I apologize in advance for the length of this tale.
Backstage Club, Houston Texas, summer 1989, SRO. My band used to do two sets of originals and close each set with a song that had an extended four-on-the-floor chugga-chugga breakdown vamp over which the singer would rap (I mean the this goes out to all the hell-raisin-Houston-Texas-get-on-down-boogie-woogie-whiskey-drinkin-pot-smokin-coke-snortin-big-t#$ty-lickin-rock-and-roll-mother-f@*kers! kind of rap, not the yo yo in da howse variety); one vamp in A, one vamp in E. The A-vamp in the first set ended with a snare roll that led us back into the chorus, and the E-vamp in the second set ended with the singer singing the first line of the last pre-chorus, after which the guitar and drum crashes would kick in.
We always had some drinks on stage but usually kept it well together but that night a few rounds more than normal came up and by the end of the gig the effects were being felt...
So, picture it: Second set, last song of the night, chugging the E-vamp. Singer does his rap, then he stands there while we chug and wait for him to sing the line to bring us back into the song. Nothing. We continued chugging. Nothing. I exchanged a millisecond whiskey-tango-foxtrot? glance with the guitarist, but nothing obvious to alert anyone in the crowd. More chugging. Nothing. After about 15 seconds, which seemed like an eternity with us looking at the crowd and them looking back at us, the singer turned around, puts his hands over his head and began screaming and gesticulating very animatedly, making no effort at all to conceal his frustration at what had by that time become painfully clear to me: he had confused the last song of the second set with the last song of the first set and was waiting for the drum roll to bring us back into an entirely different song! He had no idea that instead he was actually supposed to sing a line that cued us back in; we were waiting for his vocals but instead he was up there having an ostentatious tantrum. The spectacle was embarrassing. I was surprised he was acting that way because the man had years of experience playing live.
Suddenly, Ill be damned, even though we couldnt hear what the singer was screaming, the drummer finally figured it out and went into the snare roll of the last song of the first set! As if we had rehearsed it a million times, the guitarist and I followed flawlessly. It wasnt as smooth as it sounds, though, because we had to shift gears without a clutch from E to A, and this snare roll led into a section during which we executed some Warrant-esque choreography that we still scrambled to do but pulled off half-assed because we werent on our marks. So we started with one song and ended with a song we had already playedimagine AC/DC playing Sin City but then after the bass/vocals breakdown Bon Scott had a ostentatious tantrum and then the band morphed into Shot Down in Flames for no apparent reason, which they had already played.
After the song we did our Beatles-bow as usual and I did my best to pretend that we had planned it that way, but I walked offstage red-faced and humiliated. In the dressing room the singer was fuming by the time I arrived, by then aware of his charlie-foxtrot but roiling in an embarrassed rage that his drunken ego used to attempt to blame us for the mess. He was cursing and hollering and wiping out tables of drinks, etc. All this led to an intense band argument and some ugly minutes that nearly resulted in fisticuffs. It was all so damned Spinal Tap. A horrible end to an otherwise great evening.
