Your 'Not So Favorite' Gig Disasters...

[trimph1]

I'll start with my WTF moment....

First set.....threw guitar into speaker bin

Second set....skewered headstock of same guitar into my 4x12 cab.....

[cryophonik]

Hmmmm....I slipped on wet grass while playing frisbee on a slippery hillside just before our slot at a reggae festival ca. 1992. Had to play the show with a gruesomely bent, broken, and black and blue big toe. Longest.gig.ever.

[lachrimae]

Left middle finger got sucked in-between a grinder wheel and tool rest the morning of a show.
Fortunately only the fleshy end was ripped away (no bone). Wrapped the digit in some hefty gauze and played the show later that night whilst flipping off the audience.
Couldn't manage anything but pentatonic scales and power chords but made it through :p.

Now that I think of it, I seem to have a love/hate relationship with my left hand, having since broken metacarpal #5 and also that same middle finger (still broken but plays somewhat ok).

[bluedad]

Ten yrs ago, gigging using vst's for instruments didn't notice my laptop had come unplugged and the battery died mid-song. Luckily I also had a Motif to switch to.

[vurt]

hearing the words "if he keeps this up much longer im gonna glass the c**t" during a quiet moment.
that was quite scary as i had about another half hour to go

[Bronto Scorpio]

hearing the words "if he keeps this up much longer im gonna glass the c**t" during a quiet moment.
that was quite scary as i had about another half hour to go

[GaryG]

hearing the words "if he keeps this up much longer im gonna glass the c**t" during a quiet moment.

Church gigs are the worst...

Left middle finger got sucked in-between a grinder wheel and tool rest the morning of a show.
Fortunately only the fleshy end was ripped away (no bone).

And there is your definition of True Grit my friends. <salutes>

[werp]

Spent three hours programming a lighting desk for a world premiere show later that day. Saved the last scene, relaxed, grabbed my by now cold coffee and dropped it on top of the console, a Rank Strand prototype.
80,000 watt flash of light on stage and then darkness....
Spent a mad three hours trying to find a board that would talk to our system with a nervous producer contemplating two deaths. Mine then hers.
I had 10 minutes before FOH opened to program basic washes into a pin matrix.
Ran the show manually, making it up as I went along.
Put me off coffee for minutes did that.

[bsork]

This is far from the worst gig I have ever made, but anyway..:

Sometime in the late '80s doing a gig with a Commodore SX64 (a luggable version of the 64 w/colour monitor) running Steinberg Pro16 sequencer controlling a number of MIDI boxes. Not many was doing that sort of thing live at the time without a hardware sequencer of some sort.

All had went well until in the middle of the last song, when the thing happened that almost gave the sound engineer and the audience a heart attack, but was all too familiar for us from rehearsals... The machine, program and/or interface freaked out and spitted out as many NoteOns as possible on every MIDI channel.

Thankfully, it didn't take much to stop the noise attack - I think we just hit enter on the SX64 keyboard.

[foosnark]

Let's see:

HIgh school jazz ensemble had a gig on short notice. Instead of the school's Rhodes I had to bring my own Korg DS-8. I didn't have a stand, so I used some of those flimsy plastic storage shelves which wobbled all over the place and just barely avoided breaking. I also had grabbed a bad cable, and the whole time I was cutting in and out with loud pops and snaps.

I never had any really bad taiko performances, but we've had small stupid things happen:

-- my first show, I tied my obi wrong and my pants were too loose and I nearly flashed everyone. It was a conference for female Christian ministers.

-- at another gig, our odaiko player for the first song in a set -- facing toward the drum, away from the MC and audience -- managed to start playing before the MC was done introducing us and while the rest of us were standing at rest.

-- playing in a casino for Chinese New Year, we had to go through this ridiculous security screening and hand over our driver licenses while we were there, just because we used a service entrance to load up the drums. Unfortunately one of our performers was 16. After several minutes of arguing, they decided she could go around the outside of the building to the main entrance and was okay as long as she didn't go backstage. And then during our performance, somebody set off these obnoxious electronic firecracker strings that we hadn't even realized were all around us. It startled one drummer so much he threw a bachi out into the crowd.

[robogone]

Probably the pub gig where a guy starting throwing things at me and when I took my bass off and turned around to lean it against the amp, he had got up and drop kicked me in the back of the head. I was unconscious for a couple of minutes, but a brief mini-riot had ensued and pretty much brought everything to a close for the evening.

[jancivil]

back in 1986, for a show at the Green Room at the old MOMA in SF, I had a sort of bottom layer of the arrangement for the whole concert done on computer, the beige MacIntosh that ran off of a floppy. Somebody there to shoot video (it was a whole multi-media thing) unplugged something, it seems like it was just a midi cable. which caused mystery corruption of the files - I believe this was because the OS and the music data was on this floppy - so the computer music was not reliable. I had to abandon it after the first piece, we improvised. Actually the show came off a great hit but in terms of the recording and the whole it would have been better with that music. I worked for 3 weeks day and night on that computer score. Of course this was proof for some that you shouldn't taint music with that kind of technology. Could have been avoided by being more stern with those idiots with cameras. Very prestigious room, we had to have half a million dollars insurance to rent it, of course I forged that. THAT could have been the real disaster, particularly as we provided LSD for the audience (in vats of punch) which was anyone that wanted in.

I had one show where my old school chum and I imbibed a fifth and a quart of mescal between us where I puked my guts out onstage, but I did keep on making some form of noise on the guitar, hammering it while it fed back. Probably the highlight of the show. Wasn't my gig, I was charged with filling in for a drummer who simply could not manage 6/8 time on one thing, even though I hadn't really played drums for years and years; it was a really crazy thing one of the above visual people threw together.

[Ja.x]

About two years ago, my laptop started to fail in the sound check: some "funny noises" and then silence. After a restart is seemed OK, until it failed again in the middle of the gig (fortunately not many people, mainly friends). Restarted again (audience waiting) and the rest of the gig was fine. Next day morning it did not restart and died for good.

[robogone]

No my gig, but a theater show I worked on in around 90 or 91. The keyboard player had some very early sampling technology that allowed him to transpose to the keys that each performer wanted to sing in, so he played everything in keys that he knew well. One of the musicians near him kicked the plug out of his keyboard and it reset. He didn't realize until he started playing that he was playing in the *actual* key rather than the transposed one and hoped that the guy could sing in the new key. Unfortunately, the singer pitched everything upwards rather than downwards which meant that he was horribly flat on a good proportion of the notes as he was above the top of his range.

Apparently it took about 2 minutes for the keyboard to load programming from a floppy, so the keyboard player went through another couple of songs in the wrong key before he got enough of a break to load.

Lesson learned by the show's producers - employ a keyboard player who can play the black notes.

[Aloysius]

Got Tickets to see Henry Rollins with my brother.

Before the show, we had a drink and another, and another ... When we arrived at the concert, we pushed our way through the crowd until we were standing right in the front of the stage.

Just then ... Henry turned to the crowd and said ... thank you and good night.

Yeah ... we missed the show.