Your worst gig played or seen

In 1978 i played in a band called de-deprss and the scuts.

OK, back in about 1992/93, the day started with me getting my new flying V guitar which I'd been waiting for a couple of months to get. I worked in a music store so I spent some time setting it all up real nice so I could use it that night for a show we had. Just before the show, I was joking with a friend of mine, "tonight, would be a great night to break a string" because there weren't many people there. So about 5 songs in of course string breaks on my new V, and the other guitar is still in it's case 'cause I just never really break strings. So I tell our drummer, "hey just do a drum solo for a bit" (which he always wants to do, he's a drummer) He starts his solo while I grab my other guitar and get ready to go into another song and what do ya know, he breaks his kick drum skin and double kick pedal. Needless to say it was quite a short set and a quiet ride home.

Worts gig : Larry Coryell opening up for Jean Luc Ponty during his coke days at the St Denis Theatre in Montréal. Came out so strung out that he couldn't even plug in his electric. Then a roadie came out and handed him an Ovation electro-acoustic. He just basically f**ked around and didn't really play anything that was recognizable. He came on with Ponty's band for the encore which was Egocentric Molecules. I felt bad for Larry because he was and still is one of my favourite guitarists of all time. I went to that gig to see Coryell more than Ponty but wasn't completely disappointed because Ponty had a smoking band with two guitarists Darryl Stuermer ( Genesis )  and Joachim Leovano. 

mrcozdude wrote: TODDLER wrote: In 1983 I was booked to play at a very large venue somewhere in the mountains of Northern P.A.  The owner promised 2 grand for 2 nights. He put us in a 2 story house and just the top floor was available for sleeping. As we went to sleep, we heard nightmarish screams in the house. We turned on the lights and there was a huge parrot in a cage. This thing made me want to extinguish a cigarette in the flesh sockets above my head. On the second night we were hit with a massive snowstorm. As we were packing up. we witnessed our drummer going into a fit of anger with the owner. The owner had now went back on his word and was offering only thirteen hundred. In the late 80's, I was broke and joined a top 40 cover band. They offered between 5 to 6 hundred a week. to perform la-de-da 80's top 40 songs. The lead vocalist and keyboardist hired me, the bass player and drummer all in the same day, on the spot, at the audition. They played the Atlantic City Casino for 2 years. I wore a penguin suit and drove home with the sun in my face every morning. It was brought to my attention a few months down the road from band members that our 2 band leaders were gay. I really thought nothing of it in particular. I had already been in the entertainment business for 12 years at that time and understood that it was their preference. Many entertainers and musicians on the road just happened to be gay. I never entered into it. Various performers that I worked with had a preference to be gay and all of the musicians (for the most part), in those bands that were straight excepted it and kept a steady professional friendship going. After we left the casino gigs, we were booked at a rock club. Club owners were hiring DJ'S for the weekends instead of bands so money was tight. Our singer had a wide vocal range and covered many a difficult feat. The drummer, bass player and me were leaving the club that night and walking to our cars when we were approached by at least 20 guys yelling at us and saying that they were going to kick our ass because we were gay. I turned to the leader and said, we just finished our job here and we are now going home to our wives and children. He then screamed at me, But your singers are gay! I just couldn't reach this guy and so my bass player jumped in and handled the situation well. He somehow talked them out of it. I couldn't believe they wanted to harm us over such an issue. Talk about having your butt in a sling. We were lucky to get out of that mess. They had baseball bats and were ready to crack our teeth and bust our heads  I should have quit then. I was in a terrible car accident on the way to a gig and suffered from extreme head injury. I asked them to cancel for a week so that I could recover and they threatened to fire me. I sat on a stool with a bad head injury playing 80's garbage rock just to make a fast buck and pay the bills. .  .   You need to write a book. Has any of these events ever made anyone here reconsider music professionally?

I spent close to 30 years on the road with every type of band conceivable to mankind and I have been in the past, pretty much an ideal candidate for psychiatric treatment because of it. Well, the life style you know? From age 7 to 18 I spent my youth in a room with my father teaching me guitar. All I did was study and had no real contact with the outside world. At 18, and going on the road was a shock to my reality but, I carried a chip on my shoulder regarding society as a whole and it was not a very healthy experience. There is a vast level of criminal activity in the music business. For 5 years I performed with bands that were in higher circles (so to speak), and the crime was very organized.. It was actually scary to sit in your Holiday Inn room and ponder over this junk. I was touring on that circuit with Hackett, Dixie Dregs, Renaissance, Ian Hunter, Happy the Man, sometimes....Nektar. I was paid one hundred dollars a night. Rooms were paid for by the corporation. They paid me 25 dollars an hour to rehearse and meals were paid for as well. We traveled on a bus and sometimes limos. Transportation was provided and all the money I made was kept in my wallet for the most part. It was a great experience because I got to work with brilliant musicians. They were usually 10 or 12 years older than me and they were my teachers on the road. Playing this circuit was totally insane. You never knew who was going to pop up in the venue or backstage. Famous comedians and musicians that I listened to when I was a kid. I learned a great deal about the music business in this hands on type situation. Doc Seversion and his band from the old Johnny Carson show were touring this circuit and a punk rock band called The A's. Eventually one day  Steve Hackett just disappeared. He just vanished off the circuit and fled to England. He was suppose to play the western United States but bailed out for some reason or other. The circuit that I was playing was known at that time as the "Has Been Circuit" or simply the "Celebrity Circuit".  As everyone knows around that particular time, prog was on it's way out and promotion was becoming less and less. I jumped onto that circuit at the very bitter end of things.

It was 1991, my old band played a joint called the Carteret Hill Bowl. It was literally a bowling alley with a stage over the lanes. The crowd there was shockingly redneck, and they had no intentions whatsoever of listening to our brand of heavy psychedelic funk. They began flashing the lights for us to stop halfway through one song - the drummer mistook that signal for a light show and thought that they loved us, so he extended the song into a 25 minute jam. By this time the crowd was livid. We packed our stuff, and a car followed us until we reached the city limits and then turned around!

This is frustrating and disturbing. In the early 80's during extensive travel our manager or band leader would be in charge of hiring sound techs. We had a different one every week. During some point of a gig, a guy would stop in and slide a few hundred dollars into the sound techs pocket and say: "If you make them sound like crap, the money is yours". My drummer would somehow get wind of this and fire the soundman. This went on for about 2 months. As it turns out, this guy or whoever would proposition the soundman, were musicians from various bands that our manager booked. They were angry over the fact that our manager was dating our singer and as a result we obtained the better gigs, while they performed in rat holes.