Worst, or most interesting settings you have played in?

[RABid]

What has been your worst setting for a gig. Not worst management, but one of those times you arrive and think "we have to play here" or "they call that a stage?"

 

Years ago someone in Lexington, KY bought a bar and decided to add live music. Not content with local talent on opening night they sought out the top band in Louisville and hired us for opening week. The guy had connections and it was Kentucky Derby weekend. A lot of the upper class that we saw on TV, connected to the derby were there. The entire Anita Madden party was there. More stars than I had ever seen before. We pull up to the back door to unload, go in to check out the stage, and there is was. A brand new stage. 10 feet wide and 6 feet deep. It was all we could do to fit the drums and keyboards on the stage. Everyone else was going to have to stand on the floor. Turns out that was not the worst of it. They had a row of plugins across the back of the stage, all connected to the same 20 amp breaker. We did not get through 10 seconds of a sound check before we lost power. The owner set staff out to buy heavy duty extension chords. They ran them all over the building and even next door to the gas station. I will say, the owner had an electrician there within an hour to talk to us about the needs of a band. Went back the next day and there was a new electric panel behind the stage with plenty of power and a direct box connection. Still had the same 6x10 stage. We finished the week and never went back. A few months later the club was shut down and the owner along with several employees were arrested for selling drugs at the bar. Seems the "in crowd" was into cocaine. 

[Anderton]

Amazingly, I've never had to endure horrible stage situations. The closest was an open-air gig when the band played on the steps of the Philadelphia art museum. It was a pretty cool concept, and there were thousands of people. What wasn't cool was that the electricity was being supplied by a generator. The amps were fine, but my DIY synth (this was late 60s), which used a Radio Shack power supply, sounded like it had a slow, rolling vibrato. The vibrato speed was at the "warped record/seasick" speed. Except for some white noise parts, I had to ditch using the synth and cover the parts on guitar. 

[Notes_Norton]

Most interesting:

• Nudist RV Park. We did that a few times per year until a hurricane came and blew down their clubhouse building. They didn't require the band to be naked, so we dressed minimally. Funny thing, after a few minutes, it's not sexy, but very interesting.
• Opening for headliners in concert. I got a taste of what it is to be a 'star'. A hall full of excited, cheering people loving what we were doing.
• Cruise ships. No pool table or wide screen TV to distract the customers, nobody has to work the next day, and they come to party. We became 'family' with the crew and staff, every week was the same, but every week a boatload of new passengers took the place of the old. You could tell the same jokes every week.

Worst?

• Back in the 1970s, a person I was acquainted with was hard up for a New Year's Eve band for his condominium. This was back when the average retirement dweller quit listening to music after Frank Sinatra, and actually hated Elvis and that “rack-and-roll”. It's also before I targeted the retirement audience. We were rock and roll. I told him we weren't right for the gig. He said that he knew these people, and it would be fine, and offered us a lot of money. We should have refused, but trusted his word. They hated us. Lesson learned—the hard way.

I can't think of any other horrible gigs we've had, and I've been doing this a long time. Some are better than others, but a bad day playing music is better than a good day at any other job I can think of.

 

Notes ♫

[RABid]

Played a bar in Hazard Kentucky. The namesake of Dukes of Hazard, but in the hills of the Appalachians. It really felt like I was in the Blues Brothers movie. No cage around the stage, but an 80 old bouncer was walking around with both hands on his M-16.

 

Played a pool party at a large hotel. Mid August, 12:00 to 3:00 PM, full sunshine, no cover. It was so hot that the plastic covering my keyboard panels bubbled. I had to lay towels over the keyboards because touching the metal areas would burn you. I told my band, never again.

 

Played a bar mitzvah at the WYCA. Voltage was at brown out levels. Only had one keyboard that would work. I got really mad at myself for even playing under those conditions. Told the band, never again.

[NewImprov]

Let's see...

 

Played a music festival that started right after the awards ceremony for  the Eugene Marathon. We started, there were 2000 people (track is big in Eugene), we ended playing to about 50. Turns out people don't want to dance to high-energy funk music after running a marathon. Worst part was, we were the first of 8 bands...

 

Played a NYE party for the local Hell's Angels chapter. This was 1980-something, we were 4 skinny guys with moussed hair playing tunes by The Cars, Psychedelic Furs, Simple Minds etc. We learned Born to Be Wild, and played it twice each set. Didn't help.

