Tell your gig disaster stories

[GitFiddle]

"One night in a seedy little bar near an Ohio Steel plant,.... "

Middletown, by chance?
I got a story or two about disaster gigs from that town.

I'll be right back.

Yep, the old Airport Inn, around the late 80s. We started out just doing Friday and Saturday night. The crowds got so big, he ended up booking us there for five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday.

Then he decided to try having wet t-shirt contests on Tuesday nights. Then one night the other guitar player got carried away and started announcing on the mic, "It takes skin to win". This resulted in a sweet young thing dancing stark naked on the dance floor. "I think we have a winner".

Needless to say, the cops were sitting in the back waiting, on the next Tuesday night. That place was a real trip. But from a guitar playing point of view, we would play five sets a night, five nights a week, with a packed house. You talk about some serious practice on your chops.

We got so tight, the bass player/singer could call out a song we had never done before. While singing and playing bass, he would sign the chord changes with his hand behind his back. By the 2nd or 3rd time, we would have it down.

 

[Meatwad]

One time, at a crappy little bar near an Ohio steel plant, we played an inside beach party.

They hauled in sand, and covered the whole place about a 8 inches deep.

There was no way to keep it out of pedalboards, cases, etc.
That kind of sucked, but hey - we knew that it was going to be a PITA in that regard going into it, so.....

Anyway, they were also having a bikini contest, so who cares about a little sand anyways, right?

Our drummer had a psycho girlfriend, who was insanely jealous of him, and vice versa. She came to gigs pretty much just to keep an eye on him, and he wanted her to be there so that she couldn't go running around with her friends.

She was on some kind of medication that, apparently you shouldn't be using with alcohol. And she was psycho anyway.

So, they had just got done having a screaming fight right before we went back up. All I remember before the lights went out was her standing right in front of us screaming and flipping him off.
I turned my back to say something to him, and then I remember waking up with people standing around me, and my head hurt bad.

She thought he was looking at some other girl, and had thrown her beer bottle at him.
She missed him, but beaned me right in the noggin. I never saw it coming.

She didn't come to any more gigs after that.

Oh - the sand they hauled in wasn't nice, clean playground/sandbox sand. It was nasty dirty river sand.

We all coughed up black shit for a week after that.

Good times.

 

[rikko]

It was my turn to sing and apparently there was a grounding issue because each time I stepped up to the mic my lip got shocked and I swear I could see a flash of light each time it happened. In retrospect, it wasn't too smart for me to play through that whole song.

Another night I had worked a LONG day (construction), sat in traffic all the way to the studio to get my gear, raced home to clean up, and raced back
(through bad traffic) to the gig.
I was wearing a belt buckle my wife had given me with a built in bottle opener and just before we started our set I opened a beer and the bottle lip snapped off and I gashed my index finger (fret hand).
Got blood all over the place...PURE RAWK FURY!!!

 

[TheAce93]

First ever time I played guitar live, the song was 'Calling Dr. Love' by KISS. I stepped on my jack lead, yanking it out of the socket on the guitar... Literally a millisecond into the guitar solo.....

I should have stuck with drums

 

[battra]

I broke a string once. ...and dropped my pick a few times.

Pfft.

I've never done either of those things in all of my 7 gigs.

 

[battra]

I have a story from the 19 year old Battra files.

We played this club a bunch of times...well he did all ages 4pm Saturday shows sometimes...so we signed up for one of those so a bunch of our friends could make it. It was our Halloween gig right? So we all put on Kiss make up underneath masks...we had like 50 people waiting to get in...

And the asscock didn't show up till like 5:00pm...and we just left.

 

[lǎo​wài]

Do you mean as in Shadows of Knight / Van Morrison Gloria?

If so, f***king awesome.

For some reason, I've liked that song going all the way back to my earliest middle school garage band days.

Now I feel like I have permission / it's legit to suggest my current band learn it just so we can pull it out when the spirit moves...

We played a conglomeration of many versions, and added plenty of our own interpretations.

Musically we played something between the Shadows of Knight and the Doors version using lots of dynamics. Singer sang close to the SoK version, added his own verses, and even managed to work some lyrics from Peggy Lee's Fever. I played a solo in it that used a bunch of licks from Third Stone From the Sun. Gloria was a 7 minute song for us.

But then, my band would start playing a highly psychedelic version (think 450 ms of delay with a lot of delay feedback) of For Your Love and finish it using the ending of Freebird.

We were all fair to middling musicians, so instead of trying to sound like the record we billed ourselves as:

Wayne Foundation. "Rock and Roll smoothed out on the psychedelic tip, with the drug appeal."

Did OK for a hobby band.

Songs like Gloria take 5 minutes to learn. Then spend the rest of your time making it your own.

 

[lǎo​wài]

one time the donkey got out of his harness. he really went to town on me.

TOMMY! Not those kind of gig disasters.

 

[lǎo​wài]

One night in a seedy little bar near an Ohio Steel plant, we were rocking the crap out of a SRO packed house. All of a sudden a brawl broke out about 20 feet from the stage. We just kept grinding the song harder and louder, when out of nowhere a shot glass flew up and hit me right on the back of my right hand (didn't hurt the guitar ).

It hit the back of my index finger knuckle and dropped onto the stage at my feet. The brawl was still going full tilt. In a fit of rage and pain, I picked it up and hurled it right back at the brawl as hard as I could. Then continued playing. By the end of the song, the fight was broken up and they were hauled outside. Never knew who or what got hit with that shot glass, but my knuckle swelled up like a golf ball.

That's exactly what we did until the owner cut us off.

 

[GitFiddle]

That's exactly what we did until the owner cut us off.

One time we were playing some redneck bar out in the sticks. We got through the first set fine. Place was steadily filling up. About halfway through the second set, a big fight broke out. The owner broke up the fight, threw them out, shut down the band, turned all the lights on and kicked everyone out of the place for the night.

They even started yelling at us to get our stuff packed up quicker. We only got paid for two sets. That was the first and last gig at that place.