As a musician I can tell you that nothing equals the excitement of playing a live gig. When you’re feeling good and the band is firing on all cylinders, it’s an almost mystical feeling of connecting with the music and the audience, a total adrenaline rush. Whether you’ve played hundreds of gigs or are young and new to playing in front of people, playing live is something to get psyched about, and when everything goes right, you can reach inspiring musical heights.
But things don’t always go right. In fact, sometimes things can go horribly wrong. It happens to seasoned pros as well as nervous first-timers. Gig mishaps are mostly the result of unexpected curveballs. It’s essential to plan and prepare for gigs as thoroughly as possible, but sometimes, things don’t go as planned – or take a seriously wrong turn. It’s part of being a performing musician. Eventually, you will encounter the Gig From Hell. And you will have to deal with it.
If you want to read some horror stories, dozens of them are online. This article by Tuck Andress of Tuck and Patti is a classic. On December 10, 1971, Frank Zappa was pushed off the stage by a member of the audience in a 15-foot fall and suffered a broken leg, a broken rib and other injuries including a crushed larynx, which permanently changed the timbre of his voice. But I wanted to make this article more personal, and relate some of the mishaps I, my bandmates, and some of my musician friends have encountered. Like the New Year’s Eve 1973 concert at the Academy of Music in New York where Blue Öyster Cult shared a bill with Kiss, Teenage Lust, and Iggy Pop, who was so out of it that he forgot what song he was playing – twice – and fell off the stage – twice. The audience had to help him back up. Oh yeah, Kiss’ Gene Simmons also accidentally lit his hair on fire. At a Deep Purple gig in the 1970s, a friend watched Richie Blackmore lean over, puke, then continue playing. (Then there was the time the band encountered some stupid with a flare gun...
Getting sick. Getting injured. Equipment failure. Hostile audiences. Not getting paid. Lousy venues. Bad or no food. Wardrobe malfunctions. Brain freeze. Many things can make a gig go south.
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It’s the oldest saying in showbiz: the show must go on. What if you get ill before a show, like I did the time our band the Lines were the warmup band for a major international act at the Malibu nightclub on Long Island in the early 1980s? The day before the gig I caught the flu and had something like a 103 temperature. I was so weak and delirious I could barely get off the couch. My friend packed up my gear and drove me to the gig and the other band members set up my equipment. I was practically passed out in the dressing room before the show. My friend pretty much pulled me out of my chair and shoved me onstage. I willed myself to play the set, though I could barely stand, the room was spinning, and I almost fell over when I tripped on an onstage monitor. More than once. After the show I collapsed. My friend packed up my gear and drove me home.
Sorry, I don’t remember the headliner. I didn’t stick around to meet them, which under other circumstances probably would have been one of the highlights of my life.
As Joe Walsh once said, “If you’re sick, you’re sick. You have to play.”
In 2016 Blue Öyster Cult played the “Reaper Residency,” a series of shows at B.B. King Blues Club and Grill in Manhattan (sadly, now closed). On one night the band played the entire Agents of Fortune album start to finish, a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was magical. They killed it. After the show I went to congratulate guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Richie Castellano. I stuck out my hand and he said, “don’t shake my hand! I’m really sick!” He had barely gotten through the show, and up close I could see he was really green around the gills. But you’d never know it from being in the audience.
A few years ago, I saw Todd Rundgren visibly struggling to play his guitar at a show. After a few songs he announced to the audience that he had a blood blister on his finger and was going to let guitarist Jesse Gress (RIP) do most of the playing. I’m a guitar player and I know that even a small cut can be excruciatingly painful, considering that the diameter of a typical high E electric guitar string is .009 or .010 of an inch. When you press on something that thin and your skin is broken, it hurts. I can’t imagine what Todd’s blood blister felt like – and he had many more shows to go on the tour. The show must go on.
There’s nothing like the sound of applause to make a performer feel on top of the world. But what if the audience…doesn’t like you? In the 1970s my college band Third Hand (featuring F. Lee Harvey Blotto as drummer) played music ranging from Springsteen to Roxy Music to the Kinks to Genesis. College crowds dug it, but…we got a gig at a place called The Store somewhere in upstate New York. Well, the locals didn’t want to hear Lou Reed and Todd Rundgren and such twee stuff – they wanted country music. When we said we didn’t play country music, the patrons got ugly to the point where I told the singer to be ready to wield his mic stand as a weapon, and I was poised to use my Telecaster as a baseball bat.
If you think I’m exaggerating, check out this clip of Keith Richards:
We managed to make it through the gig. We couldn’t get out of town fast enough.
Later, we found out that The Store had a reputation for stiffing bands (not just us, which they had done that night) on their pay. One night they stiffed the wrong band…who started a fire and burned the place to the ground.
Here’s a story from my longtime friend, musician, and consumer electronics industry veteran Ron Goldberg:
“Yeah, we’ve all been there. But the post-punk horror stories of the 1980s were worse, I’d imagine. The vibe then was that anyone could be in a band, even if you couldn’t play particularly well, and in the wake of MTV and CBGB, lots of bands tried to get by on image and/or attitude.
My band, Artificial Intelligence, was guilty of all three when we played our debut gig in ’82 at the Dover Showplace, a classic New Jersey venue, as an opening act for the Good Rats, a band we’d actually heard of! AI had only formed a month or so earlier, and still hadn’t settled our very imperfect and arguably off-putting mix of punk, prog, metal, noise and new wave. But since new wave was the thing out there, and our weirdo tape was what got us the gig, we went on stage as new wave weirdos. We had a vocalist that introduced our set by reading aloud from Playboy, a metal guitarist who’d just recently got hipped to [avant-garde guitarist] Fred Frith, a spandex-wearing bassist, a future NJ cop for a drummer, and me behind the keyboards in a white lab coat, scowling like Ron Mael [of Sparks]. The audience were mostly bikers, there to see the Rats.
