Here are some helpful tips so you get to prevent a catastrophe at your music gig, and the inevitable lawsuit from your underage groupies, presented with real life examples from real life musicians.
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Port-a-Potties Quickly, what is the most important thing you need at any place where thousands of piss drunk people are going to spend time gyrating? If you said good urination facilities, congratulations, your mind works in uncommonly perceptive and creepy ways. Folk rock giants Jethro Tull had to learn this the hard way at New York in 1976. As the band walked onto the field they received, from their adulating fans standing high above in the players access ramp, a spray of warm, golden, beer. Keeping in mind the heading of this section, it shall probably suffice to say that the ‘beer’, wasn’t actually beer.
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In the words of flautist Ian Anderson, “The unmistakable pong wafting from my then-ample head of damp hair and freshly laundered stage-clothing would remain for the duration of the show. An unholy baptism from above.”
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In 1982, The Police were king. Four albums into their career of making women swoon with Sting’s voice; they’d already had hits like “Message in a Bottle” and “Walking on Moon.” This is when they came to Sting’s homecoming concert at Newcastle. This was supposed to be Stings triumphant return, except for one tiny hitch. This little band called U2 were also playing.
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So when you’re playing a gig, remember one thing, the Irish will always win against you.
Seriously do it at summer Weather and telephone corporations are the two things you can’t win against. So I suggest you compare two consulting meteorologists and one astrologer before you decide on a music gig. Otherwise it may well become a clusterfuck, like at Woodstock 1994, where it rained so hard that the aforementioned belligerent fans, started a mudfight. In a story that I will never get tired of telling, Green Day bassist Mark Dirnt got his teeth knocked out (righteous). Trent Reznor, on the other hand, refused to be outclassed so NIN came to stage already caked in mud. Stories like this are a dime a dozen the annals of music from Def Leppard stuck in Arizona rain to alternative rockers Garbage found playing alternately al 20 below at New York so suffering a heatstroke at summer Japan. So beware the tale of mudstock, and have your gig somewhere nice and dry.
Musicians do a lot of crazy shit. In fact, they perhaps only exclusively do crazy shit, which is why we love them. But it does to keep your band in some semblance of coherence. My favourite example is what happened to the Mystery Jets at Tokyo. This event is best narrated by lead singer Blaine Harrison, so I’m going to leave him to it. “It was a great gig, but before the encore someone from the record company brought over a bottle of mezcal – which usually comes with a worm at the bottom, and which a lot of people confuse with tequila, but is actually a lot stronger – with a scorpion in it. Then someone decided to take it on stage. In our encore we passed it between us. And basically I had a fit – an alcohol-induced fit – during our last song. I looked around me and I was seeing everything in weird multiple dimensions, and the band seemed to be playing a completely different song to me. Everyone looked at me in horror, including the audience, and I mimed along for the rest of the song, hoping no one would notice. I had to be carried off stage to the dressing room, where apparently I was talking nonsensically, and got dumped in the bathroom. It was all quite horrifying, really. It’s obviously lethal stuff, because another time our drummer downed half a bottle of it, got really violent, started hallucinating, and attacked our sound man.” Perhaps, next time, leave the drink with the scorpion alone.
Be sure to hire a adequtely bad opening act
In the torrential rain, the already ineffably crazy Bono climbed up scaffoldings and played a three song encore, to almost universal acclaim. And in that, he upstaged a girl (literally) and The Police (figuratively).
Keep the band nice and dry, uh, as far as possible.
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Do not grapple with the ineffable. Sometimes, you do everything correctly, and yet, things go into strange shapes. This is not your fault, and you probably cannot do at anything to prevent this at your gig. But gosh darn it, does it make an interesting read. Like the time when a band called Mini-KISS opened for Tom-Tom Club (which is basically just half of The Talking Heads). The hilarity of the situation is the fact that Mini KISS is a group of dwarves, dressed in full make-up, lipsynching to KISS songs. Or at the Status Quo concert at Dundee, where a full on, no holds barred, classic Scottish fistfight broke out between a thousand people. The band wisely vanished from the venue, and when they returned in the morning, “these 20 old washer-women were there in a line, on their knees, scrubbing the blood out of this lovely new parquet floor.”
The
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