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TLDROK, I'll bite. I've got a real good one. It's not so much an implosion as an explosion. Heck, this even sounds like an excuse to tell a long version of the story
So the setting: this is a cover band that does a super diverse array of tunes, focusing on the lead singer's vocals. She's got a great voice, and we play a lot of stuff like Gillian Welch, Florence and the Machine, Flaming Lips, Phantogram, Blondie. Great setlist. Her, I, and the drummer are in our 20's and early 30's, our guitarist is in his early 60's but he's got a ton of energy and enthusiasm. But is also definitely the weak link talent-wise. He can never remember which songs he's supposed to capo, only has maybe a half dozen rhythms that he applies to every song, struggles with solos etc. But he brought the band together, owns the PA, practice space etc. So there was never conversation of replacing him. He's also got a serious ego problem that shows up in many ways, and I think is a deeply insecure person. He always is right. Always.
The drummer and I used to be in a wild 3 piece once described as "avant garde nirvana hendrix" for a few years, he has a metronome for a brain and insane technical chops on the drums, and seriously restrains himself for this band. It's like watching Animal from the muppets. You can feel the energy building up inside of him and by the time we hit the Meat Puppets and RHCP part of the set he goes apepoopie and it's shagging rad.
-----
So, going back a bit: after having been with the band for 3-4 months, I became in need of a place to live, and ended up moving into an off-grid cabin on the guitarist's property. His work takes him away all summer (real drag for the rest of us, somehow in his head it's everyone else's fault for losing interest in the band every spring though), and in the winter he spends half his time at his other house. I lived there for about a year and a half, it was awesome when mr type A control freak was not there, and when he was around I just tried to appease him. Come to see later this was probably doomed from the start, as I've learned he has a reputation in our small community as being "notoriously difficult".
So yadda yadda ya, tensions wax and wane between us, always more or less sorting it out in the end, but not without him throwing in a personal dig at me along the way. Last summer while he was gone I got offered a job in a touring reggae band, which was somehow a personal attack on him as he considers himself a reggae head (an old white dude who overstrums and can't skank... ok sure whatever man). The reggae band only plays in the summer, so it in no way interferes with the cover band. When he got back from work in the fall I told him about it he said "That's so weird, because you can't play reggae for poopie!", a line he repeated to my face at least a half dozen times afterwards, and several times to mutual friends. Obviously the professional reggae band disagrees, but I digress...
The cabin runs off of a little solar panel and bank of 12v batteries. The batteries were getting up there in years, never got the exact age out of him but at least 8-10 years old, which is sort of their typical lifespan. I told him a few times that it seemed like they weren't holding as much of a charge as they used to, and he would always brush it off with something condescending like "well, when it's cloudy they don't get as much of a charge so you have to run the generator more". Ok yeah I know that, not what's happening here, but whatever. Last fall their performance finally got so bad I made him come look at them with me. Big pillows of corrosion on the terminals, plastic casing swollen in a few spots. He insinuates it's all my fault, that I must have been either overcharging them or undercharging them, and that I need to clean off the terminals and get them running right. Electricity is not my strong suit, and he did not seem concerned about the swollen casings, and since I was on a no-contract month-to-month deal in a place where rentals are notoriously difficult to find, I felt pressured to once again appease him.
Following his instructions, I set about cleaning the terminals. I was about halfway through, hunched over a battery, when a bright white flash obscured my vision and a bang the volume of a mortar or shotgun blast went off about 18" to the side of my head. A battery had blown up, luckily not spraying acid on my face, but my hearing... let's say it was just like the movies portray it. There was a constant, loud high pitched ringing in my ears, and everything else was super muffled and far-away sounding. Immediately I was concerned the pressure from the explosion had ruptured my ear drums.
So I run up to his house, excitedly tell him (probably shouting because I can't hear myself) "a battery just exploded in my face and I can't hear anything" and he says "huh" and walks away to go back to talking to the 16 year old kid dropping off a load of firewood. Realizing he's going to be no help, I run back to the piano in my cabin to establish if my hearing was totally ****** across the whole frequency spectrum (yup, pretty much). After a couple minutes he comes down and says "oh wow you weren't kidding, the battery really blew up". (why would I joke about that?) So now he is down to be somewhat helpful, and I use his phone to call the paramedics out.
