Your worst gig played or seen

I saw bad gigs, and I played bad gigs, which I won't describe. I don't care much if I'm performing in front of a small audience (ten people) as far as I'm somewhat satisfied with performance. Also there were performances where audience cheered, shouted, applauded, asked for encores, but I don't think my band was deserving it. However, it's all part of the experience.

^ Ha, I've experienced that as a band manager - the van containing half the band and all the gear got lost on the way to Camden and arrived with barely minutes to set up and play. Somehow in that short space of time (and while on stage) one of the band member's (no names to protect the innocent ) imbibed so much stress relieving beverage that she could barely stand and managed to bend the mic stand double in an attempt to support herself - needless to say the gig was more emotional than intended. I imposed a pre-gig alcohol ban after that, and suggested that only water be drunk while on stage.

^ I'm sure you mean Peter

Dean wrote: ^ I'm sure you mean Peter

That's what I said look ^^^

For the end of year 12, me and some dudes in the year level were asked to play a thing for the end of the school year, in front of all the year 10s, year 11s, year 12 and all the school staff at our campus. I can't remember who came up with the idea (most likely our drummer), but yeah, we ended up playing a bunch of classic rock and metal stuff (so parts of   We Will Rock You by Queen, so parts of Iron man by Black Sabbath TNT by AC/DC and of course the totally unexpected Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple)

Firstly, there was zero stage monitoring, so I could barely make out the vocals, couldn't hear the bassist nor the other 2 guitarists at all and basically could only hear myself and the drummer. It's amazing we were even able to be in the same sections of the songs in that circumstance.

Secondly, or some reason by the time we got near the end of the peformance, at the TNT part which was the last song of the medley, I got extremely nervous and anxious, RIGHT BEFORE THE GUITAR SOLO and it continued into the solo (given I have been getting severe anxiety problems that year, that sort of thing seemed to strike at any random time). Pretty much every note was being bent out of tune and my vibrato was horrible (picture Kirk Hammett trying to play AC/DC leads and you're on the money......or the guitarists from Dragonforce, either one or the 2 is okay) because I was so nervy that I wasn't able to totally control what I was doing at all.
The musicians in the crowd (which wasn't many luckily) must have been cringing during that solo.

And then weirdly enough, we straight after played an instrumental version of BB King's rendition of The Thrill is Gone (although we even then had our own arrangement of the piece) and my playing was perfectly fine and totally in tune and controlled during the guitar solos


Edited by Petrovsk Mizinski - October 20 2009 at 05:12

^ mainly because the acoustics change when the venue is full from what it was during the sound check - a bad sound engineer will compensate for that on levels rather than EQ.

I played with my doom/ death metal act Last Abide ( I think it was in 1994) to a very hostile crowd of mothers and their small children. They screamed: "Stop the noise" between each of the songs in our set. Needless to say we turned up the volume to pain level. Not the best night of my life but I learned a lot from the experience. Such as know your audience.

I'm just sitting here wondering if I ever played a good gig. I was very drunk and stoned most of the time, up until the last couple of years since I've cleaned up my act.
I do remember one gig where I was so messed up I dedicated a cover of "For your Love" to my female cousin.....Ouch!

Yeah not rehearsing and gigging can be a bad idea.Sometimes the improv is great other time it just goes to sh*t.

Worst gig conditions:
played in a bar where the guitarist/singer had to stand behind the counter with the microphone hanging from a shelft, the other guitarist had to turn his back to the rest of the band, and keys+bass+drums stuck in a 3x2 space...
We played a tribute to the doors, all drunk, with lost of improv.