They call playing in a rock band a glamor profession, but believe me, there are times when it isn’t. As I mentioned in Part One (Issue 217), nothing equals the excitement of playing a great gig – and few things feel as soul-crushing as playing a bad one. You can and should plan for any eventuality, but sometimes even the most experienced pros will have a gig go horribly wrong. Every musician who has been around can tell many tales. Here are a few more.
I should have known early on that playing in a rock band would be a somewhat, er rocky, career path. In Hauppauge High School in the 1970s the local musicians used to play at a bar called Pepper’s Pub. One night a bunch of us got together for their regular jam night. Some of us had played together before, some hadn’t. Since it wasn’t a “real” gig and we were young and stupid, most if not all of us were in various stages of intoxication on various forms of alcohol, combustibles and who knows what else. These were the days when you’d go to a concert and the men’s room would be a bazaar of dealers hawking questionable unknown varieties of drugs, some of which could get you extremely high, as if drinking four beers before going onstage wasn’t enough.
The night started off well enough as we played through some standard rock songs of the day. But as time went on and everyone got more and more loopy and we ran out of songs that everyone knew, the music got more and more weird. In fact, every song turned into some strange psychedelic extended jam, whether warranted or not. I could hold my beer pretty well back then, but I’d be lying if I said I was anything but loaded.
We decided to play a Neil Young song. I’m always up for a song where I can play a 10-minute guitar solo. At some point during the song, someone thought it would be a good idea to play a drum solo. Whaaa? (I took the opportunity to walk off the stage and go to the bathroom. I’ve never been good at holding it in.
When I got back on the drummer looked at me for a cue to end his solo. I picked up my guitar – and realized I had forgotten what song we were playing.
I whispered to one of the players. “What song are we playing?”
He gave me a blank look and answered, “I don’t know!”
He then yelled out to the rest of the guys, “What song are we playing?”
No one in the band could remember the song. The drummer futzed around aimlessly on his kit.
In desperation I yelled out to the audience, “WHAT SONG ARE WE PLAYING?”
Someone at one of the tables yelled back, “SOUTHERN MAN!”
The drummer stopped his putzing around, counted off, and we all came shakily back into the verse. Why someone thought it would be a good idea to play a drum solo during “Southern Man” I’ll never know. The audience was bewildered. We didn’t get a lot of applause. We never played there again.
Well, sh*t like that happened in those days…Iggy Pop falling off the stage twice at the Academy of Music in New York on New Years Eve 1973, shows starting an hour or more late (rock bands never started on time back then), venues filled to way beyond capacity, underage drinking, and a level of substance abuse on the part of both the band and the audience that was at times quite frankly scary and dangerous, not to mention resulting in some terrible performances.
Speaking of scary…in the 1980s our band the Lines had achieved a decent amount of success on Long Island and upstate New York, even playing gigs in Rhode Island, Boston and elsewhere in the region. I once shared a dressing room with Madonna at a club in Manhattan. She was in a band called the Millionaires before she got famous. We both got to see each other in our underwear as we changed for the gig. I think I was the one more impressed. Anyway, at a gig at the club Spit in Levittown, Long Island, the Lines were on a bill with Robin Lane & the Chartbusters. It was one of the first times our band was on the bill with a national name act, and we were super-stoked. We took the stage and started playing like our lives depended on it.
Suddenly, the sound started going haywire. The monitors dropped in volume to the point where we were having trouble hearing ourselves. The house volume dropped drastically. The bass disappeared. The sound became terrible. We were disconcerted and started to stumble.
Our sound man was furious. He stormed up to Robin Lane’s sound man – and pulled out a gun.
He aimed it at the guy’s head.
He yelled something to the effect of, “Quit f*cking around with our sound!” Needless to say, Robin Lane’s sound man stopped sabotaging our mix.
Decades later, our drummer corresponded with Robin Lane on Facebook and asked her if she remembered the incident. Her reply was something like, “Yeah, that sounds like something our manager would do.” Her people did not want us, or any warm up band, upstaging her.
Robin Lane & the Chartbusters released three albums on Warner Bros. Their most popular song was “When Things Go Wrong.”
The Lines once did a gig with the Go-Go’s at a disco-turned-New Wave venue, Club 2001 in East Islip, NY (not the 2001 Odyssey Disco in Brooklyn where the dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever were filmed). Well, pretty much every band the Lines had been on a bill with had been really nice to us, including acts like the Blasters, Paul Weller, the Ramones, Duran Duran, the Delta 5, the Bush Tetras, Our Daughter’s Wedding, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, and other New Wave acts.
But the Go-Go’s’ management went out of their way to be as rude and nasty to us as possible. They only gave us a few minutes for a sound check. The Go-Go’s’ goons would not let us get anywhere near the band (contrast that with me playing pinball for hours with Dave Alvin at the Channel in Boston). Their dressing room was near ours, but in order for us to get from our dressing room to the stage we had to walk all around the back of the club, since the Go-Go’s’ dressing room was in the way. The band's people treated us with contempt. I was in a foul mood, especially since I had really been looking forward to playing with a band I loved. Well, used to love.