Of course, the paramedic girl I had been dating for like 2 months happened to be on shift, and showed up first, then a couple more people showed up. We are at least 30 minutes after the explosion by now and my hearing has returned to 90% of normal, so I had calmed down and was joking around with them to keep the mood light, as I tend to do with medical professionals when they are providing me serious care. In the middle of their protocol, my guitarist/landlord disrupts one of them while he's literally physically inspecting my ear to say "Can you move your vehicle? I've got another load of firewood coming, this isn't that serious, he's fine really". The paramedic looked at him as if to say "Are you shagging kidding me dude?" and ignored him. Thankfully my girlfriend knew him well enough to go move the vehicle, cause he was not going to let the issue go.
OK, so fast forward through a few weeks of us fighting over whose fault it was (mine, obviously), whether he was going to replace the batteries (he was not), whether he was going to refund me my rent money for the month and a half I had paid ahead for a cabin that no longer had electricity (quite offended at the suggestion, he was not going to). Amazingly I found a new place to live pretty quickly, but I had to install new floors and rebuild the kitchen in it first. I was working full time, so this turned into 80 hour weeks all of December up until the holidays. Man that sucked. Oh yeah, also my truck broke down during this, an electrical problem I couldn't solve (and was too traumatized from batteries to even consider seriously working on), so i had to emergency buy another one.
Anyways, I was obsiouly ready to be out of the band with this guy, but I had already booked us a NYE gig at the main bar in the ski town we have all spent serious pieces of our lives in, and no one was going to bail on that. So I am driving my "new" 280k mileage F150 up there after work, on time to just make it there for load-in. Bam, my truck dies on the highway. It's not going anywhere. I called up my friend who was going to sit in with us on fiddle for the first time, and told him to turn around and come pick me up. Then I called the tow company and abandoned my truck on the side of the highway with cash in the glovebox for him. Made it to the gig 15min before the start of the show, guitarist was in a huff and bossing everyone around, we set up, I smoked a doobie, and we started to play.
Honestly, it was the best show this band ever played. It was a roaring 20's theme, the place was packed to the gills and everyone was dancing and having a great time. Fiddle was the perfect addition to the band. We were all feeding off the crowd, and the drummer had even more pent up Animal energy that usual. He ended the first set by building into a wild frenzy on what is supposed to be a pretty reserved song, and then exploded out over the top of his drumset and stormed outside in one fluid motion, literally knocking the whole thing over. I got hit with in the leg with a falling crash cymbal. I fed off that energy later: during the meat puppets cover I was repeatedly bashing his crash cymbal with the headstock of my (then) mint condition '93 MIJ unlined fretless jazz bass that I was playing my first gig with. It was just an electric shagging energy in there. Nothing like boiling-over band drama and a NYE show to elevate the night. (Sidenote: Hitting the crash cymbal with your headstock is great theater! It has to be authentic though). End of the night I packed up myself, and went off to an afterparty. First and only time I've ever not helped pack up the PA system, partly because dude and I were *not* on speaking terms, partly because I had more whiskey during this show than during the rest of my shows with this band combined. It was all I could do to even get my stuff back in the fiddle player's car.
So January 1st was also my deadline to be out of the cabin, which I did not meet, but dude I was putting in 80 hours a week literally building a new place, then moving, and dealing with a busted truck (now two busted trucks). I had everything I cared about out of the place, and only had to go back to finish cleaning and make a trip or two to the dump. He locked the gate to the property, and got on a crazy rampage about "you need to coordinate with me to come clean, you can't be here alone", then was extremely difficult to coordinate with. When I finally got him to agree to a time for me to go over there, he was behaving completely irrationally and mostly just screamed at me. So I told him I came over to clean, not to be harrassed, that I was done, and not to contact me again. Got in my new car (finally bit the bullet and took out a loan for a new car instead of juggling old 250k+ mileage trucks) and drove off.
