I am just curious. Has anyone on this forum had a "Spinal Tap" moment. When you thought things were going right . . . some mishap takes place on stage and it turns into a comedy number . . . Hence one of the greatest movies of all time. LOL

Yeah plenty

Other guitarist walking into the venue *drunk* as I've hit the last chord of our set...

Other guitarist walking on stage with some vagrant he's been swigging cider with down the local canal carrying his guitar

Other guitarist nailing his underwear to the wall of the venue then convincing some gal that she can buy it for the price of another pint...

Getting held up by customs officers at gunpoint. When one of them asks the bassist "pleas'a?" the *other guitarist* pipes up, "wuurgh pisshead how they know that about you then dave?".

*other guitarist* ringing up applying for his own job

Being swabbed for possible contact with plastic explosive (me)

Bassist asking the inventor of thrash metal guitar, "which band do you play for then mate?".

The list goes on and on....

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Thats next level.

As we were getting ready to play my strap knob came out of my guitar--and flew who knows where (Straplocks wouldn't have helped--it was the screw that came out)
I also broke two strings.

So instead of playing my Les Paul copy I played a nice Gibson SG Custom.

Hmm that worked out okay--so maybe not a great example.

Except our performance was awful.

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It wasn't Willy-Nilly, it was at crows.

My very small playing career has nothing to put alongside the likes of Nikininja. But in addition to the usual things like falling over monitors, falling of the stage, etc, etc, I proudly tell of the time I went for the big Pete Townshend windmill, missed the strings and hit the selector switch instead, ripping the switch tip off to go flying across and hit the bass player in the face. The audience was small enough most of them could see and appreciate it.

Aside from that, in earlier days when I was the drummer I'd rigged a homemade pyrotechnic whereby at the end of the last number I could press an electrical switch to trigger a circuit that set off a thunderflash type bomb in front of the drumset - big flash, tons of smoke and I'd step up on the bass drum Keith Moon style and jump over the kit to arrive triumphantly on the stage next to the other players. Da-nah! 'Cept one time I caught my foot on the toms on my way over and landed face-first at the singer's feet in an un-heroic sprawl, looked up and found him rolling his eyes contemptuously at the audience in a way that said: "huh - drummers!"

Time to become a guitarist...

Cheers - C

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I bought a Strat poster on ebay. It turned out to be postcard size, a bit like the Stonehenge incident I guess.

--Went to play a venue sight unseen. The "stage" was a six-inch platform barely large enough to fit a (small) drum kit on. It also had one single power outlet...for two guitar amps, one bass amp, two pedalboards and the PA.

--in 1992, when leaving a gig in a small Chevy S-10 Blazer, with two microphones & stands, three amps and five guitars in cases surrounding me in the back seat (two were sitting across my lap), the driver and Front Seat Passenger could not wait to crack open a couple of beers...while driving through a small rural town well-known for pulling people under 25 over and administering a field sobriety test as an regular order of business. 

Let us count the red flags:
(1) Musicians. Enough said.
(2) After one in the morning on a Saturday morning, three guys under 23 years old in a car, which had enough instruments in it to
(3) look like we had just robbed a small guitar shop, as well as
(4) Two (count 'em) two open containers of alcohol in a motor vehicle, and
(5) the Front Seat Passenger was under 21 (automatic "Contributing to the delinquency of a minor" charge).

Therefore, to lessen suspicion, the two idiots hand me their (mostly full, open) bottles of beer, and said, "Here, hide these...and don't spill 'em!" I put them between my feet and prayed the police wouldn't ask me to get out of the car. Fortunately, they didn't, the driver ("Joe Blow"...names have been changed to protect the guilty) passed his sobriety test and Front Seat Passenger kept his mouth shut for once in his life, so we got out of that one.

Shortly thereafter, I disengaged myself from their company/group and started dating Lady Armadillo, who never put me in situations like that. Years later, I got back in contact with Joe Blow and formed the Screamin' Armadillos, which led to:

--Joe Blow showing up during the second song of our first set (plastered, plowed, three sheets to the wind, however you wanna say it, he was drunk), plugging in his amp and then trying to tune his guitar...while we were playing. After being unsuccessful in that endeavor, he decided to play anyway (out of tune), so the sound guy snuck up behind him and turned him amp down. This confused him, and he kept looking at his guitar, his cord, the indicator light on his amp...he couldn't figure out that the amp was turned down.

After we finished the third song, I introduced him; "Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the late guitarist,  Joe Blow!"

He took umbrage to that, and decided to pour himself another drink--5/8 whiskey, 3/8 Coca-cola in a quart-sized insulated cup. Throughout the night, he repeated this process a couple of times, and was fortified further by the beer(s) people were bringing him. By the middle of the third set, he was so wasted that he sat down with his head against the main speaker and tried to play. We took his signal out of the mains, turned his amp towards him and left his guitar in the monitor closest to him, so he thought he played lead the rest of the night. He was playing a different set list from the rest of us...And we had a fourth set to go.

This was the second or third time he had pulled a similar stunt, and two days later, when I went to tell him to either show up on time, show up sober, and stay sober or he was out, he angrily denied that he was even past a little buzz and decided that our "three chord rock and blues" wasn't worth his talent, and he quit.

