.
The first set (and the two which followed) went like this from song to song, when we couldn't make out his handwriting on some of the music sitting on his stand:
(whispered question) "what's the next song?"
"When Irish eyes are smiling"
"What key?"
"C"
We should have been called Nameless and the Farkawees. By the fourth song I had to check my amp behind me while playing. It was that or laugh out loud at the living dead crowd or my uncle's eye-rolling at each song. The chance to do that came in the first set break.
Uncle: "What the F... kind of song choice is that for a party?"
Nameless: "I thought they'd be fine for a 70th party".
Uncle: "And you don't think that by the time they're 70 they'll have grandchildren?"
I don't know how we pulled it off - it was the best exercise in instant playing by ear & memory I've ever had - but never again: learned that lesson.
vic
Some great stories ! And to think that this thread almost ended prematurely ! ?
eric-vaxxine
Sadly, the manager at Callaghans Bar, Piccadilly, instructed us
not to play 'Leave your Hat On' anymore, as he'd noticed that
it always encouraged the inebriated audience to strip off.
NorioDS
LOL ? And it's never the cute petite girls, is it? ?
eric vaxxine wrote
Sadly, the manager at Callaghans Bar, Piccadilly, instructed us
not to play 'Leave your Hat On' anymore, as he'd noticed that
it always encouraged the inebriated audience to strip off.
eric-vaxxine
Norio wrote
LOL ? And it's never the cute petite girls, is it? ?
eric vaxxine wrote
Sadly, the manager at Callaghans Bar, Piccadilly, instructed us
not to play 'Leave your Hat On' anymore, as he'd noticed that
it always encouraged the inebriated audience to strip off.
Ha haaa no. But by the same token, it's usually the girls who have 'quantity'...
and quantity has a quality all of it's own.
Such a maiden once shouted to me...'Do you have a bed in the back
of your van Eric?' The joke is that now, when we see a girl in the audience
who isn't too tasty, one of us normally points here out quipping to one another...
'Do you have a bed in the back of your van ?'...etc
eric-vaxxine
Very aweful Van Halen....
Awefulness starts at 0.45
=
charleshaupt
That,s bad,sounds like they started off in the wrong key ? Synth playing one key.guitar playing another and the bass parking off inbetween ?
karoo
Ha, in my school days me and my older sister played at local pubs/clubs here in Potch. We only played acoustic stuff. While we were in the middle of one song, really can't recall what song, a bar fight broke out. Was a couple of older okes having a go at each other and the owner of the place climbing in as well. We (me and my sis) just looked at each other, and kept playing. Was one very awkward moment....but as the saying goes...the show must go on