During the gig I decided to wear sunglasses to look cool. Bad idea. I was inexperienced and didn’t realize that the combination of dimmed vision and stage lights shining directly into my eyes would be blinding. Long story short, I stepped to close to the edge of the stage – and fell off. I think it was at least a three- or four-foot drop. My left arm and back and the neck of my Telecaster slammed against a speaker (or some other immovable object) at the side of the stage. Miraculously, I somehow landed on my feet, and was not seriously hurt, though bruised and banged up pretty good. Being a scuffling musician, I was more concerned about my guitar than the possibility of internal injuries.
Not your editor's best look (OK, it was the 1980s), and those sunglasses were tailor-made for falling off the stage.
When the Go-Go’s went on you can imagine I was in no mood to like them. I thought they weren’t very good anyway, except for the drummer. Maybe the fact that I was infuriated had something to do with it. Maybe they’ve gotten better since then, or gotten better management. I wouldn’t know.
Many of us musicians of a certain age got our gig chops together in the 1970s and 1980s. Here’s a story from Alex Pepiak of Lost Art, who play “original music for modern times”:
“Let me take you back to the early 1980s when we decided to write our own music in a New Wave style and join the ranks of the huge original music scene in Philadelphia.
South Street was the place to be, as the song said, ‘where all the hippest meet.’ We played some of the minor clubs there but JC Dobbs was the club to crack. We spent countless afternoons and evenings hanging out, delivering demo tapes and talking up our band. Finally, they gave us a shot, on a Monday night.
Usually Monday nights were occupied by local legend Kenn Kweder doing his solo act…so the first night we were booked we got a call we were bumped. We rescheduled and bumped again. And again. Finally a Monday came around where we were on for the night.
Our bass player was 17 and going out with a 22 year old go go dancer. He was nowhere to be found. Finally we drove to his house to find out his girlfriend broke up with him. So what do you do? Drop acid and drink a bottle of Jack Daniels. We poured him into the car.
We got to the club set up and realized the bass player couldn’t play. He could barely stand, so we hung his bass on him and I pulled the cable half way out of his Ampeg SVT [amplifier] so it made no sound. He never knew the difference.
Our friends showed up, and some of the bar regulars, and we started to play. Back then a buzz would happen on the street, and the word got out that Dobbs was the place to be, and the place filled up.
We took a break and extra bartenders were called in and they opened the upstairs bar. We could do no wrong. At the end of the second set it seemed like a Friday, with the place packed and both customers and management loving our band.
The third set went off without a hitch. To cover for the bass player, the lead singer played some rhythm [guitar] and I laid in heavy on the bass parts on guitar, unless I had to play a solo for that song.
At the end of the night the manager came to me handed me an extra $100 and told me he wanted to work us into regular rotation starting on Thursday, then working us into Friday and Saturday nights. Our prayers were answered. We had broken into the major club scene in Philadelphia!
We started to pack our gear, and the drummer started to tear down amps, cables and gear – and mistakenly took the house mics and put them in our bags. The house sound man told the manager, who then, pissed off, demanded his mics back, swearing we would never play his bar again or [anywhere else on] South Street. The drummer and I explained that it was a mistake. I even took the money he paid us out of my pocket and handed it back to him and said, ‘look, take your money back; this is all a mistake. I don’t want your money if you think we stole from you.’ He said to keep the money because we earned it, but that he would never hire us again.
I told the drummer to tear down his kit while I tried to figure out what to do. By this time the way underage and still tripping bass player was angry. He took the SVT cabinet and wheeled it off the 4-foot stage. It crashed to the ground with a thunderous noise. I grabbed the drummer and said, ‘he’s your friend, get him out of here!’
An Ampeg SVT Classic bass amp. Imagine one of these falling off a stage. The cabinet stands four feet tall and weighs about 165 pounds. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Steen Elm.
I packed up and loaded up my car and then heard a window smashing and an alarm going off. I ran over to find the bass player holding his hand with blood gushing everywhere. He had smashed it through the window.
I left with my gear and one of the other guitarists, and the drummer and lead singer were trying to control the bleeding. As I heard sirens and lights flashing I pulled away.
We never got another gig there although we begged and pleaded and cried. We did play other clubs on South Street but never worked into the big time.”
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One of the most disheartening things for a band or musician is to play to a dead room. When there’s no one in the place, it’s hard to be anything but bummed out. And here’s a harsh reality for all you aspiring musicians out there – the first time you play a local place, unless it has a built-in crowd, most of your friends will come. The second time, maybe half of them will come. The third time, a handful will come. The fourth time, almost no one will come, like the time we played at a local dive bar last year and at one point, the only people in the place were us and the bartender. Under such circumstances, the only one who will be unhappier than the band will be the bar owner.