--Cops called three times at a very quiet outdoor gig, due to bad blood between neighbors.

--Gave a venue owner/manager a press kit and CD to book a gig, and she immediately wanted to get us on the bill. Negotiated two gigs, two weeks apart, good money.
Immediately in our opening number, she screamed, "Y'all are a blues band! What the @&$! is wrong with you?!?" she hadn't read the press kit or listened to the CD, and had assumed we were country & western because of our name...played both gigs, had a great time, but she was mad because we "Tricked" her. I hope she doesn't book the Dixie Dregs, she'll really be ticked off.

--Guitarist (Joe Blow again) thought it would be cool to play behind his head, breaking the stage lights mounted above him.

--Paranoid cocaine-addicted bassist thought I was a cop when I was invited to play harp in a pick-up blues band. Glared angrily at me each time I played with them, worried I was going to bust him.

--Three hundred pound drummer set his throne's foot on my guitar cable, which meant if I moved an inch, my guitar  came unplugged. I tried to get him to stand up out of his seat, but he didn't understand what the problem was, and refused to get up. His bassist brother finally threatened to smash his hi-hat, so he stood up and I pulled my cable out from under his throne's foot...bassist and drummer yelled at one another for a minute and then settled down, glowering at one another all night.

--Drunken woman twice my age and weight tried to pick me up. I politely rebuffed her, and she sat crying in the corner for half an hour before her friend took her home, yelling at me that I was probably "not masculine" (not in those words exactly, but you understand) and that I "couldn't sing, either."

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Good Vibes To Y'all!



Screamin' Armadillos
Texas Roadhouse Music
Guitar/Slide Guitar/Harp/Vocals

Great topic....brings back many memories.
Two incidents stand out from my (long ago) playing days:
A gig at the local university where we'd been assured that there was a pa system for our use. When we arrived, we found that it was a underpowered system that was useless for the gig. The room was also L shaped (always check out the venue well beforehand!!). We had three microphones so we plugged one into each of our amplifiers and away we went, only to have the rhythm guitarists amp die early on in the first set. We ended up running the 2 guitars through my amp and a single microphone through the bass amp as we only had 2 inputs per amp. Talk about a muddy sound!
The second incident happened when we were playing at a high school dance. The ground of my amp and the ground of the pa were reversed and since I had a habit of singing with my eyes closed, I ended up brushing the microphone and getting 110V ac through my lips, causing my head to arch back rather quickly and introduce a doppler effect to my vocal.
It could have been worse....it could have happened were the mains were 220V!
great thread..
cheers,
Alex

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......it's a topsy-turvy world when noses run and feet smell...

in the early days of garage jamming with one of my first groups,24 HOUR GARAGE SALE, we would practice on the weekends at the drummer's house. After the first case of beer and about 2 housrs into jamming,if we can make it that far into it, the cops would come knocking. Semms the neighbors didn't like drunken punk rock music being blasted between 8:00 and10:00 in the evening on fridays and saturdays. So, we head on down to Houston's city hall and apply for noise permits. The next time the cops showed up, we produce said permit, and proceeded to write the most obnoxious song titled "we've got a permit!" Well, turns out the neighbors were even more miffed about that, and 2 weeks later as we are about to load our gear for a show, we find that someone broke in and stolen the my flying v, amp, and the other guitarists amp. Fun times....till we got ripped off!

He thought you were a cop - because you were playing blues harmonica? Hey, cool cops you must have where you live!

BTW: has Joe Blow used up his nine lives yet? My patience would be wearing thin if I were you.

Cheers - C

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Alex, make the tale perfect and tell us you were singing "All Shook Up" when you got shocked.

Ceri, I need to pick your brains about explosives, that is a classic

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Good one....i felt like I was part of AC/DC after the event!
cheers,
Alex

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......it's a topsy-turvy world when noses run and feet smell...

Sure I've got a photo of it somewhere...

All perfectly legal but very out of date, technologywise. Dunno if anyone remembers those olde worlde camera flashbulbs that had two metal terminals sticking out the bottom which you pushed into the flash attachment on very historic types of cameras? You used one of those as the catalyst on the far end of a length of two-core cable, fired by a nine volt battery running through a little switch which I used to tape to my hi-hat stand. Then you made a thin shell casing from tinfoil, packed it with stage smoke powder (from theatrical suppliers) with the flashbulb embedded in the middle of it. Place the whole thing in an empty tuna fish can in front of the drumkit and when you press the switch - presto! - a big white flash and a stage instantly filled with smoke.

I still have that old drumkit in the attic with burn marks on the bottom of the bass drum from putting the ordinance too close. I expect it's all stupidly dangerous and I wouldn't recommend anyone to try it...

Cheers - C

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Hi boxbang: no, I drive past Stonehenge regularly and it really is as small as in Spinal Tap. Look:



...Nah, just kidding:



(Wearing my Forum T-shirt, BTW.)

Cheers - C

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Stupid, dangerous and totally unrecommended!

I'm all over it!

Now just to devise some way of modding a neck to a quick release system. So I can make it look like the guitar has exploded.


BTW, Moonie classic. Why he is the best ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVa4q-YVjD8

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