Craziest thing ever said to you at a gig

[Gary75]

 

After the song is over, this cigar-chomping, 5-foot Ernest Borgnine look-alike walks up to the saxophonist and says (within earshot of the microphone), "You're GREAT!! I've never heard anyone as good as you!"

 

He then turns to me, takes his cigar out of his mouth, points it right in my face and blurts out LOUDLY, "And YOU...you SUCK!"

 

Needless to say, my mojo was totally destroyed that evening and I'm still traumatized after all these years.

 

 

What a prick, although are you certain that wasn't actually Ernest Borgnine?

[Rockhouse]

After auditioning at a live show for a classic rock band, I got the gig. The next night we had a show up north and were all going to pile into the leader's van for the trip.

 

Second show, we arrived at a Holiday Inn lounge and I started to set up my rig. A few of the members wandered off and returned dressed in cowboy outfits.

 

The leader asked me: "Where's your hat?"

 

I stood there in my torn Led Zep shirt and my jaw hanging open.

 

It turns out the band did both kinds of music, Rock and Country.

 

I couldn't name 3 country songs to save my life, back then. So, they shouted out the chords for each tune and I mucked through it somehow. I tried to quit the band, but they begged me to stay until they found a replacement. I ended up stuck in that band for 6 more months and we never did another Rock show in that time.

 

Ironically, the drummer had joined them after a live audition at a Jazz lounge, and got sucked into playing Country 5 nights a week too.

 

What was the worst thing i ever heard? "Where's your hat?" has to be on top of that list.

 

[mate stubb]

Were you playing at Bob's Country Bunker?

[solpincus]

'Were you playing at Bob's Country Bunker?'

 

That means you played BOTH kinds of music : Country AND Western.

[ITGITC]

 

Izzat a spare MIDI cable in your pocket?

 

...or are you just glad to see me?

 

(Predictable? Yes. Funny? ...maybe.)

 

Especially since it was clear to see that my MIDI cable was connected to my synths on stage and there was no room for it in my pocket...

 

...alongside my "SM58".

 

Yeah... SM58. What did you name YOURS?

 

 

[HammondDave]

There is a bikers club in Orange County called Cooks Corner. I was playing a gig there and went into the men's room to relieve myself. The pissoir was a four foot trough and I was cheek to cheek with the guy next to me pissing into a mound of vomit. The guy turns to me and says "It does not get much better than this..." Yuck!

[Josh Paxton]

I have about a 1 in 3 chance of having basically that same experience on any given weekend night.

 

Semi-related: I've never understood what makes men in certain situations feel the need to engage in infuriatingly banal conversations with strangers while relieving themselves. It happens almost never in places like upscale restaurants, but all the friggin' time in tacky bars. It's the main reason I try to use the private bathroom upstairs at my club whenever I can -- well, that and the 1 in 3 chance of puke in the trough.

[stillplaying]

Pissoir - like it, and "cheek to cheek" ...

[DanL]

'Were you playing at Bob's Country Bunker?'

 

That means you played BOTH kinds of music : Country AND Western.

 

He was the lead singer and driver of the Winnebago.

[Jaime Chimuelo]

Had a vase of Roses by my rig one night with a note that said, Roses on Your Piano Now, Tulips on your organ later.

I couldn't have agreed more, and it was a very enjoyable evening.

If she was a Lakota Sioux Indian, she should have had the name Fucks With Lips....

[Gary75]

"I had a long conversation with Theo Verelst last week"

[Tonysounds]

"I had a long conversation with Theo Verelst last week"

[JeffLearman]

rofl

[Josh Paxton]

From the "I swear I'm not making this up" file. Last night a woman at the bar called me over and asked me my name. I told her. She said, "Why does your keyboard say Korg?" I said that's the name of the company that makes it, why? Her reply: "Oh, I thought maybe Korg was your name."