Well, sometimes it’s not your fault. The band I play in had a gig at a local folk music series on a multiple-band bill. Usually they’d get a good crowd, but on this date there was an intense storm with torrential rain. The only people who showed up were the musicians, the people working the door and I think I counted three paying customers. On top of that, our band was playing in an all-acoustic instrument configuration, something we didn’t normally do, and a song that we hadn’t rehearsed enough to be comfortable with. Let’s just say it wasn’t our best performance.
Imagine playing to a "crowd" like this? Here's what the Memory Motel in Montauk, New York looked like on Sunday, May 29, 2024 at about 12:45 p.m. We were not thrilled. Luckily, the place filled up before our 1:00 starting time.
Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as the time I was in college playing at some bar and the owner asked us to turn down low enough so that the handful of patrons could hear Ronald Reagan’s speech on TV. Or the time with another band when we played at Canno’s Swiss Tavern in Lynbrook, NY and after the first set the owners asked us to stop because he thought the patrons would enjoy the jukebox more than the music we were playing. (And yes, places like this were as unglamorous as their names.)
Younger bands with limited stage experience can be especially prone to onstage mishaps. Here's a bummer gig experience from my nephew Dylan Coates, who currently plays in the band 80 Proof Country (@80proofcountry on Instagram):
“With over 15 years of gigging experience, I’ve collected my fair share of stories: gear malfunctions, drunken harmonica players crashing the stage, and even a cat eating a snake behind the stage at an outdoor venue in the woods. But one moment stands out as the most cringe of them all.
It was early in my first band’s playing days, during a gig at a dive bar. The night started off strong and the crowd was warming up and getting into the music. Then, mid-song, our guitarist’s sound cut out completely. As soon as the song ended, he dove down to his massive pedalboard, frantically attempting to troubleshoot the issue. Meanwhile, a confused silence began to settle over the room. Our singer, clearly feeling the pressure, decided he needed to fill the dead air. Unfortunately, instead of offering a simple, ‘We’re having a quick technical issue,” he launched into an impromptu stand-up comedy routine that consisted almost entirely of painfully bad Dad jokes.
One by one, people started filtering out of the room, each joke seemingly acting as a repellent. I could see the desperation rising on the guitarist’s face as he fiddled with cables. Finally, he looked up at me from the floor and shouted, ‘Start playing a bass solo now!’ I took the cue and jumped into an improvised solo, trying to salvage what was quickly turning into a trainwreck.
Our guitarist eventually gave up on trying to solve the issue and decided to play the rest of the gig without his pedalboard, which left our sound feeling much more lackluster.
The next day, while unpacking his gear, he discovered that one of his patch cables had been knocked loose, the result of our singer accidentally bumping into his pedalboard earlier in the set. Between the technical failure and the cringe-worthy comedy routine, it was a night we'd all rather forget, but one I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life.”
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A couple of years ago the band I'm in played at a big outdoor concert series with multiple performers. We arrived early to do our sound check. Except we were informed there would be no sound check. The sound company was running late. I asked if I could at least check out the house amp I would be playing through. I was told I could not, but not to worry because everything would be fine. After cooling our heels for hours, we were rushed onto the stage (the old wait-and-hurry-up). I tried the amp – a model I was unfamiliar with – and could not get a sound, or even get the pilot light to light up. The sound person and I started screwing around with the amp. I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses so I couldn’t see the controls. Finally, I managed to get a horrible distorted sound out of it.
I would have liked to have figured out what was happening, except the MC was announcing us. We had no choice but to start playing. The singer and keyboard player could not hear themselves in the monitors. I tried to get some kind of decent sound out of the amp by turning my guitar volume down – and it was a song that required a clean solo guitar intro. I was rattled – not something that usually happens to me on stage – so I flubbed the intro. The rest of the band was thrown off also, to the point where the singer came in wrong on a verse and the rest of us were equally off-cue. What should have been a total rush of a gig in front of something like a thousand people turned into a bitter disappointment. As we were leaving the stage one band member said, “That was horrible!” Another one looked at me and remarked, “Well there’s a story for your article!”
If there was an after party, we did not stick around for it.
This tale has a happy ending, though. Some months later we played another concert in the series. We were determined to get back on the horse after falling off. That night, we did. We killed it. A friend told me later that I should have moved around more on stage. I told him I didn't because I was concentrating with an iron will to deliver a good performance. It was one of the best performances of our lives.
The lesson: although most of the time, playing in a band will be fun and inspiring, along the journey you will encounter gigs from hell. No matter how good a musician you are, it happens, just like a Major League pitcher will sometimes load the bases and walk in the winning run. It’s just part of becoming a good musician.
Header image courtesy of Unsplash.com/Luke Porter.
