Worst live experience?

[SenorDingDong]

Now in my days of music, I have had some pretty shitty things happen live.. From puking bass player to drummer forgetting all cymbals.. But the worst thing live was at the Webster, my old death metal band Shadow Sanctuary was opening for Taiwanese black metal band Chthonic... We were on right before Chthonic and after our second song, my rhythm guitarists guitar dropped UNBELIEVABLY out of tune. We were in drop c, and he ended up in like A or something... But for some reason he refused to tune, so I ended up having to palm mute A LOT of our third song to try and cover up the difference. Thankfully there was no solo in the song, or he would have made me sound bad
But after that song me and the sound guy exchanged a glance and he knew what was up, so he shut off my rhythm's amp. Saved! But by far the worst experience, especially being right before such a tight band. At least it has a happy ending. So what is YOUR worst experience?

 

[Soubi7string]

shit I don't know where to begin.
hmm well there was the first show or any show at this place called Fathom,shady fucking place, and we were playing and no monitors or anything(even though there were some dude just wouldn't turn them on),Lead forgot to bring his NS pedal so he was squaking and squealing, the dude wouldn't give us a soundcheck(he literally refused).Then at the end of the night they said we didn't bring in enough people, which was BULLSHIT cause we clicked the door and got 80 something to show and the requirement was like 50 or something.So yeah overall that was probably our worst night.I'll share more later.

 

[ZXIIIT]

I would say yesterday was my worst show in a while.
Was very sick and felt like shit, we did our soundcheck before playing our set, only to realize that our levels were completely opposite (loud vocals/guitars, very low drums/backing tracks) so the first 2 songs were a complete mess.

2nd singer kept going off time because of the sound issues and me feeling like shit affected my stage presence.

The last 2 songs were ok, felt the adrenaline and got into it, but will definitely be one of our worst shows to date.

 

[jymellis]

I would say yesterday was my worst show in a while.
Was very sick and felt like shit, we did our soundcheck before playing our set, only to realize that our levels were completely opposite (loud vocals/guitars, very low drums/backing tracks) so the first 2 songs were a complete mess.

2nd singer kept going off time because of the sound issues and me feeling like shit affected my stage presence.

The last 2 songs were ok, felt the adrenaline and got into it, but will definitely be one of our worst shows to date.

damn maing, hope ya feel better.

 

[ZXIIIT]

damn maing, hope ya feel better.

Thanks man, have a show tomorrow so I better !

 

[synrgy]

I've been lucky, in that one of the worst things to ever happen was a blown transformer in the middle of a DJ set. We re-routed power and had it resolved in about 3 minutes. It was actually pretty funny; the power blew *JUST* at the peak of a minute-long buildup/crescendo. *edit* Imagine all the sound at a Tool show cuts out immediately after Maynard sings "I must persuade you another waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy". It was like that.

In one of my old bands, we got booked for one of those 'if you don't sell tickets, you owe the venue money' sort of shows. The problem is, the only person in our band who knew it wast that kind of show was our drummer, and the idiot (no really, he was a complete imbecile) neglected to share that information with the rest of us, so we were totally caught with our pants down.

NOBODY was at the show besides us, the band who played before us, and the band we were opening for (Tribal Instinct, who were seriously the biggest bunch of posers I've ever had the displeasure of listening to) and a few obligatory girlfriends.

We were completely broke, and the venue people were basically trying to shake us down at the end of the show, threatening violence and the whole nine. Ultimately, our drummer had to leave all his cymbals with the venue as collateral until the band could come up with the $180 something they wanted us to pay them for the right to play in their dank hole-in-the-wall. It was a mess.

Mind you, they didn't ask the headlining band or the band who played before my band to pay a dime. I have no idea why we were the only band being picked on.

Anyway, that was like 11 years ago.

 

[ryzorzen]

My band almost played the wrong venue one night. We started wheeling the gear into one venue and realized we were playing down the road just as we locked the trailer up. Not that bad, but after a couple weeks of touring it really sucked haha

 

[Varcolac]

For the first few gigs with Prometheus, it seemed I was cursed to break all equipment.

One gig my guitar's output jack worked its way loose during the last song. Not the lead; the wires connecting the jack to the pickups. Fortunately it was during the outro of the final song, so I just had the synth player turn his keyboard all the way up and mimed the last chords.

At a gig three weeks later, using a different guitar, I managed to kill a Line 6 Spider during the same section of the same song. The sound started farting out and by a minute from the end there was nothing coming out of the speakers. For a minute I thought my second guitar in a month had gone the way of the dodo, but checking it through the bass amp after our set proved it wasn't the guitar; I'd just killed the amplifier dead.