 

So I said in my best bad vague foreign accent, "Ya my name ees Korg! I am big rock and roll star weeth personalized keyboard!" Then for the rest of that set break, she called me Korg and I called her Louis, after her Louis Vuitton purse.

[EscapeRocks]

Lol. That's funny and cool.

 

[FJR]

From the "I swear I'm not making this up" file. Last night a woman at the bar called me over and asked me my name. I told her. She said, "Why does your keyboard say Korg?" I said that's the name of the company that makes it, why? Her reply: "Oh, I thought maybe Korg was your name."

 

So I said in my best bad vague foreign accent, "Ya my name ees Korg! I am big rock and roll star weeth personalized keyboard!" Then for the rest of that set break, she called me Korg and I called her Louis, after her Louis Vuitton purse.

 

Ahh! So thats why they put tape over the name!

[jogger]

Happened today at an outdoor public wedding in downtown Philly. While about to play the cocktail hour and talking to the bass player, some dude came out of nowhere and started blessing me in the name of the lord. The funny thing about it is I got a gig in a couple days in the same area with a blues rock band and we'll be playing Presence of the Lord.

[J. Dan]

From the "I swear I'm not making this up" file. Last night a woman at the bar called me over and asked me my name. I told her. She said, "Why does your keyboard say Korg?" I said that's the name of the company that makes it, why? Her reply: "Oh, I thought maybe Korg was your name."

 

So I said in my best bad vague foreign accent, "Ya my name ees Korg! I am big rock and roll star weeth personalized keyboard!" Then for the rest of that set break, she called me Korg and I called her Louis, after her Louis Vuitton purse.

 

OK, a little OT because it's my day job...but my division sells Industrial Flow Meters. Some of our shirts say "Flow Team", others just say "Flow". So I don't remember if I was at a hotel or a bar (or a hotel bar), but this gal asks me my name. I say "Dan". She says "then why does your shirt say "Flow"? Needless to say, they called me "Flo" for the rest of the week.

[J. Dan]

Actually, I was just posting on FB regarding an ex bandmate, and happened to thing of one way back. We were doing a Duo at the time and both had long hair. We were loading in the side door to the bar, and had stopped to chat about something. Our backs were facing the street. This old guy pulls up and says "Ma'am, Ma'am, excuse me, ma'am..." Finally we turned to look, and he just says "OH!" and drives off.

[Gary75]

Haha! I know, I have really bad eyesight (diabetes related but I digress) and the number of men I have mistaken for women. I also sometimes need to stare a bit longer than usual to try recognise who I think is somebody I know, only to find its a complete stranger. It's a wonder I have all my teeth intact!

[opdigits]

Great thread and wonderful stories!

 

I'll relate three that all happened almost without fail every gig during a number of tours I did with a Vegas style show band I played with.

 

The entertainer I worked for was an excellent vocal impersonator whom had the gift of gab and comical wit and timing unparalleled. He had everyone in our audiences eating out of his hand and spellbound with the wonders of our show every time we played.

 

1.) During the course of our shows, in which we played mostly 30 second to 1 minute snippets of the songs by famous artists he was impersonating, interspersed with song related historical verbalisms and jokes, he would hand signal us unobtrusively (and seemingly magically out of thin air to the audience) to stop playing instantaneously, and then immediately launching into the next bit. Without fail, after each show as we mingled with the audience I would hear or be commented to by a wonderously baffled audience member how we managed to stop playing instantly ... "How do you guys do it?" I heard time and time again. After the first few times I'd say, "Well, erm, ahhh, we just lift our hands off our instruments", which would leave the questioner with the same tilt-headed, eyebrow-scrunched, baffled look. In time, and after continually seeing the bewilderment on their faces after my answer, I just decided to tell them that we had learned and practiced a special and secret musical technique perfected by master musicians from ancient times past. Upon hearing that they would inevitably get a suitably impressed look of understanding accompanied by a breathy "Ahhhhhhh ... Wow!!!"

