your most embarrassing music moments

[natty fred]

hi, after reading the "music screw-ups" thread, I was wondering if anybody here would like to share any of those "arrrghhh, I wish the stage / ground would just open up and swallow me now!" moments thay have personally experiance / caused. I have a few... but I think I would like to here a few of yours just to guage how bad mine really are :D peace, natty [img]http://www.theunholytrinity.org/cracks_smileys/contrib/fk/butterfly.gif[/img] p.s. wohoo, I actually have a sat nite at home all by myself.......I should probably be working on something, but I haven't had a bit of a hang with you guys for a while, rickenbokker(sp?) doesn't know what he's missing, I actually turned down a dinner party to be here :D

[x factor music]

a coupla years ago i was playing a club with a very shallow stage. our drummer had a gibralter rack system that reached right up to the lip of the stage. after a lot of freaking booze, i jumped up on the lip of the stage in front of the drum rack, facing the drummer to sing some stupid lyric to him, and lost my balance on the tiny thimble of stage there...grabbed the drum rack to catch my balance and the front toms lifted up off the ground. so rather than bring the whole drum kit with me, i let go and fell off the stage on to the dance floor, where i managed a very convincing backwards sumersault across the dancefloor and lept back up facing the audience. didn't fool anyone...it sucked. another embarassing time was when i played a club in downtown greenville sc where the band played on a veranda at street level, and the audience was down below in a little cafe type place. somehow the zipper on my pants broke, and for some reason, i thought the best way to address the problem was just to be up front about it. so i pulled my shirt out through my zipper and performed the rest of the show. both terrible embarassments completely massaged by lots of sweet, soothing alcohol.

[x factor music]

double post. now how the flip did that happen?

[surfjunkie]

i'm sure we'll hear some good ones. here's the best i've got: i was playing electric bass with a group some time ago, and the D string broke towards the end of the night. it broke at the bridge but the core was intact, so it sort of flopped down onto the G string. it was in the middle of a song and i had to get it out of the way, so i grabbed it with my right hand and tried to break & remove it. it didn't work. instead i got a nice cut across the first joint of my ring finger. the outer part of the roundwound string broke further, and left 7 or 8 small metal crescents in the wound. i wasn't bleeding that much, but there were some nice red drips on the bass and my white towel was not just white anymore. after the gig, the other guys in the band went to the local pub, and i stayed at our rehearsal place and [i]plucked the pieces of metal out of my own finger with a paring knife.[/i] owee! i was not plastered, but drunk enough to not think that it might be a bad idea to perform minor surgery on myself. i think i was smoking a cigarette while i did it, too. :rolleyes: i must have done a good job, there's no scar!

[coolhouse]

One night several newfound friends came out to hear our band. These people were all killer players that I was fortunate enough to be gigging with at another club. They were all several notches above me in ability and I was anxious to impress them on my home turf. We were playing a Bryan Adams tune that had a one measure,4 note,[b]solo[/b] piano transition to the lead. We're talking octaves. We're talking a freakin' [i]1/4 note triplet[/i] here. Suddenly,I get a bad case of thinkin-when-I-should-be-playin and hit the apex note a half-step flat. :eek: I've had my fly open on stage before. This was [i]way[/i] more embarrasing than that! later, Mike

[natty fred]

mmmm, done the big WRONG note once too, only once tho, a few years back we (my band Juju) at the biggest & best jazz club in town, it's quiet bit in blazin' funk tune, band played Dmin, me a C sharp! I swear I heard the whole audience go "woooooohhhhhhh", my ears still burn from that one........ blush, blush peace, natty [img]http://www.theunholytrinity.org/cracks_smileys/contrib/fk/butterfly.gif[/img]

[Magpel]

Other than countless musical mistakes, my only stage blunder occured when, during a fiesty set, I bent forward, expressively, as guitar players will do, and gashed my forehead open on the reed of our sax players clariney, which was on a stand. Lots of blood. Finished the set, and looked like a monster after it.

[Dak Lander]

Duh! I forgot the words to a song that I wrote in it's entirety. Boy did I feel stupid.

