Worst thing that's ever happened at one of your gigs?

[Top_Ten]

Opening for Bad Religion at a pretty big theater in Detroit. Somebody in the audience is throwing things at us, can't tell what they are. Finally we get a good look at these projectiles and they turn out to be severed gopher heads. This nut job had a whole bag of them. Our guitar player was so outraged that he jumped into the audience and confronted the guy, almost got into a fist fight before the bouncers took the guy out. Other than that, it was a pretty good set.

Small club in Germany. I took some kind of pill, not sure what it was (this was in my younger and more indulgent days). Anyway, about half way through the set I blacked out. To this day, I don't remember anything from half-way through the set until the next morning.

Warfield Theater in SF. Big homecoming show after a long tour -- all of our friends and family are in the audience. We're excited. Drummer counts off the first song, I do a big rock n' roll leap into the air and fall flat on my ass.

Hole in the wall club called the Icepick in some town in Michigan. Walk in, bunch of scary dudes that seem sort of like a cross between skinheads and the hillbillys from Deliverance. Tons of grafitti all over the walls, including a bunch of scary racist crap. We hang around a little and get freaked out, so we decide we are not going to play. We hadn't loaded in yet, so we just try to slip out and make a quick getaway. The scary dudes literally chase us out of town and then show up to the next night's show in a different town. We had to hide out in the dressing room until they left.

I got a million terrible show stories -- those are just a few!

[iridiumrocks]

Originally Posted by Stanley Design

I remember someone here telling a story that they used to have a drummer who no matter how drunk he got, he would play like he was sober. In fact, he could play better with a few in him, loosened him up.

Well, one night he got in a fight with his girl or something and drank wayyyy too much. The monitor setup on stage wasn't the greatest, and the bassist could hear that something was off with the drums, so he looked over and the drummer was flailing about knocking over his cymbals drunkenly trying to play. He fell over the front of the entire kit and passed out mid song. Hilarious.

Our drummer had just gotten out of an alcohol rehab class after getting a DUI. He invited a bunch of people from rehab to see our show. He wanted to drink, but didn't want them to see him drinking. He normally drinks beer and was drinking water (we thought) from a sports bottle. We found out later that the bottle was full of straight vodka. He was so trashed that he got up and walked off stage right in the middle of the second set with the dance floor full of people. He announced that he had to pee, headed to bathroom, took a cigarette break, and then came back with no explanation. We still had an entire third set and he was so drunk he could barely play. It was the worst and most embarrassing set we ever played. When he was packing his drums after the show, he fell over one of the floor monitors and knocked over half of his drum kit. We have a new drummer now.

[TigerClaw]

Originally Posted by two fingers

Show up to a gig. I tie into the power panel at the club. I did a voltage check on a couple of outlets on our distro and everything seems fine. Fire everything up and smoke EVERYWHERE! Stuff is burning up left and right. Guitar amp, two keboards, bass pre, couple of power amps.....all fried. The club owner comes out about 30 seconds later and says "Hey, I forgot to tell you guys we got struck during the storm the other night. Our power system is all over the place. Be careful!" Needless to say I had some choice words for him. We didn't play there that night, or ever again. His insurance paid for everything but it took a few months. What a PITA.

[JQ1986]

The worst thing that's ever happened at one of my gigs was when both of our PA speakers blew before we finished the 2nd set at that band's very first gig. Besides that happening, 1/2 the band was drunk/stoned out of their mind and our singer was sick. It was my first and last gig with that band.

[knumbskull]

guitarist beaten up by bouncers, hospitalised
singer arrested for drunk & disorderly
this was the same gig...

i fell offstage once but that was more funny than anything else.

oh and i played a big outdoor community gig in East London that was shut down by the police after some poor kid got stabbed.

[addylewis]

Originally Posted by TigerClaw

You sod - I'm reading this at half 7 at night, dinners not gonna be for ages and I'm BLOODY 'ungry now!!!

[Trauma Boy]

I was playing guitar for a band and we played a show at Cleveland's Peabody's a few years back. I was enjoying the band that was on before us and we are all good friends with the band, so I jumped on stage and decided to do a stage dive. Jumped right off the stage and everyone moves out of the way. Woke up to our roadie yelling my name to get on stage. Couldn't remember any of the songs, my head was bleeding, and it was all on tape. Watching it was funny just seeing my a$$ fly into the air and then seeing me do a nose dive and with my feet straight in the air...funny but horrible show

[groooooove]

Originally Posted by jimc

I was playing in a band that got booked to back an Irish violinist, I'm pretty sure his name was Dermot McConville. He played Stephan Grappelli, hot club style jazz.

Somehow he recognized me as a gearhead and in the break is showing me his special violin combo. He tips it forward to show me the speaker and, thinking I have hold of it, let's go where upon it falls on my foot (breaking a toe I found out later).

So now the combo doesn't work, I identify a broken fuse and, being the bass player, I have a spare in my car. What I didn't know and should have checked is that our Irish friend has tried switching the amp back on while I'm at my car.