Ok, so the best part about this? Two days after this encounter, I'm back up in the ski town for an open blues/funk jam my buddy puts on at the same bar. There's a solid 40-50 people there watching, the musicians are arranged in a V on stage, and I'm dead center. Two guitarists, a keyboard player, and a singer on the left, and a drummer, two more guitarists (I know what you're thinking, but these guys are pros. Four guitars but it only sounded like two. Honest!), and a dude on djembe on my right. And we were absolutely feeling it! I seriously can't emphasize how much magic was in the air this night. Some really, really incredible musicianship, and we were all just listening, leaving as much space as possible for 9 people jamming together unscripted, and I was in the driver's seat, laying down some serious grooves. One of the best musical experiences of my life.
And my ex-landlord was there. For a bit I thought maybe he wasn't going to do anything rash, but as he got drunker he decided to come up in the middle of a song, in front of half the town, and shout "You're a pussy ass bitch!" in my face, to which I stone face responded "Sit. Down". Everyone on stage looked at me like '*** was that??" but we kept on going. He sat down at the front table and heckled me for a couple of songs. "Hey! You suck!" "shag you, you pussy!".
Now, this was a first for me. I'm a bassist. I don't get heckled. But I always knew what to do if I did: I just ignored him. Didn't respond, didn't engage, didn't even look at him, just locked eyes with the drummer, or one of the guitarists, and played music. This goes on for a song or two, and pretty quickly he figures it out, and in between songs he shouts out "Oh, you're just gonna ignore me huh? Really??"
And a lightbulb goes off in my head, and I lean into my buddy on drums: "Hey, you know how to play reggae?" and he says "Yeah man, I love reggae". So I say "ok, just follow me".
I laid into one the fattest, dubbiest, minor key reggae basslines I've ever played. The drummer fell in with me, the guitars and keys all started skanking and trading reverbed out solos, dude on the djembe was having a field day. The crowd was hooting and hollering (as they had been for the last hour). I looked up just in time to see my ex-landlord about to have an aneurysm flipping me off as his son (wisely) escorted him out the front door.
I thought it was a pretty good bassline for a guy who "can't play reggae for poopie". I haven't seen him since.
Now we’re talkin’! That’s classic TB right there.
OK, I'll bite. I've got a real good one. It's not so much an implosion as an explosion. Heck, this even sounds like an excuse to tell a long version of the story
So the setting: this is a cover band that does a super diverse array of tunes, focusing on the lead singer's vocals. She's got a great voice, and we play a lot of stuff like Gillian Welch, Florence and the Machine, Flaming Lips, Phantogram, Blondie. Great setlist. Her, I, and the drummer are in our 20's and early 30's, our guitarist is in his early 60's but he's got a ton of energy and enthusiasm. But is also definitely the weak link talent-wise. He can never remember which songs he's supposed to capo, only has maybe a half dozen rhythms that he applies to every song, struggles with solos etc. But he brought the band together, owns the PA, practice space etc. So there was never conversation of replacing him. He's also got a serious ego problem that shows up in many ways, and I think is a deeply insecure person. He always is right. Always.
The drummer and I used to be in a wild 3 piece once described as "avant garde nirvana hendrix" for a few years, he has a metronome for a brain and insane technical chops on the drums, and seriously restrains himself for this band. It's like watching Animal from the muppets. You can feel the energy building up inside of him and by the time we hit the Meat Puppets and RHCP part of the set he goes apepoopie and it's shagging rad.
-----
So, going back a bit: after having been with the band for 3-4 months, I became in need of a place to live, and ended up moving into an off-grid cabin on the guitarist's property. His work takes him away all summer (real drag for the rest of us, somehow in his head it's everyone else's fault for losing interest in the band every spring though), and in the winter he spends half his time at his other house. I lived there for about a year and a half, it was awesome when mr type A control freak was not there, and when he was around I just tried to appease him. Come to see later this was probably doomed from the start, as I've learned he has a reputation in our small community as being "notoriously difficult".
So yadda yadda ya, tensions wax and wane between us, always more or less sorting it out in the end, but not without him throwing in a personal dig at me along the way. Last summer while he was gone I got offered a job in a touring reggae band, which was somehow a personal attack on him as he considers himself a reggae head (an old white dude who overstrums and can't skank... ok sure whatever man). The reggae band only plays in the summer, so it in no way interferes with the cover band. When he got back from work in the fall I told him about it he said "That's so weird, because you can't play reggae for poopie!", a line he repeated to my face at least a half dozen times afterwards, and several times to mutual friends. Obviously the professional reggae band disagrees, but I digress...