[Skip_dup1]

Magpel Just noticed you`re from New Paltz? that`s my alma mater. Me mum`s a perfesser at the college. Maybe I`ll catch ya there this summer, I do some open mics around town. I was with a jazz group in Taipei, these cats were from Philly and monsters technically, but they let me play on the more fusion oriented stuff cause it sounded great with guitar. one night I was there early and they said that a horn player they were going to feature didn`t show up, so maybe I could be the featured player. That sounded great, but what I didn`t know was that they played standards in the first part of the show, a lot of which I hadn`t played before. So the pianist makes a big announcement about `featuring the guitar sounds of skip T.` (well it sounds more impressive with a mic), and what do they do but play for the first song `Green Dolphin Street`, one of those jazz numbers with a different chord each measure. It was too late to jump out so I just sort of strummed the guitar and nodded my head, but with the volume down. I whispered to the pianist, `I don`t know this freakin song!` and he threw a copy of the lead sheet in front of me, which with my reading skills wasn`t much better. Then this German guy in the audience leaned over to me and said, `turn op your power-I can`t hear anyzing`. I managed to play a chord or two, but mostly it was excruciating.

[Tedster]

Green Dolphin Street is a cool tune.. Well, my most embarrassing moment (that I can remember)... Back in my metal days...we were gigging at a club in Canada. I was sorta James Hetfieldish in stature in those days, and we had another guitar guy who musta weighed 100 lbs soaking wet. So, this being the days of pomp and spandex (mind you, I never wore spandex, even when I could)...we had one part of the show where I'd crouch down during a solo, the other guy would hop on my shoulders and do a solo while we paraded like a totem pole around the stage. Then I'd crouch back down and he'd hop off. Well, one night all went well until he tried to hop off. I must have bent too far forward, as he went rolling head over heels over my shoulders and crashed into the monitor, sprawled all over the floor. I don't think we ever did that stunt again.

[thisDude]

In junior high, I played in a guitar ensemble at Walt Disney World in Orlando. The local news picked it up but went to their live feed too early. There was absolutely no one in the crowd and about 45 seconds (a lifetime)of dead air time before we realized the feed had started. In that 45 seconds the camera was only on me looking akward and gawky at 13. When we finally started playing "The Girl from Impanima", we were all about a whole note out of tune, then the news cut away. My mom's still got the tape, despite repeated attempts to destroy it.

[Magpel]

(sorry to take this thread OT but...) Skip, I used to teach English at the college, and I used to host the electric open mic at the Gryphon (through most of the 90s, until it became a sushi joint). Perhaps we know each other. My real name is John Burdick. Do I ring any bells?

[henryrobinett]

I was once playing a gig with my band. This night I had a bad cold or flu. Most often when I go to a gig sick within the first set I forget all about my sickness as the music takes over. This night the place was packed, wall to wall people. Wanting to purge my illness I really got into it. I took this one solo and put everything into it My head was rocking back and forth and I cranked the volume. I'd glance at the audience every now and again and I see them squinting at me, eye brows furrowed in intense scowls; really into it, I thought. After the solo was done there was applause and I went to wipe the sweat off my face only to find it covered with a thick coat of snot running all down my chin. No wonder they were scowling.

[BassGuy]

A few years ago, this town had two very active "open jam" scenes moving from venue to venue. I went a lot to one of the jam scenes and had a great time. A group of musicians who had never played before got up on stage and improvised music together. Someone would start some kind of groove or basic idea and everyone else would just try to run with it. It was a lot of fun and I do really well at that kind of improvising. So I decided to check out the other jam scene. Turns out that scene was about people who had played together for years, celebrating their love of their favorite songs by playing a tribute very close to the original recording. The only things improvised about it were who happened to be playing at the time, and in which order they played the standard solos for these standard songs. By the way, none of these were songs I had heard of, and they were by musicians I hadn't heard of either. They stuck to a pretty narrow music genre range which is outside my typical wanderings in the world of music. Nobody told me about those being the rules. I made a true idiot of myself and felt like crawling under a rock by the end of the night. I think I'm turning bright pink and maroon just thinking about it now.

[offramp]

About 1990. I'm in a band with a group of local studio musicians; lead singer's a spicy little number who was one of the first-call jingle singers in town, other guys are pretty top-notch cats. We get a gig at a local comedy club that had decided to try and add live music to the venue. We're opening for another local band of label-signed professional songwriters, and one of the local guys who made it into the Top 40 (Henry Lee Summer) was there, too, because he knew all the gang. So, I've got a bunch of pro-level players surrounding me. Halfway through our set, I started off one of the Motown standards we did...at half-tempo. And being the drummer, this is a very bad thing. To this day, I still have no idea what happened in my head. Boy, talk about looks from the other band members.