 

 

 

 

[Notes_Norton]

One of our most unusual gigs.

 

We were playing at the Yacht Club we had a house gig in. A German man who was here on business approached us to play for his birthday party. We accepted.

 

He was renting a small house, and he flew 10 friends in from Germany to party with him. The house was small, we set up in the kitchen, and they partied in the living room. They only time we say anyone, was when they came into the kitchen, smiled at us, and got more beer out of the fridge.

 

The gig was for 3 hours. At the end of the 3rd hour, he put a couple of $100 bills on the keyboard and asked us if we could play some more. We accepted. At the end of the 4th hour, a few more bills and another hour of playing. At the end of the 5th, the same offer, and being greedier than sane we said “Yes” again.

 

As it got towards the end of the 6th, we were hoping for more money, and also hoping to just go home. The group came in, thanked us for a great evening, and offered to help us carry are gear out to the minivan. We usually refuse that kind gesture, but this time we accepted.

 

Notes ♫

[Stokely]

I'm at the low end of things, so lots of very small "stages" (often no stage at all, just a space that might or might not fit a band).  Honestly, I have no idea why some of these places hire full bands; they don't have room, and no matter how quiet you are (unless you have e-drums) it's too loud.  But I'll take the gigs!

Way back when I lived near Nashville, and we were hired at a big club that had stripper/dancing cages.  Rough spot, and we were not the right band for it, we were all in college and didn't play the music they wanted.  Before the show, I went back out to my car and found a huge truck and inch from my back bumper.  Turns out, I was in the owner's spot and he didn't like it.  He had just gotten out of prison and wasn't a very fun guy, I was told by the sneering people at the bar when I asked meekly whose truck was behind my car.  "Why don't you just push it out of the way" was the answer I got.  What a fun gig.

I really hate the soul-suckers, as I call them...the bar gigs where the 10 people drinking don't care, and you get the feeling they can't wait until your set break to put on the jukebox or just have no music.  We don't have as many of these as we used to.

This December, we may have a gig at a clothing-optional nudist colony, so there's that.   They like dancing apparently.

[Lou Gehrig Charles]

We played just a few weeks ago at a little bar/brewpub/beer garden; the place has a big outdoor patio, a small gazebo and a nice stage on the grass in back.  With rain in the forecast, though, they decided to move us onto the back porch of the main building instead, so we'd be under a little bit of a roof.  As it turned out, the "roof" was just an awning so to stay dry we were all crowded together with all our cables and power cords right under our feet.  There were two heavy timber columns on either side of our makeshift "stage" and there was a giant tree growing up through a big hole in the middle of the porch right in front of us (I think the tree was there first so they built the porch around it).  Almost all of the audience was a hundred feet away from us under the gazebo.  I suppose really it wasn't a bad setup besides being crowded, but all our friends who tried shooting pics or videos were frustrated trying to shoot around the big columns and the tree.  But at least we stayed dry.

[Shamanzarek]

2009 in Vigo, Spain I played a room that had at least a ten foot high stage. There was a crane at one end of the stage to lift the band gear up and down. The band was barely visible from the bottom of the stage. We are playing and into the third song when the guitar player is in my face yelling at me to stop. I didn't see it happen but our singer had fallen off the stage backwards. We didn't know if he was going to survive but there happened to be someone there with medical training that checked him out. The singer was taken to the hospital and found to have brain hemorrhaging and some broken bones. That ended our tour and the singer spent a month in the Spanish hospital. He did recover but has some lingering minor problems. Shortly after that Steven Tyler and a couple others fell off stages so it seemed like a trend developing.

[Greg Mein]

Small stages, empty venues, disinterested/rowdy/fighting patrons, flights of stairs, electrical blowouts and technical problems are such a cliche, I'd seen plenty of it. It's impossible to pick out a worst. At the same time there have been enthusiastic crowds at packed houses on all different sizes of stages as well. As a general rule I prefer outdoor gigs.

 

Since "forming" five or six years ago my wife of seven years and I were a duo and I put a lot of work into creating backing tracks but I was ready for a change and now we're a four piece live band having added a drummer and bass player. Having moved to a low population area however, our gigs are further apart but the last couple have been really enjoyable.

We got on the bill for an annual three day jam festival that's a pretty big deal around here, just across the border in AZ. We came to watch a lot of it and our band clearly got the best response. Around the same time we played an outdoor gig at a fair/festival put on by our little city. Then we crossed a new threshold the Friday before last when we played an outdoor gig in Washington UT put on by the city with sponsors. That made for state number five that my wife and I have performed in.