The cabin runs off of a little solar panel and bank of 12v batteries. The batteries were getting up there in years, never got the exact age out of him but at least 8-10 years old, which is sort of their typical lifespan. I told him a few times that it seemed like they weren't holding as much of a charge as they used to, and he would always brush it off with something condescending like "well, when it's cloudy they don't get as much of a charge so you have to run the generator more". Ok yeah I know that, not what's happening here, but whatever. Last fall their performance finally got so bad I made him come look at them with me. Big pillows of corrosion on the terminals, plastic casing swollen in a few spots. He insinuates it's all my fault, that I must have been either overcharging them or undercharging them, and that I need to clean off the terminals and get them running right. Electricity is not my strong suit, and he did not seem concerned about the swollen casings, and since I was on a no-contract month-to-month deal in a place where rentals are notoriously difficult to find, I felt pressured to once again appease him.
Following his instructions, I set about cleaning the terminals. I was about halfway through, hunched over a battery, when a bright white flash obscured my vision and a bang the volume of a mortar or shotgun blast went off about 18" to the side of my head. A battery had blown up, luckily not spraying acid on my face, but my hearing... let's say it was just like the movies portray it. There was a constant, loud high pitched ringing in my ears, and everything else was super muffled and far-away sounding. Immediately I was concerned the pressure from the explosion had ruptured my ear drums.
So I run up to his house, excitedly tell him (probably shouting because I can't hear myself) "a battery just exploded in my face and I can't hear anything" and he says "huh" and walks away to go back to talking to the 16 year old kid dropping off a load of firewood. Realizing he's going to be no help, I run back to the piano in my cabin to establish if my hearing was totally ****** across the whole frequency spectrum (yup, pretty much). After a couple minutes he comes down and says "oh wow you weren't kidding, the battery really blew up". (why would I joke about that?) So now he is down to be somewhat helpful, and I use his phone to call the paramedics out.
Of course, the paramedic girl I had been dating for like 2 months happened to be on shift, and showed up first, then a couple more people showed up. We are at least 30 minutes after the explosion by now and my hearing has returned to 90% of normal, so I had calmed down and was joking around with them to keep the mood light, as I tend to do with medical professionals when they are providing me serious care. In the middle of their protocol, my guitarist/landlord disrupts one of them while he's literally physically inspecting my ear to say "Can you move your vehicle? I've got another load of firewood coming, this isn't that serious, he's fine really". The paramedic looked at him as if to say "Are you shagging kidding me dude?" and ignored him. Thankfully my girlfriend knew him well enough to go move the vehicle, cause he was not going to let the issue go.
OK, so fast forward through a few weeks of us fighting over whose fault it was (mine, obviously), whether he was going to replace the batteries (he was not), whether he was going to refund me my rent money for the month and a half I had paid ahead for a cabin that no longer had electricity (quite offended at the suggestion, he was not going to). Amazingly I found a new place to live pretty quickly, but I had to install new floors and rebuild the kitchen in it first. I was working full time, so this turned into 80 hour weeks all of December up until the holidays. Man that sucked. Oh yeah, also my truck broke down during this, an electrical problem I couldn't solve (and was too traumatized from batteries to even consider seriously working on), so i had to emergency buy another one.
Anyways, I was obsiouly ready to be out of the band with this guy, but I had already booked us a NYE gig at the main bar in the ski town we have all spent serious pieces of our lives in, and no one was going to bail on that. So I am driving my "new" 280k mileage F150 up there after work, on time to just make it there for load-in. Bam, my truck dies on the highway. It's not going anywhere. I called up my friend who was going to sit in with us on fiddle for the first time, and told him to turn around and come pick me up. Then I called the tow company and abandoned my truck on the side of the highway with cash in the glovebox for him. Made it to the gig 15min before the start of the show, guitarist was in a huff and bossing everyone around, we set up, I smoked a doobie, and we started to play.