[Mats Olsson.]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by natty fred: [QB]the biggest & best jazz club in town[IMG] Would that be Ronny Scott's? Natty, have you ever tried the restaurant across the street from Ronnys', "Bröderna Olsson" (=Olsson Brothers) ? They got some mean dishes (all with garlic) as well as the largest selection of shots in the world. Their pub downstairs is also a different place. Was this OT? /Mats

[natty fred]

mmmm, some funny stories here, thanks guys, I think [b]henryrobinett’s [/b] snotty face gets my gold star.... had to deal with a similar experience to [b]skip[/b], tho it wasn't me doin' the fakin', I had this guitarist booked for a show with my jazz group, but come the day of the gig this guy hadn't made a single rehearsal or come round to mine to go thru the charts. (can never figure why people do this..) As a lot of the tunes were "challenging" to read and I knew this guitarist wasn't a strong reader, the rest of my band didn't want him to play (and neither did I) but it turned out that a) it was his birthday, and b) his mum had come a long way (3hrs) to hear him. There were tears (his not mine). Anyway as I'm not to good at doin' the bitch thing I relented and let him up. I was expecting all sorts of disasters, but this guy didn't even turn his amp on! :eek: Apparently way to scared to do that so he just mimed the whole thing and looked like he was really into the music. His mum thought he was wonderful and she had a great night out. bless..... Another time, somehow a guitarist and I were jammin’ out so much that we managed to collide in such a way the my (really long) dreads became so totally entangled with the head-stock of his guitar that we had to stop the song…… my worst two music blunders…. probably can’t be printed here to protect the innocent :D … peace, natty [img]http://www.theunholytrinity.org/cracks_smileys/contrib/fk/butterfly.gif[/img] ps: [quote] from mats.olsson@rockfile.se [b] Would that be Ronny Scott's? Natty, have you ever tried the restaurant across the street from Ronnys', "Bröderna Olsson" (=Olsson Brothers) ? They got some mean dishes (all with garlic) as well as the largest selection of shots in the world. Their pub downstairs is also a different place. [/b], [/quote]Mats, no it wasn’t Ronnies, that "incident" took place at the Basement in Sydney, Oz, & we were headlining on a Friday night…. But thanks for the tip on the restaurant, my friends and I eat out a lot so we are always on the lookout for cool new places… cheers

[Botch.]

A very amusing thread! I'm mainly a keyboardist but play a harmonica solo every now & then. Back in my country days I used to have a glass of ice water on stage, would swish out my mouth so the "hops & barley" wouldn't gum up the harp. Well, the guitarist quietly swapped my glass of water for a glass of vodka, and the whole band was waiting for my harp solo. I sprayed half the dancers and the rest of the band had to quit playing for about five minutes they were laughing so hard. Another gig was outside a small town bar in ND, I had played a few harp solos the previous set and was at the bar ordering a drink; I could hear someone tooting on a harp in a booth behind me. Suddenly I hear her yell, "OOOH HARMONICA PLAYER PLAY MY HARP!!" As I was turning around I could just see her Randy Johnson-like follow through, and an 85 mph fastharp about 18" from my forehead. I'm not the quickest guy in the world, blood everywhere; of course everyone in the bar saw it, ("Haha, that chick just nailed the nerd with a harmonica!!") She felt pretty bad, I was quite embarrassed. Finally, ANOTHER harp problem kinda like Henry Robinett's. I had a bad cold and was playing my first gig with a pretty hot cover band. My first harp note was a long, drawn-out, bending wail, requiring empty lungs at the start as its an inhale note. Well, I blew all the air out of my lungs vigorously and a large booger, with bungee cord attached, flies out the schnoz, snaps back, and lands on the top of my nose! Fortunately we didn't have good lights and most people didn't see it, but it was embarrassing! I'm starting to realize why I don't play harp so much anymore :D -------------- "The Bungee-Jumping Boogers" would be a great name for a rock band.

[Gtoledo3]

Yeh, Iron Butterfly was on a reunion tour, and I was a "guest" guitarist for a couple songs( I was just a lad), on the Florida tour. Back in those days, I exclusively used an ES-347( my fave)- and was used to playing w/ out any kind of tremolo setup. Man, I decided to use a Paul Reed Smith w the tremolo set up to float... and of course the damn d string broke and pulled my guitar a 1/4 step sharp! Ugh! Nasty.... I just had to kind of yank the notes in tune, but it sounded foul anyway.Further compounding the situation was the fact that I was playing through this Bassman reissue provided by the club ( thought there would be the typical twin, roland chorus, or marshall head/cab- all of which work fine on the spot if you have a good pre), which I personally think sounds like shit. I have no problem with actual Bassman's , or ones w the tube rectifier put back in though.

[strat0124]

the other night I was commenting to a bandmate about this hot chick's ass at the bar, only to find out FROM HIM...it was his wife!!!!!