 

2.) One of the tunes we played was Orange Blossom Special in which the entertainer would show off his masterful skills on the fiddle. In reality, he knew next to nothing about playing this instrument other than making himself look highly skilled through his fake actions, whilst I played the fiddle licks on a string synth (Crumar Performer I believe?) trying to look invisible. He would prepare for the song by over resining his bow, and plucking more than a few bow hairs loose from one end, so that as he was whirling around on stage resin dust would be flying around in clouds and bow hairs would be doing the same. We had the thing tuned so that he could actually play each string as we modulated chords and had it just barely loud enough in the PA so that the real fiddle sound would blend in with my synth. Again, without fail, folks would always tell him that he was "one of the best fiddle players they'd ever seen!!!"

 

3.) During one leg of a tour we lost and had to hire replacement girl backup singers (we had a large band), but we were short on time before the next show and were in a very rural area. We quickly threw together some auditions but only one of the girls could sing well. So, we hired her (she was rather homely looking) and two hotties that couldn't sing their way naked out of a shower to save their lives. For the show, we dressed them all three up in their gowns, put the homely but angelic voiced one in between the two cuties, with a live mic for Miss homely and dead mics for the two hotties. And yet again, after every show we played with them guys would come up to the two lip-syncing dead mic'd hotties and tell them that they had the greatest voices they'd ever heard, completely ignoring Miss homely.

[Sospiri]

New to this Forum, but essentially a retired Brit keyboard/vibes player now living in Greece. Here's some from a few years ago......

 

1962 (early Beatles era) in a small dance hall in a South coast resort. I was part of a 5-piece, the oldest of which was the drummer at 29 and most of use were five years younger. Two girl teenyboppers near the stand, one daring the other to make a request, which she eventually did. Halfway through the brief conversation, her eyes scanned the members of the band, she turns round to her mate and yells "Christ, it's a band of old men!!!"

-------------------

Around about 1970 I was roped in (on vibes) to augment a band to ten members for the local policemen's ball. It was pretty ghastly with few arrangements and comprised 4 saxes (frequently busking in unison!), trumpet, vibes, piano, bass, drums & a male vocalist, a bit of a character. After the last waltz, the vocalist got chatting to the Chief Constable and then reported back to the band - "The good news is that they liked us, the bad news, they've gone and booked us again for next year!"

-------------------

In the early 1960s I was part of a quintet resident for several years in an Orthodox Jewish hotel. The band were asked not to leave stacks of sheet music on the stand as it looked untidy during the day, so being fairly lazy, we used to lay it on the strings of the baby grand piano when we'd finished playing, and, of course, close the lid.

One of the owners was American and his mother (a New York resident) was a former member of the Grand Met Opera. Annually she would visit her son and stay at the hotel. On one occasion she was requested to do a recital of arias one afternoon and used a classical pianist recommended by our agent as her accompanist. She rehearsed with him elsewhere, was announced on the day, and her accompanist had only opened the keyboard lid. Straight in to the first item and she was accomnpanied by a series of dull thuds! We were all dragged into the office later, one of the many occasions when we were read the Riot Act!

 

Happy Days!

[Sospiri]

One more, same hotel as the last story......

 

Four of the band, including me, were married. The vocalist was single, but the bass player, shall we say, was known as the Ram of Xxxxxxxxx! Freqently the bass player and vocalist took willing girls, some quite young, out to a club in the forest some distance away, had their wicked ways with them, and returned them to the hotel in the early hours of the morning.

On this particular night, the two girls were staying at the hotel with an aged grandmother, who'd had gone to bed early, expecting her granddaughters to follow shortly afterwards. Some hope!

When the band members brought them back around 4:00am, they found the front door of the hotel closed. The night porter hated the band's guts! "No problem", the boys said, "we'll use the fire escape and go in through a first floor window". Foiled again, the window was shut, but two faces were looking out at them from the inside - the night porter and the grandmother in her nightdress! Very gentlemanlylike, the band members scarpered and left the poor girls on the fire escape to face the music.

