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Stage antics? Ideas? Get creative!

Bayou_Brawler

Bayou_Brawler

The most hurtful thing ever realized
Oct 23, 2003
2,055
11
47
Ann Arbor, MI
#1
So my band is thinking about do more crazy stuff onstage. Some recent ideas...

1) have cue cards for the audience and hold them up after tunes....they may say....applause, cry, sex noises, silence, etc...

2) play spaced out music as one person reads from a random book in the mic...then another person starts to read in a different mic from another book....then another...etc..

anyway some crazy zapa esque stuff like that...

any ideas? stuff you have done? give me some ideas!:)
 
#3
come out dressed the complete opposite of your genre. I dont mean something cute like old Buddy Holly stuff that they KNOW you're joking. Find something that will get you boo'd off the stage almost until you start playing kick ass music.

Examples: if you're a metal band and you come out dressed Emo

If you're a Punk band, come dressed in Abercrombie.

If you're a Pop rock band, come dressed as gansta thugs.

If you're country, dress in Slayer and Tool shirts.
 
#5
Bayou_Brawler said:
So my band is thinking about do more crazy stuff onstage. Some recent ideas...

1) have cue cards for the audience and hold them up after tunes....they may say....applause, cry, sex noises, silence, etc...

2) play spaced out music as one person reads from a random book in the mic...then another person starts to read in a different mic from another book....then another...etc..

anyway some crazy zapa esque stuff like that...

any ideas? stuff you have done? give me some ideas!:)
Click to expand...

Once I made popcorn onstage and did a monologue about Jack Nicholson going to Hell. Afer which, one of my bandmates took the just finished bowl of popcorn around to the audience and offered it to them saying "Welcome to Hell, would you like some popcorn?" :D This was in LA, circa 1987 @ the long definct Madame Wongs' West.

Another time, with a different band, I shot paper airplanes into the audience at random intervals with hilarious and/or cryptic messages on them.
 
#6
Play your first song with you on drums, your guitarist on bass, and your drummer on guitar, and see what happens!

We also managed to get the venue silent, then our drummer doing an intro from the back, hitting things on the way past in a very drumbeat fashion before getting to his drumkit and playing the intro to our first song! was an excellent intro if i do say so myself!
 
#7
Just remembered some more. We got some friends of ours who could barely play a radio to go onstage and pretend they were us, they actually stumbled and bumbled through a version of "My Generation" before we (the real band) came storming out onstage and threw them off, then we played our real set. All of us and the audience LOVED IT!!!

Another time, we played "I Don't Care About You" by FEAR, Meidaeval/Baroque style (even had a guest musician on recorders, then we swithched to the real all-out punk/metal version. Audience loved it.
 
#9
Ste_m3 said:
Play your first song with you on drums, your guitarist on bass, and your drummer on guitar, and see what happens!
Click to expand...

We did that in the early 90's to Faith No More's "Introduce Yourself"

It works.

How about you get some random hotties from the crowd to come up. Give them your instruments and have them put them on. Then you have them put their arms behind their backs, you slide your arms through and play your instruments on them from behind. The drums might be tricky... I'd have to experiment to know for sure... But I think it could work.

And even if it didn't - think about it... how much fun it would be trying to make that work! But if it DOES work... think about how much fun that would be too!

Remember, you heard it here first.
 
#10
"..Just remembered some more. We got some friends of ours who could barely play a radio to go onstage and pretend they were us, they actually stumbled and bumbled through a version of "My Generation" before we (the real band) came storming out onstage and threw them off, then we played our real set. All of us and the audience LOVED IT!!!.."

Man I LOVE original stuff like this.. its so corny that its brilliant. I would have loved to have been there for crazy Chinese Fire Drill... Well done!
 
#11
I have a theramin.

That is stage antics enough.

Pull that thing from out back stage and star playing and people are like

*** is the bassplayer doing and why the hell does the music sound like the theme to the original startrek now?:cool:
 
#18
Grow really really long beards (except the drummer, who will ironically be named, "Beard"), wear shades, play furry guitars that rotate on a belt-buckle apparatus and play really lame, watered-down, formerly-cool-but-clearly-in-it-only-for-the-money-now blues/rock with a Texas accent.

Oh yeah, don't forget to do the unison, follow the passing car, point.

Yeah, that's a gimmick!
 
#20
Throw a bunch of water balloons and filled cheap water guns into the audience. (Preferably at outdoor summer gigs). Once you have earned their trust and they are frolicking in the waterplay, switch to the balloons filled with cheap cologne.

-Stephen
 

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