[G. Ratte]

One gig, playing bass in a punk band on this big wooden stage. Jumping around... broke through the stage, ended up standing waist-deep and confounded. Finished the tune though. As a singer, forgotten lyrics too many times to even mention, you can pretty much count on it. The solution is to jump on somebody in the crowd and hump him/her.

[AlChuck]

Magpel, skip, Neat to see mention of New Paltz here... I went there back in 1972-1975, had my first band there, with a local bass player named James Diven... lost touch with him after he went off to Berklee School of Music in 1976... Those were memorable days. There were some good local area bands -- Orleans, The Fabulous Rhinestones, and my personal favorite was Chrome Willy (the band name was "Chrome Willie and the..." something), who went on to have a big hit song a few years later called "Steal Away" under his real name, Robbie DuPree... -AlChuck

[Magpel]

Alchuck, I knew James (Jimmy) Diven, though he was a good 6 or 7 years older than me. He was sort of the senior statesmen of the youth music scene that my brother was a part of. Do You remember the Womblers? Danny and the Hot Rods? The Whippets? I'd still like to know when Skip was there, and who his prof. mom is.

[Steve LeBlanc]

I've got plenty of embarrassing moments, I won't bore you (or disgust you) with a bunch of them. One particulary funny moment, I was playing a gig where I had set up a fan to cool me off. I was jamming on the guitar totally into it, everytime I looked out in the audience I'd notice smiles and laughter...I was a bit confused because the music wasn't particularly happy. Well this gig was video taped...I watched the video the next day and couldn't believe my eyes...a huge chunk of my hair (I have pretty long hair) had blown into my open mouth and stayed there through a full 10 minute jam without me noticing. Ever since I make it a point to close my mouth occasionally during jams to make sure there's no hair there:) Weird and funny.

[AlChuck]

Magpel, Wow! You knew Jimmy! Any chance you know where he is or what's he been up to? Like I said I haven't seen him since I visited him in Boston while he was at Berklee -- that was probably 1977 or so... Let's see, I was in my 3rd year at New Paltz so I was about 20 when I met him, and he was still in high school. We played together in a band for a while, starting in New Paltz, then we and the drummer moved to Long Island and hooked up with another guitarist and a piano player and worked for a few months before it dissolved. I think he started going to Berklee the next September. He was a great guy and I have often in the last twenty-odd years thought about him, tried to track him down via the internet, to no avail. I do remember the Womblers, and I have a possible vague memory of Danny and the Hot Rods, but The Whippets don't trigger any memories.

[evets]

One night a couple of years ago while I was putting my guitar in the case after a gig a female friend of mine came up to talk for a moment and about the same time another female...slightly cooked... began to bug us to play another song. She kept on and on and I was trying to explain to her that the system was already down and everyone was packing up but she wouldn't hush. About then my friend (abit of the mischievious type) told her that if she'd "show me something" maybe I'd play her a song. Now I'm trying to quiet my friend and keep her from digging me a hole when up[ went her blouse and out "they" came and now I've got to do something so I (with an unplugged guitar) am trying to sing her something, anything to get her to put "em up and please go away. The unplugged guitar ain't doing it for her at all so she proceeds over to my wife :eek: (the lead singer) to complain that I didn't sing her a song and "after I showed him my tits"!! It went downhill from there.

[S_Gould]

Hey George (GT3) - I remember that gig - Gator Club in Sarasota, Feb. '94 right? I was the tour manager/sound man for I.B. You came with your father. I moved to FL not long after that, lost touch with Mike Pinera a couple of years ago - he moves too much! I've got a great (private) studio here. Drop me an email at digitmus@sunline.net :D . Scott

[Magpel]

Sorry, Alchuck, I din't know Jimmy at all well enough to know what he's doing now. I was just a little kid. Knew him well enough to wave to him. But, because we grew up in the same NP neighborhood, there' actually a chance my Mom would know a bit of his story. I'll ask.

[AlChuck]

Thanks, Magpel, I appreciate it...

[SFOracle]

I think I was about 18. My mother plays violin, and she asked me to do a piano/violin duet with her for a christmas eve concert at her church. The church had a beautiful steinway, but some clown has moved the piano so that the bench was within an inch of the edge of the stage. With the stage lit only by a single spot light, and a music stand light on the piano, I didn't notice how close the piano bench was to the edge of the stage. As I sat down at the piano (complete with tux and tails) I tried to 'hop' the piano bench back a couple of inches so I could get my knees under the piano. The leg of the piano bench slipped off the stage and me and the bench went tumbling off the stage followed by an explosion of sheet music and hymnals that were inside the bench. My brother was dying laughing at the back of the church.