 

Hands down my most unique gig was several years ago when I got tapped to play keys for a rock hits show with the symphony orchestra.

[Anderton]

Well since we're also mentioning most interesting gigs, that would have to be playing for a wife-swapping party when I was in high school. By a pool, of course. I kept seeing permutations and combinations of couples going into private rooms.

 

The most interesting gig my college band turned down was for an Andy Warhol event where we would have had to play "Walk Away Renee" continuously during the event until it was over. In retrospect, we probably should have done it. Then I could have added it to a "most interesting gig" list

 

Ever have someone get so drunk they fell over on your pedalboard and enabled an effect you didn't want enabled? Only happened to me once, but that was enough!

[KenElevenShadows]

All of mine have been fun and interesting and cool, thankfully as far as settings go.

 

Off the top of my head: A gay bar in Hollywood with tons of people wearing leather, bondage gear and assless chaps; a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Malibu with sweeping 180-degree views of the Pacific while organizing/playing a fundraiser for the Navajo with numerous celebrities in attendance; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles with the guitarist for Interpol.

 

All of them were thoroughly enjoyable and fun.

[Notes_Norton]

8 hours ago, Stokely said:

Way back when I lived near Nashville, and we were hired at a big club that had stripper/dancing cages. 

That reminds me. When I was 18 years old, just out of high school, we got a job at a strip club. Fortunately, the band had to sit down, because my appreciation for the girls was definitely showing.

 

They were nice, like big sisters, and eventually would request their favorite song that we played. The star was an Asian girl, billed “With her million dollar wardrobe”. She didn't keep it on very long. She did one set per night. I think Thursday was her night off.

 

We were the Monday band, the more professional bands played the other 6 nights. That was before DJs took those types of gigs away from musicians.

 

Notes ♫

[ProfD]

Outdoor gig for the Super Bowl winning football team.  Except there was no team or audience or PA system. 

 

It was like the band showed up at the wrong place.  The *promoter* insisted we were in the right place. 

 

I guess the promoter guy was a super fan of the football team and/or band and wanted a private outdoor concert. 

 

It was too cold out there to play for crickets.  More like howling wolf.  We did get paid though. 😎

[KuruPrionz]

Decades ago, the band I was in played the "hip" part of Fresno, the Tower District. We were sort of New Wave, played some original songs and a variety of covers but no country or country rock. 

A friend of ours who played all popular covers and lots of country had a steady gig on Saturday nights at a club in Clovis, the "Cowboy" section of Fresno. He got a better paying gig one Saturday and talked our lead singer into taking his regular gig for one night. 

It started out with us playing our New Wave stuff for about 10 "cowboys" across a large room standing at the bar, drinking. They had the full regalia, snakeskin cowboy boots, 10 gallon hats and garish belt buckles. They all wore blue Wranglers, Levis were for hippies or something. They completely ignored us, probably waiting for Jim's Place down the street to have space so they could go there, that was the big club in Clovis. 

OK, but not great, up to that point. 

Then, a Hispanic biker group came into the bar, started stepping on the cowboys boots and trying to drink their drinks. Suddenly, a fight broke out. Chairs were literally flying, fists were flailing, there was damage done, pain and misery. I was standing on the edge of the stage with ride cymbal and stand in my hands, ready to smash it into somebody if they came after us. Thankfully, we were completely ignored. After a couple of minutes, the bartender pulled out a revolver and fired it into the ceiling. It got very quiet for a minute, then the Clovis Police came in with full riot gear on and started handcuffing everybody at the bar and brutally dragging them into the paddy wagons out front. Bitter enemies were handcuffed together and just shoved outside. It didn't take the police long to clear the place. 

 

Then the bartender walked up to us and calmly said "You can go home now, we won't be needing you anymore." We didn't get paid but were glad to get the hell out of there anyway! Far and away the worst gig I've ever played. 

 

The "interesting" gigs were probably those hot Fresno summer evenings when women would come into the club, start dancing and flashing us. That was fun. 

 

[jazzpiano88]

Was playing in blues band for a New Years Eve gig.  I happened to look off to the side of the stage next to me and there was Tiny Tim relaxing in an overstuffed chair next to the stage.    The rest of the band and audience took note and we called him up to sing Great Balls of Fire and Tiptoe through the Tulips.  He had his Uke with him.   Fun time!