Worst gig you've ever done

[[ xerocreep ]]

wow Scot, that sounds rough...

damn those ex's....










so yeah, what about that transvestite

[emdot_ambient]

Summer, 1989. I'm playing keyboards in a 3-piece all-originals synth-pop band. Our line up was 1 singer/keyboardist, me on keys and backup vocal (as if), a guitarist and a shitty drum machine. Our sound man, a really great engineer from Baltimore who loved our stuff and ran the desk at a B'more nightclub that booked fairly big acts, tells us about this battle of the bands . . . so go, sure, why not.

What he failed to notice was that every other band playing in it was HEAVY METAL.

Sounds bad but actually we played first and everyone just ignored us and drank beer at this pavilion while we entertained the sound man.

What really made it stand out as a suck ass show for use (apart from no audience) was the fact that the stage was actually a huge metal garage-like structure with a bare concrete floor.

M'kay? A big metal box with a concrete floor! Our stage monitors turned the thing into the best damned echo chamber you ever heard . . . except for the fact that the echoes were not sync'd to host, if you get my drift.

So we pounded out our peppy synth bit crap as best we could with no audience and no clear sense of what was in or out of time.

Strange thing is our sound man swore up and down it was the best we had ever sounded!

[diverdee]

Wasn't it Creme Brulee?

Yeah Creme Brulee - classic, gonna have to wath them all again.

My ex showed up

that's always a bad sign, my first ever gig (that got cancelled by the mgmt (mainly due to masses of our mates smoking shit & dropping acid - the manager it turned out was a special constable, unbeknownst to me who's building up a spliff backstage), nearly caused a riot - had to sneak us out the backdoor with the synths & samplers, poor enzo nearly beefing over the potential for his gear getting smashed up) - anyway that one my ex & my girlie of the moment showed up & were sat next to each other. that un-nerve me somewhat, un-nerved my gitlie of the moment too, never really saw her much after that.

[crazed one]

I've played a couple bad ones.

One night our drummer must have been too stoned and he kept forgetting where he was at in the songs or even which song he was playing! f**k I hate that!

We played an out at a country show with bands from LA and SF, we went on second to last which was about 11:30. The problem was that we had way too much time to hang out before we played- which means we were pounding the liquor. So I knock over my mic stand in the first 10 seconds like a drunk ass, our bass player kept on pulling his cord out of his amp without realizing it ( who does that? ) and our vocalist went crazy the night before punching himself in the face and screaming his lungs out at his girlfriend- so his voice was completely shot not to mention that he looked like "raging bull" with his black eyes.

We sucked so bad and our friends were embarrassed for us too. I immediately finished a 5th of Crown Royal.

[clueless]

the worst gig i ever played was...

...no, it's too painful to recount...

suffice to say, it was a make or break gig. It went along the lines of Spinal Tap's airforce base gig. We broke...

/

http://www.clueless.uk.com/Heeey.mp3

[Vegetarian]

Weeeell, not necessarily the worst ever, but my band had a gig on the weekend once, naturally our guitarist/singer had arranged for us to rehearse for it the same day, and told everyone the day before we'd gotten another gig at one of his friend's parties. We had a problem, though - neither of our band's percussionists could show up when we needed them to, and we desperately needed a drummer (our frontman had refused to perform an acoustic set). Well, that's stressful enough ... We started calling other drummers we knew, and for some reason one of the rhythm guitarist's friend's younger brother seemed like a good shot. Problem being, he wasn't the cute, year or two younger brother I was expecting ... He was cute, but about 10 He came around, and we quickly discovered his standard wasn't even comparable to the other drummers. We had to tell the little guy that the gig "was cancelled" to avoid upsetting him We were now thinking of hiring a drum machine ...
At the last minute, we managed to get a drummer friend of one of my school buddies to come along, and thankfully, he saved the day I also managed to get myself smashed, but unfortunately not fall into any sort of company of any desireable kind or otherwise, but it turned out to be a good evening after all that stress

The really bad one was when I blew my bass amp's head unit (protip: find out how loud everyone else is beforehand and if they're too loud for you plug into a PA. Don't turn up every knob and slider on your amp!) and ended up having to use one of the wedge monitors instead

then there's the old "trainwrecks galore" dj set, but I don't consider that a real gig, just kinda irritating (:

[TexasMusicForge]

Not that I'm proud of being able to win a contest for crappiest gig, but...

Lincoln, Nebraska (a dirtbag of a town) at a trash country bar with the entire band down with a bad case of flu and running dangerously high fevers of 104 Farenheit. The bouncer at the club extorted my last $50 when we were setting up gear, saying it would keep our stuff from getting busted up in the bar fights. "How often do fights break out?" I asked. "As often as they need to" was the reply.

We spent our time there dodging shot glasses and lit cigarettes we could only see as they came arcing in past the stage lights with a *very* hostile crowd hollering for "Loretta Lynn" which we played none of, even when we were all healthy.