And then there's the two times that I've launched in to the first riff of the first song, only to have my guitar strap fall off. Twice that's happened, and I've had to finish the first verse with the guitar on my knees until I can find a suitably musical place to hold a note and readjust my strap. I keep forgetting that I only have straplocks on my bass; I should really get some more for my other instruments.

 

[JohnIce]

My worst was only weeks ago.

A fellow AE student had planned to start up a monthly rock club at a local bar, and for the first event he asked my band to headline, with his band opening. We said sure, it was a good idea and well-needed in the town. So we do soundcheck, everything works pretty well, then we go off and his band is going to soundcheck. He asks me to do the sound for them, which I was happy to do, no biggie. So a few hours later their band go on to play their set, and it sounds great, I do some minimal tweaking and walk around the room listening etc. being pretty active throughout their whole set, even though the rest of my band were backstage drinking and having fun.

Then we go on. The dude has been drinking a lot during the show, so he goes off stage and "rearranges" the mixing console as he thought it had been when we did soundcheck... then he disappears. We go onstage, everything sounds like shit, and aside from being busy playing, I had no clue what was on each channel or what I could do to fix it. The crowd starts thinning out, either going downstairs or leaving entirely. We end up not playing two songs, and during the final song, only 2-3 of our closest friends are still in the audience.

When we come offstage and go back to the dressing room, there sits the dude, drinking with his band and a couple of girls. Completely oblivious to the fact that he had fucked up his own arrangement, completely humiliated us in our home town, and probably caused the bar to lose a ton of money from people leaving early. Not to mention being pretty fucking unproffessional in general.

We've had a lot off minor accidents onstage, for example I once broke my D string during the first song and didn't have a backup, so I kept playing the set... these things we can handle. But shit sound is shit, and there is nothing you can do about it, especially if your "sound tech" doesn't show up at all.

 

[Inazone]

My worst gig was an EP release show back in 2008. My wife was also in a band at the time, and she'd done a gig at this little hole-in-the-wall type of place that was tiny but had the type of layout that created the impression of playing to a big crowd. The house PA was minimal but sounded good, and the sound guy knew the board. I went ahead and booked us there.

Well, the night of the show arrives - a torrential downpour going on outside to set the mood - and we are sitting through the opening band. They sound pretty bad, but it's their first show, so we figure it's just them. They finish, we start setting up our gear, and this girl jumps on stage, barking orders at us in some sort of Eastern European accent that makes it very hard to understand her. As it turns out, she's running sound that night, and she's making it very clear that no death metal guys are going to tell her what to do. (Our bassist, who was trying to calm her down, was told "Shut the fuck up or get the fuck off MY stage!")

This was a recipe for disaster. Our rhythm guitarist was playing through a new rig (Peavey Triple XXX half stack) and was barely audible. I had to stand with half my pedalboard off the stage to get anywhere near a monitor. The kick drum trigger was virtually absent in the mix, and the bassist was blasting everyone off the stage. It sounded like ass, and naturally, this was one of those shows where people who hadn't seen us live in years came out to see us.

Disaster!

 

[Jogeta]

Mine was at this:

My wireless packed in. Then my backup cable broke.

I frickin' ADORE The Red Chord. Pretty much all the band merch I have is theirs. I guess they are sort of my heroes?

Looking like a twat in front of them burns to this very day!

 

[poopyalligator]

I have a bad habit of being the clumsiest person ever when it comes to playing live. One time i tripped and hit my head on the floor monitor, and started to bleed quite a bit. I ended up playing the whole show with a bunch of blood on my head and face. I was playing in a pop punk band at the time so it didnt add to my metal look lol. There was another time where i tripped before a show and split one of my rgs clear in half.

 

[Goatfork]

I was playing show with a make-shift band once for the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. Basically, you meet up with a bunch of musicians, form bands, and put on a show of a couple songs each at the end of two weeks.

I was lead guitar/vocals in our band and our last song was the BLS version of No More Tears. During the clean section immediately before the solo, I walked over to the other guitarist to have one of those 'rockstar moments' where you just kinda rock-out fretboard to fretboard.

The solo comes up, and not only am I on my clean channel, but I'm a good 15 to 20 feet away from the distortion box acting as my lead channel. I dash over and jump onto the button, disconnecting the pedal somehow from both leads, 'tweaking' some knobs with my foot, and I'm still late for the solo. I manage to plug it all back in, reset the knobs, and get right into the song just a couple measures before the fast part kicks in.

That. Sucked.