I push the fuse in and promptly get electrocuted and blown back 10 feet across the dance floor (this was in the UK, 240 volts there!). Spent the rest of the evening at the hospital.

Worst. Gig. Evahhhh!

/thread.

[Skywalker83]

Erm mine is proabbly the best one....

Around 5 years ago, i was playing in a busy wedding and function band, i was also doing alot of other work at the same time. One night we we're playing a wedding gig, i had been working stupid hours that week and had driven straight to the gig very tired. The start of the second set my body decides to let me know that i should get some rest....by giving me my first and only (touch wood) epileptic seizure....

I blacked out, dropped to the floor and started convulsing... The singer thought i had been electricuted.

Luckily there we're several nurses attending the wedding....

[Lazylion]

Originally Posted by Skywalker83

Erm mine is proabbly the best one...

If you say so, but did you read #36?

At least you survived!

[sedan_dad]

Played a seedy bar years ago in a blues/rock band and a fight broke out . Our singer/guitar player broke it up. Well the guy he kicked out wouldn't stay down and came back and stabbed him in the back.
I took my buddy to the hospital and sat in the parking lot drinking beer while he went in and got stitched up.He's fine.

[Eric Perry]

Originally Posted by Top_Ten

...they turn out to be severed gopher heads....

Despite this site being around for over a decade, with the multitude of members, and exponentially more posts throughout that time frame, I am willing to bet my entire rig (and a kidney) that no one person has EVER typed the phrase "severed gopher heads" before. Ever.

[5StringBlues]

Severed gopher heads,the new bacon.

One even snuck into my sig.

[Jonathan1990]

One afternoon before a gig, our one and only roadie got abducted bij aliens. We had to do everything ourselves.

[MooseLumps]

Little while ago, i was doing sound for a Jazz concert... Some gal comes stumbling in drunk and has to *walk* past me to an open seat. About two minutes later she tries to stumble back out to relieve herself, but she does not make it. she manages to get by me, but managed to splat a nasty puke hand print right on my chest.

And I had to clean up.

And I never got paid.

And the gal she threw up on is a nice gal I've been flirting with, but she seems to associate me with vomit now.

Which is not cool.

[nealw]

Ok, I've got one. Back in the 90's I was in a popular original band in Atlanta. We were booked to play the local music awards show at the Cotton Club-a large and pretty prestigious venue at the time. It was about a 900-seater and totally sold out. EVERYONE in the Atlanta music scene was there: radio personalities, signed bands, the works. Each band or performer was allotted 15 minutes to play and of course there were no soundchecks. We tune up backstage and then go out there. We start our first song and something is VERY VERY wrong but the the sound is so bad we can't even tell what it is initially. We finally (probably only a minute or so but felt like days) figure out that the guitarist is terribly, horribly out of tune. In tune with himself, but out of tune with everyone else. That's easily enough fixed, then: he has a spare guitar! He picks up his spare guitar and starts playing again-sounds exactly the same! He checks his tuner-according to it, he's perfectly in tune! He's probably 1 and 1/2 steps out and our set is 3 songs long. He tries to struggle back into tune by ear while we continue to play and pretend nothing is wrong but the set is far too short for us to redeem ourselves. We play our 3 songs and slink off stage in humiliation. Afterwards, we figure out that while he was tuning, he accidentally hit the "calibrate" button on his tuner and calibrated A440 to some random note. Horrible!!

[Randy Warren]

Hah, our lead singer would always forget some line to at least 2 songs at every gig, walk over the lead players chorus, etc. We got to the point we could adjust within a quarter note due to the frequency of his mistakes (they were never in the same songs or same place, but we were always ready) How good did we do? Well, we went in to cut a CD of covers to shop around at the local bars, ran the 5 songs as a live band performance, three tries on each song then out, overdub the vocals on a scratch track. Singer missed a bridge bar in "LA Woman", we all caught it in 1 quarter note and continued, the engineer, said to us he was impressed insofar as there was a bridge he was expecting to hear that the singer missed but that the whole band caught it in one quarter note, the lead guitar and I laughed, said we have been doing this with the singer for years, engineer laughed and said, yea, old school ****!

[Oric]

I left my Hartke amp head in another city (Louisville). Still haven't arranged to have them ship it back.

[Marley's Ghost]

In 1977, I was playing in a mainstream/progressive cover band. We had just started out third set, ironically with Yes' "All Good People" when a huge fight broke out. Chairs were broken, bottles went flying, cops came in. The place was shut down. The mamager was rushed to the hospital with a huge cut on his head. And we never got paid. The only good from it was that we helped ourselves to free drinks while we waited for his brother to come and close up.

[DavidBlandinii]

I guess my worst experience has been on a party we were covering blink 182`s song i miss you and the drummer finished the song at the 2nd verse after the 1rst chorus with no lyrics!! Then we all stopped (great mistake!) and we got mad with him!