Honestly, it was the best show this band ever played. It was a roaring 20's theme, the place was packed to the gills and everyone was dancing and having a great time. Fiddle was the perfect addition to the band. We were all feeding off the crowd, and the drummer had even more pent up Animal energy that usual. He ended the first set by building into a wild frenzy on what is supposed to be a pretty reserved song, and then exploded out over the top of his drumset and stormed outside in one fluid motion, literally knocking the whole thing over. I got hit with in the leg with a falling crash cymbal. I fed off that energy later: during the meat puppets cover I was repeatedly bashing his crash cymbal with the headstock of my (then) mint condition '93 MIJ unlined fretless jazz bass that I was playing my first gig with. It was just an electric shagging energy in there. Nothing like boiling-over band drama and a NYE show to elevate the night. (Sidenote: Hitting the crash cymbal with your headstock is great theater! It has to be authentic though). End of the night I packed up myself, and went off to an afterparty. First and only time I've ever not helped pack up the PA system, partly because dude and I were *not* on speaking terms, partly because I had more whiskey during this show than during the rest of my shows with this band combined. It was all I could do to even get my stuff back in the fiddle player's car.
So January 1st was also my deadline to be out of the cabin, which I did not meet, but dude I was putting in 80 hours a week literally building a new place, then moving, and dealing with a busted truck (now two busted trucks). I had everything I cared about out of the place, and only had to go back to finish cleaning and make a trip or two to the dump. He locked the gate to the property, and got on a crazy rampage about "you need to coordinate with me to come clean, you can't be here alone", then was extremely difficult to coordinate with. When I finally got him to agree to a time for me to go over there, he was behaving completely irrationally and mostly just screamed at me. So I told him I came over to clean, not to be harrassed, that I was done, and not to contact me again. Got in my new car (finally bit the bullet and took out a loan for a new car instead of juggling old 250k+ mileage trucks) and drove off.
Ok, so the best part about this? Two days after this encounter, I'm back up in the ski town for an open blues/funk jam my buddy puts on at the same bar. There's a solid 40-50 people there watching, the musicians are arranged in a V on stage, and I'm dead center. Two guitarists, a keyboard player, and a singer on the left, and a drummer, two more guitarists (I know what you're thinking, but these guys are pros. Four guitars but it only sounded like two. Honest!), and a dude on djembe on my right. And we were absolutely feeling it! I seriously can't emphasize how much magic was in the air this night. Some really, really incredible musicianship, and we were all just listening, leaving as much space as possible for 9 people jamming together unscripted, and I was in the driver's seat, laying down some serious grooves. One of the best musical experiences of my life.
And my ex-landlord was there. For a bit I thought maybe he wasn't going to do anything rash, but as he got drunker he decided to come up in the middle of a song, in front of half the town, and shout "You're a pussy ass bitch!" in my face, to which I stone face responded "Sit. Down". Everyone on stage looked at me like '*** was that??" but we kept on going. He sat down at the front table and heckled me for a couple of songs. "Hey! You suck!" "shag you, you pussy!".
Now, this was a first for me. I'm a bassist. I don't get heckled. But I always knew what to do if I did: I just ignored him. Didn't respond, didn't engage, didn't even look at him, just locked eyes with the drummer, or one of the guitarists, and played music. This goes on for a song or two, and pretty quickly he figures it out, and in between songs he shouts out "Oh, you're just gonna ignore me huh? Really??"
And a lightbulb goes off in my head, and I lean into my buddy on drums: "Hey, you know how to play reggae?" and he says "Yeah man, I love reggae". So I say "ok, just follow me".
I laid into one the fattest, dubbiest, minor key reggae basslines I've ever played. The drummer fell in with me, the guitars and keys all started skanking and trading reverbed out solos, dude on the djembe was having a field day. The crowd was hooting and hollering (as they had been for the last hour). I looked up just in time to see my ex-landlord about to have an aneurysm flipping me off as his son (wisely) escorted him out the front door.
I thought it was a pretty good bassline for a guy who "can't play reggae for poopie". I haven't seen him since.
"too many...successful moments to be real"
Yes! I love this! Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction! 