We must have looked pretty pathetic because the bouncer warned us at the end of the gig that the manager was driving a Cadillac and if I hurried to the back parking lot, I could catch him before he took off without paying us. The drummer and I grabbed a tire iron and caught ol' Frank just as he was getting into his car. "Boys, there's no need to be unpleasant - I just overlooked paying you." Uh huh.

This all-time worst gig came immediately after the second all-time worst gig (a whole 'nother saga), which was enough to scupper the band and the rest of the tour.

At least we didn't have to dodge a crazed gunman stalking us like happened in Wisconsin, or get beat up like the last gig in Detroit, or get my gear ripped off like that one gig in New Orleans or....or....damn, I think I've spent too many years doing road gigs...

Tio Ed
Austin, TX

[Spaceman Sounds]

I did a gig at the Pleasure Rooms near Bagleys Nightclub in London once, and the promoter said half way through that he had no money to pay us. But he handed me this big bag full of pills!

I never really touch the stuff, so I ended up handing them all out to the crowd that were allready all pilled up. I certainly didn't want them. The gig went down a storm funnily enough.

[Derek up North]

I did a gig at the Pleasure Rooms near Bagleys Nightclub in London once, and the promoter said half way through that he had no money to pay us. But he handed me this big bag full of pills!

I never really touch the stuff, so I ended up handing them all out to the crowd that were allready all pilled up. I certainly didn't want them. The gig went down a storm funnily enough.

Smart move - I bet they were laxatives

Regards,

Derek.

[wolf_of_badenoch]

<snip>
so yeah, what about that transvestite

Yeah, c'mon Scot, you can't leave us dangling with that transvestite comment like that.

[softegg]

4 years ago with my band proxivision in the Künstlerhaus passage (Open air) in Vienna. We played at the after-party of some independent movie festival. We were supposed to be opening act for an other band from the Tschech Republic ( or was it Slowakia (?)). They were supposed to bring their bass amp + PA, but were arrested at the austrian border for drug posession. So we had to play using a crappy stereo for PA ( with bass directly routed into the PA. 10 minutes after we began it started to rain, and most of our equipment was flooded. ( some of it actually survived ).

[Ian B]

'EDIT'
Oop's I thought this was about the worst gig you've ever been to Must learn to read before I type and submit.

[TexasMusicForge]

Since it seems like mostly Euro musicians posting on this thread, just one more true to life story about Gigging in America y'all might find amusing.

The band pulls into Bemidji, Minnesota (a town so remote y'all in Europe haven't got anything like it). There is an Indian reservation nearby for a band of the Chippewa tribe. The bar we're playing at (The Blue Ox lounge on the second floor over the Trailways Bus Station) is the hangout for folks from the Reservation to come into town to drink. As we're loading in, there's a huge ruckus that starts between the Chippewa guys and a bunch of the cowboys who work for the rodeo that played in town the previous night. After this modern Cowboys and Indians dustup settles down, we're playing our first night there when I see my wife (who traveled with the band) being slung over the shoulder of an immense Chippewa who then headed for the door. I dropped my guitar in mid-song and managed to get between him and the exit before the club manager got there and eventually recovered my wife. The rest of the two week stay there, I put my wife behind a table *on* stage with the band since I couldn't leave her in the hotel room because of all the drug dealers from the Res meeting their suppliers in the hotel's maze of corridors and the resulting fights, gunshots and squealing tires. Oh well, at least the temperature was always below 0 degrees F and there was nothing to do in town. By the way, this is the gig we had immediately prior to the gig in Nebraska described above (and took us 16 hours of driving to get between the two). To make matters worse, I'd married my wife immediately prior to this road trip and this was all the honeymoon we could afford. Small wonder neither the band or the wife lasted long afterwards.

Tio Ed
Austin, Texas
Land O' 10,000 Guitar Players With Day Jobs

[MickGael]

Musical Nadir? So Many Choices:

http://www.weleftbuffalo.com/index.php/ ... ny_choices

[BONES]

The second gig I ever did, in June 1985. The first one went off without a hitch. A month later I was booked to play a biggish hotel in Townsville and the set-up and everything went smoothly enough. About an hour before I was due to go on, these 16 year-old twins that I knew from working at the local radio station volunteered to dance on stage whilst I was playing. It sounded like a really good idea at the time as they were sexy and under-age plus I had to play two keyboard parts and sing at the same time in those days so it was even more boring to watch than it is today.
The problem was that, being under-age girls, they could get really, really drunk in an hour. During the third song of my set one of them careened into my second keyboard stand, the one with the 303's that were synced to the 707 and playing the Axxe and the SH-101, and brought the whole thing toppling over. The gig came to a grinding halt and it took me 20 minutes to get it up and running again. If I hadn't already been booked for another show the next night, I may well have never performed live again, making the world a better place, I'm sure.