Ever had a headliner undermine your show?

[squirefan]

For all the bad, there's always a good one... My band opened for Tommy Keene in the mid 80's. They went a little over on their sound check, and there was not much room on the small stage. After the sound check, the drummer struck his own kit, so our guy had room to set up. I can't recall if their first major label album had come out at the time. But I remember how cool his drummer was, and have always tried to be as cool to others, whenever possible.

Yeah. These stories make me realize how lucky we've been.
All the headliners we've played with have been really accommodating and supportive. Really cool to hang out with, too.
So we treat our openers the same. That's what it should be about!

 

[xk49w]

Everyone has seen the soundman for the headliner sink the opener's ship. No big surprise there.

We did an art festival at which the James Cotton Band was the headliner. We had a gig after the thing and invited him over. They showed up and sat in! Uber cool young Texas guitar player. The bass player was, shall we say mind altered and ended up blowing up the bass amp. Not good.

 

[4dog]

this has happened since the first amp was ever plugged in..dang ...itll be happening well after were gone.

 

[Seryna]

As Saturday Night Live calls it, JM is legally insane.

Still an ass in so many ways.

 

[PimasterPearson]

One time my band was playing an outdoor 4th of July show, and the headliner drove his big pickup truck right in front of the stage, IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR SET, and started unloading his gear in between us and the crowd. He easily could have driven behind the stage but for some reason he didn't.

I don't think he meant anything by it, honestly I think the guy is just a clueless idiot who never thought about what he was doing. Our singer/guitarist was ticked off, but we all had a good laugh about it afterward.

 

[Metalbasspro]

I used to play in a locally known punk/hardcore band that had built up a pretty good following within a 300 mile radius. We had done a few "reunion" shows just for fun and they drew a lot of people that wanted to come get nostalgic for their high school punk days. A friend asked us to do one of these shows opening up for some pretty big pop/punk/hardcore bands that were coming through town (not sure on etiquette so if anyone is curious who let me know if we can name drop or not). We agreed to open up for them as long as we had a guarantee that our set wouldn't be cut short (as the venue is notorious for) and, as usual, brought out a pretty good chunk of people (probably 1/3 of the crowd). A few days before the show there were 2 more bands added to the show. We double checked that we had the same amount of time to play and were assured that we were fine. During a line check the headlining bands asked where to buy beer and when we told them, they gave us kind of a weird look and then asked if we could just go pick them up a case. I told them we were playing that night and that we don't have time to make a beer run for them. After this first red flag we sat through two very long opening sets and finally went on. We had saved our most popular song from back in the day to close the set and right before launching into it the headlining bands tour manager scrambles up to the side of the stage and starts yelling "your done" at us. I gave him a goofy look and nodded at the drummer to start anyways. Crowd was happy, bands were mad. I heard they were badmouthing us quite a bit after the show but they were probably just sour that a big chunk of the crowd left after our set.

All the stories here are pretty bad. I guess my life was tame in comparison. I am thinking they only bad mouthed your band because they felt threatened.
The only thing that really sticks out for me is something like your story, my band was tearing through it's set and we got cut short. Getting cut short was common but in this gig at the after party the head liners who had invited us on the bill were talking crap.

The Singer bother was the MC of the night and he cut of short. Some dudes must have felt they were being up staged.