Once again, the whole band were dragged into the office later that day to be read the Riot Act, BUT the female owner then said "If you must take female guests out in the middle of the night then don't bring them back onto the premises. Leave them in the road outside and then the management can't be seen to be at fault!

 

She may have thought that we were bad, but the band that followed us were worse. Their leader got drunk and beat up one of the elderly guests!

 

All these munitions are the same!!!

[David R]

Wow, I've played some tame gigs... I can't think of anything that comes close to some of these stories. A recent one that's funny, but not especially exciting:

 

In one group I play in, we do a dancehall reggae style tune and I double the bassline on synth bass. After our set, a guy comes up to the bass player and says, "Man, what was that synth effect you were using? It sounded fantastic!" The bassist looks at him, points to me and says, "Him!" The guy looked thoroughly confused...

[jmemcse517]

I hope I don't offend anyone with this story but...

Back in the 80's I was in a cover band that was booked solid about 9 months in advance. When we unexpectedly lost our singer I stepped in and was basically singing 40 songs a night while we found a replacement - not easy to do, especially while doing all my keyboard parts too.

 

So after the gig I'm standing out in the audience talking with a big table full of people; there were dozens of people kind of hanging out, and the head bartender walks up and says "hey I just wanted to tell you your singing sucks." All of a sudden everything got real quite. So I say "OK, uh, thanks" and the guy says louder "hey I'm just tryin to tell you your singing sucks" - so I'm like "uh, whatever Wayne", then a third time he says "ya, well your singing sucks"

So I looked at him and said really loud "keep it up Wayne, and I won't let you come over to my house at night and suck my cock anymore" - The whole bar erupted with howling laughter as Wayne turned red and left. The next day the owner fired him.

[allan_evett]

Strange little road incident, circa 1980: a guy walks up to me after a gig, and says something like, " ..I play guitar, a little bit of keyboards.." . Then he proceeds to point at my Peavey mixer and say "Hey, that's a clavinet, isn't it ?". There wasn't a clavinet in the building...

[Ed A.]

"The aliens told me you'd be playing here."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I kid...I kid

[Ken Beaumont]

What's the Frequency Kenneth?

 

Actually at the time I didn't know about Dan Rather's incident.

But this drunk kept shouting that at me. We were playing in a bar that was also a Chinese Restaurant we were told if we did well we would be booked monthly for the next year. Well drunken boy corners me in the bathroom and says I was bad mouthing POW's and starts attacking me. I was in the Air Force at the time had about 4 inches , at least 20 lbs on him and a 2nd Degree Black Belt in Hapkido. I ended up flushing his face in the urinal just as the owner walked in, I don't know Chinese but I'm sure it wasn't nice! Needless to say we didn't get the bookings, but we did get paid and my old band mates still tell that story over beer so all ended well I guess.

[Jazz+]

The event hall manager says: Leave your keyboard here with us as collateral and we will give you some future gigs.

[StanC]

I hope I don't offend anyone with this story but...

Back in the 80's I was in a cover band that was booked solid about 9 months in advance. When we unexpectedly lost our singer I stepped in and was basically singing 40 songs a night while we found a replacement - not easy to do, especially while doing all my keyboard parts too.

 

So after the gig I'm standing out in the audience talking with a big table full of people; there were dozens of people kind of hanging out, and the head bartender walks up and says "hey I just wanted to tell you your singing sucks." All of a sudden everything got real quite. So I say "OK, uh, thanks" and the guy says louder "hey I'm just tryin to tell you your singing sucks" - so I'm like "uh, whatever Wayne", then a third time he says "ya, well your singing sucks"

So I looked at him and said really loud "keep it up Wayne, and I won't let you come over to my house at night and suck my cock anymore" - The whole bar erupted with howling laughter as Wayne turned red and left. The next day the owner fired him.

 

Can't help but wonder why Wayne was embarrassed by what was clearly just a counter attack on your part to shut him up. Unless of course he really was coming over to your house. . .