I know it isn't that bad compared to some of the horror stories posted here, and I know there are far more worse than those posted to come, but that's my worst.

 

[AcousticMinja]

We were at this local venue, one of those sell tickets to play ones, and both bands bailed, so we were the only ones playing. On top of that, I couldn't hear my vocals for the life of me and ended up being flat half the time I was singing. Lame.

 

[SenorDingDong]

Wow your guys stories totally beat mine! Especially dealing with an angry Eastern Euro chick haha

 

[Bloody_Inferno]

Where do I begin....?

One particular gig with my first band began with a horrible miscommunication between my singer and guitarist. Singer books a gig and guitarist goes off and watches the Two Towers premiere. Of course both being stubborn means neither was cancelled so our band went ahead and did it acoustic, without the guitarist, and me on guitar and our drummer on bongos. I bought my bass and keys, but I was forced to use my singer's acoustic with the high E missing. It also didn't really help when my singer drank himself to oblivion before he got onstage either.

On a grander scale, I was in a Gospel RnB band that played in the Melbourne Town Hall. That was a huge gig and a lot of buildup to it. Around 2 minutes before we hit the stage I got really nervous and ended up vomiting on my guitar. Thankfully it was dark and right before I got onstage so I just wiped it right off and played. But what's worse that happened came afterwards. After a few songs the whole onstage power went out. It held up the show and we all checked our power supplies to see if everything is good. A few minutes and power went back on again. We played a song then bam, power went out again. It turns out that one of the keyboard player's power supply was playing up and interfering with the earth line... or something like that. Dunno, but we fixed it right away and finished the show.

There was also a few recent shows last year where our then manager booked a gig and got mistaken between 2 venues, which cost us our punters and promos.

And also another gig where he booked headlining and he told us that we only had 15 minutes to play RIGHT WHEN WE WERE SETTING UP ONSTAGE. That gig sucked even more when our soundguy's mike on my amp failed and he didn't bother to replace it. I cracked it after our set, immediately packed up and went home. We sacked the soundguy then and eventually sacked the manager.

Lastly our album launch had a few problems. We used 8 Randall rental quads, while looked good onstage sounded horrible. I ended up breaking a string and used a backup that admittedly wasn't adequate for the material (though minor problem really). And it didn't help that our soundguy (another one) got plastered and forgot our settings. Outside his resident venue, we pretty much never worked with him again.

 

[AvantGuardian]

I played a gig in Tacoma one time for two people (my girlfriend and her friend). The other bands didn't stick around to watch us, and they didn't bring any crowd whatsoever. I also was running a fever and was having some pretty intense headaches. The band I was with was from Seattle, and no one wanted to drive down to Tacoma (45 minutes to an hour drive) to see us, especially since we were playing in Seattle once or twice a month back then. Actually, we had one fan from near Tacoma and he came out to the show but he didn't realize it was 21+ and he was 20, so he couldn't get in.

 

[-42-]

Honor Band concert in eighth grade.

Goddamn trombones couldn't keep tempo worth shit.

 

[stupidspoge]

I was doing a show for my school's performing arts class. Musicians recorded some clips of their playing, and the composers (also students) selected the musicians they wanted in their piece. I played Arch Enemy for my tryout, and got stuck in an indy rock act. What? (It wasn't my only act. The one I composed was metal.)

So a drum set and all of the amps were put on an 8' x 8' dolly, which was wheeled out for acts which needed it, and wheeled into the wings when it wasn't needed. The extension cord that ran to the riser came unplugged once during rehearsal, so somebody wrapped it in gaffing tape. The second night, they wheeled it on, and it came unplugged. I saw this, and one of the crew tried to plug it back in, but it was covered in tape! -_- There was no guitar that night, only synth, drums and vocals. Surprisingly, I got a nice clean out of my 5150 with the right settings. (when it had power.)

The last night, when we were moving the platform backstage after my piece (the metal one) one of the crew knocked the other guitarist's amp head (B-52 AT100) off of his cab! It fell into the drums and made a racket. We were scolded later by the music teacher... It, and the drums were fine though. Stupid crew...

Otherwise school performances, nothing has gone wrong.

 

[Ckackley]

Damn .. So many .. lol

Bad PA set ups, horrible management, gear we were promised not being there.. But the worst by far was getting electrocuted on stage. Somehow the power got weird and as I stepped on my volume pedal I got the crap knocked out of me. We finished the set without any volume swells and the rest of the band was like "WTF" until I told 'em what happened. I said something to the venue tech and his response was " Yeah, we've had that happen before. Been meaning to get an electrician in here but never got around to it. " I wanted to choke the man slowly to death . lol