They hated us. They started booing us. They yelled out that new wave sucked and so did we. Our vocalist didn’t do us any favors by pointing to the guitarist’s Led Zeppelin tattoo and informing the audience that we were indeed authentic and also from New Jersey: 'really, we’re just as stupid as you are.' A bottle flew to the stage, followed by a few more. We finished the set post-haste. This was my first-ever gig.”
In fact, Ron and I played another disastrous gig at a CEDIA trade show around 20 or 30 years ago. It was a battle of the bands, where different industry bands would be competing and judged by a panel. We picked the songs and the keys we’d do them in before CEDIA, since we all lived in different parts of the country. We were supposed to have had a rehearsal before the event, but were informed that we couldn’t because of a scheduling mishap. In addition, a singer who we hadn’t prepared anything with was added to the band...that day. I can't say I agreed with the decision. The rented Fender guitar I had to play was, shall we say, not set up to my liking. Well, I won’t say it was a complete trainwreck but it was…not good, as we stumbled over parts, missed cues, lost track of where we were in the songs and stepped all over each other. To add insult to injury, the other bands on the bill were ringers, house bands from various companies, some of who were spectacularly tight and well-rehearsed.
The CEDIA gig from humiliating hell. Your author is on the left on guitar and Ron Goldberg is on the right on keyboards. Photo courtesy of Ron Goldberg.
When we were done the judges held up their scores. We got mostly zeroes, and the highest score was a four. Having been in a number of top-notch bands, I was simultaneously upset and fuming. It didn’t help that Henry Juszkiewicz, the then-president of Gibson guitars, was there, and after our set he told me, “maybe if you’d played a Gibson you would have scored higher!”
Red Bull had a booth at the party. I’d never had a Red Bull before. They were serving Red Bull and vodka cocktails and after our set I was sure in the mood for one. And another. And another. And another…
I got back to my room and couldn’t sleep. I didn’t find out until later that Red Bull has a high caffeine content. So I was drunk, wired, and pissed off…and it was the night before the first day of the show. I had to work the Marantz booth the next morning. Now I am usually the consummate professional at trade shows, but I didn’t realize what a number those Red Bull and vodka drinks would do on me. I was absolutely trashed at the booth. And I had to talk to a crush of press people asking for chapter and verse on Marantz’s new products while suffering one of the worst hangovers I’ve ever had. The night before was a bummer, and the day after was agony. I’ve never done anything that dumb since in my playing career. Or played in another battle of the bands.
I could write a book just on equipment failures and instrument malfunctions. No matter how well-prepared you are or how good your gear is, stuff will happen. Strings break. If you’re lucky, they won’t break and jab you in the hand or arm. Reeds break. If you’re lucky, it won’t happen in the middle of your big solo. It’s very easy to trip over a cord in the heat of performance, sometimes pulling the cord out of your rig and cutting out the sound, or sometimes worse, like pulling your tube amp head off its speaker cabinet and having it come crashing to the ground. And if you keep stepping on those cords, they will break. Acoustic/electric guitars require an internal battery in order to function. It’s almost comically easy to forget to change them, and of course the bigger and more important the show, the more likely it is that you'll forget to change the battery and it will crap out.
My nephew is a professional guitarist who had a gig with an up and coming Nashville singer. During a show, his in-ear monitors weren't working. Since there were no stage monitors, he literally could not hear his guitar or what he was playing. He had to rely on knowing where to put his fingers and muscle memory and what settings to use for his guitar and gear. He had no idea what he sounded like but was enough of a pro to get through a very tense gig.
Google “Gibson headstock break.”
Sometimes in the heat of playing, you might swing your guitar...and hit something, maybe a fellow band member. Getting whacked with a long bass neck is painful and may do more damage to you than the bass. And cymbals aren't the only instruments that crash. If you don't use a locking strap mechanism, don't say I didn't warn you. Once I was listening to an acoustic guitarist at a local bar, and his strap popped off in the middle of a song. The guitar fell down and smashed onto a tile floor. That was the end of that performance.
Our band the Lines was the warm-up band for Duran Duran at their first-ever U.S. show, at the glamorously named Spit in Levittown, New York on September 16, 1981. (Yes, I did in fact play a gig with Duran Duran. In fact, our band played two gigs with Duran Duran, a fact that I’d forgotten until a band mate recently reminded me of it.) A crucial element of their sound was a sequencer, a synthesizer that plays, well, sequences of notes in precise fashion to get that driving, metronomic beat. Before the show the sequencer broke. The guys took it in stride, even though it was a crucial show. And you know what? They were professional enough to soldier on, not let it get to them, and play a great gig in what could have been a soul-crushing moment. They rocked, sequencer or not.
Another gig I’d forgotten about, as related by Vin Parry of the Lines (hmmm, I wonder why I’ve forgotten some of these gone-awry gigs?): one time the Lines were playing at Kenny’s Castaways in Greenwich Village, on a double bill with the Smithereens. The bands played two alternating sets. The stage was small, and there was a hole in the middle of it, covered by a carpet, so you had to try to avoid stepping into the unseen depression in the middle of the stage and not lose your balance. The only way to find out about the hole was to step on it, and lose your balance. (Naturally I was the one who stepped in it and almost fell over.) There was only one electrical outlet – for the entire band. The club was packed. Midway through the first set one of our band members was dancing – and accidentally pulled the plug, shutting down the entire band right when I was about to go into a big guitar solo. Yeah, you might say it ruined the moment. And then it happened again during the second set, on the exact same song, at the exact same time.
The Smithereens played their set flawlessly.
Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/kolyaeg.
