THIS IS BY FAR THE WORST SHOW STORY EVER!

leftundone · #1 03-31-2003, 11:30 AM

This true story takes place back in 1997. My band Left Undone took off from Madison Wi & started to head towards Harmony Park MN for a huge outdoor festival. My band has a superstition that you get bad luck if you turn the radio station when a Phil Collins song is on. Sitting in shotgun, my job was the music. I turned a Phil Collins song & even worse, I turned the station back to Phil after I realize what I had done. We got to the Festival a night early to camp out & party. We slept in our tents that night & woke up to a horrible band playing while we realized that our tent was soaked in a pond of water. It must rained at least 7 in over night.
Now to our show. 1500 people were watching & at least 3000 others listening in their tents. Our drummer was sick & puked twice during the show. I broke an "E" which is almost impossible. Our guitarist broke not 1, but 2 strings. Our keyboard played the guitar for a song & he broke a string as well. The singing was just not there. Bad notes all over the place. We were so ashamed we left right after our show. This is the worse part of the story. On the way back to Madison. About an hour away, we looked to the East & saw the nastiest cloud ever. Turned the radio on & the Tornado Alert, not a watch, but an alert was on. It said to stay off the RD. & take shelter. We saw the funnel coming down, couldn't believe it. We pulled off the RD. w/ all of the other cars & climbed up underneath the Viaduct. The funnel changed directions & started coming right at us. We said F*#k this & got back into our Van & started driving South. Gulf ball size hail started coming down. It was so loud that your couldn't hear yourself yell. The van & trailer was shaking back & forth. I'm not sure how much the tornado missed us by, but this was a pretty bad experience. Bottom - line, never change Phil COllins when turn to him on the radio.

Feel free to post up stories of your worst shows.

Seanhttp://www.mp3.com/leftundone

thewanderer24 · #2 03-31-2003, 01:16 PM

That's a pretty horendous story, but I gotta ask:

Would sitting through an entire Phil Collins song have been any better than what you went through?

leftundone · #3 03-31-2003, 01:31 PM

I've had to sit through band Phil Collins songs. Many at times when I had to be somewhere & I will be honest. It sucks! But I've learned to deal w/ it because at first I turned a few times to argue that nothing bad will happen & something bad happened every time. So now, Phil & I are friends. I do try to avoid the stations that his music is on though.

Sean
http://www.mp3.com/leftundone

IAMERICCOCHRANE · #4 03-31-2003, 02:48 PM

So in other words, you were at a mini-woodstock in middle america, listening to Phil Collins and jamming so hard your band broke 4 strings in all? Then you got chased by a tornado Wizard of Oz style? That my friend, is an epic, not just a story. May this story be told to many a generation after you.

leftundone · #5 03-31-2003, 04:07 PM

It is an Epic, I agree w/ you there, but you must have some kind of story. Have all of your shows been perfect?

Seanhttp://www.mp3.com/leftundone

**Thor** · #6 03-31-2003, 04:34 PM

I guess you're not in Kansas anymore ...

Did any of those people in the tents have like,
multi-colored striped socks and weird hats?
Oh, and yeah, were they vertically challenged?
-------
More seriously, I always went to gig with 2 sets of extra strings, a full new set, and the set I had taken off the bass when I had it restrung. Keep this set, because an old E is better than no E.
Still, you should be able to make it work with 3 in a pinch ....but with 2 sets available, you won't have to.

The guitar players have no excuse for not having extra, extra, extra strings for a gig.

leftundone · #7 03-31-2003, 04:59 PM

IT was a big Hippy Festival. I agree, musicians should always have extra strings. Since it was our second to last song of our set, I just played it out. But I did have an extra set.

Sean
http://www.mp3.com/leftundone

IAMERICCOCHRANE · #8 03-31-2003, 06:45 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by leftundone
It is an Epic, I agree w/ you there, but you must have some kind of story. Have all of your shows been perfect?

Seanhttp://www.mp3.com/leftundone

sorry no gigs yet, unless you count all the Marching Band and Percussion ensembles ive been in. Hmm I guess the worse story I have is from percussion ensemble. Me and the Guitarist were practicing before we were on and we both forgot our tuners

and we were horribly out of tune, so this guitar playing girl came up to us and said hey do you need to use my tuner? We said sure and then after we tuned we had to go onstage. Well She must have had the tuner set to Sharps or something cuz we were horribly out of tune when we played the show. I think she purposfully did that so we would sound like crap and lose the competition, well it worked

leftundone · #9 03-31-2003, 06:52 PM

That's pretty funny man. Something like that happened to me once. I tuned down my bass to a low D for the last song of the first set. I forgot that it was tuned down for the second set. I ended up playing the whole first song in our set with a low D & the song was in E. The low E was a must for this song. Did anyone come up to you after your performance?

http://www.mp3.com/leftundone

IAMERICCOCHRANE · #10 03-31-2003, 07:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by leftundone
That's pretty funny man. Something like that happened to me once. I tuned down my bass to a low D for the last song of the first set. I forgot that it was tuned down for the second set. I ended up playing the whole first song in our set with a low D & the song was in E. The low E was a must for this song. Did anyone come up to you after your performance?

http://www.mp3.com/leftundone

Just a really angry Band Teacher and this kid who played the vibes tried to yell at us but we just said "F*** off, We dont want to hear it".

Bard2dbone · #11 04-02-2003, 04:04 AM

I think I know the territory you were visiting. When our drummer moved several hours drive away to attend a better college(TAMU) we were left with guitar, bass, and keys/guitar. Rhythms got pretty stretchy for about two years. The three of us were still practicing regularly and even played a few coffee-house gigs without a drummer. Then he calls and says "Hey, come on down. I've got us a place to play." We thought he meant he had reserved a lounge in one of the dorms. In stead he had set up a gig at a bar just outside the gates of the college.

It was the first time all four of us had played together in four very long months. We sucked bad, but no one seemed to mind. We did a three hour afternoon-to-evening show to open the place. I did the most smartass stage patter I had ever done:"I said we would take requests. I didn't say anything about playing them."

And on the way back we ran into a storm as well. No tornados for us thank God, just a regular Texas thunderstorm. The keyboard player was driving a Honda with three keyboards, two acoustic guitars, a big old three tier keyboard stand, and the PA. There was barely room for him in there with all his stuff. We wee following a hundred or two yards behind him when he suddenly swerved and spun out. We got to his car and the windshield was all messed up even though he hadn't hit anything. He said that was what made him spin. A hailstone had shattered his front windshield and he had flinched, jerking the wheel while driving at high speed on wet roads.

After seeing him spin like that we christened that weekend and the gig down at college station as the 'Flaming Cartwheel of Death Tour'

leftundone · #12 04-02-2003, 08:13 AM

I hear you on that one. I've had many band experiences driving w/ black ice. We've almost gotten killed 3 times. I will put those stories up another time. We even wrote a song about it & put it on our new EP.

http://www.mp3.com/leftundone