Your most embarrassing moment

castlerock

castlerock

New member
After reading Thurgood's post "The new guitar god strikes again" and seeing most of the replies, I started thinking back to my gigging days. I never suffered anything like what was seen in that video, but I've had my moments when something I did wasn't as well planed as it should have been. Then again, sometimes shit just happens. =]


So what is one of your most embarrassing moments at a gig? (If you have more than one, please....do share. -L-)
 
embarrising moment ?

well i sure have had my share of missed que's on stage .....and some of my solo's have been less than stelar.. but you just gotta keep on going .... but the most embarrising was when a bass player [who no longer play's w/ us] fell asleep beteween songs while standing up at a gig ... :cool:
 
we set up for our last gig in a hurry. we take a computer with us for some drum machines and synths through reason. like a desktop PC :P we normally tape the keyboard to the top of the monitor so it doesn't fall off. didn't have time, half way a song i turned round, knocked it off and when it hit the floor it started the last drum machine we'd been using...

i did once borrow a guitar for a gig at the last minute too - didn't realise it had one less fret than my guitar until i tried to play it in this long, ambient melody... Eb didn't work quite as nicely as D normally does :D

Andy.
 
I had an entire show once that was an embarassment. No drummer or lead guitarist so we did an 'acoustic' show. Only my acoustic is notorious for bad intonation, and most of our songs lost their magic when stripped of the drums and lead guitar... I actually gave back my pay to the bar afterwards :)

We had a heavy-drinking singer who liked to get good and buzzed before shows. That always leads to good potential for embarassment as well. There was a time or two when he tripped and did 1/2 a song lying on his back. Its hard to make it look like you meant to do that number.

Then there was the cheap date drummer with a low alcohol tolerance who got (what I thought was) a little drunk with me before a show. He slept on his snare drum between songs (kind of like the bassist above hehehe). But by George, he popped right up and clicked off every song in tempo when the time came! That was more of a proud moment than an embarrasing one though.
 
dave..... said:
well i sure have had my share of missed que's on stage .....and some of my solo's have been less than stelar.. but you just gotta keep on going .... but the most embarrising was when a bass player [who no longer play's w/ us] fell asleep beteween songs while standing up at a gig ... :cool:
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-LOL- years ago i went to see a band (they were all friends of mine) that had a guitarist with a bit of a drinking problem. he did the same thing...passed out standing up...in the middle of a song.
 
i guess it wouldn't be fair to ask the question without sharing at least one of my own. =]

we were once playing a little road house bar in south louisiana. the crowd was hot, the beer was cold and life was good. i was feeling a little too good i guess and leaped off the stage to the dance floor at the start of an extended solo i did in Mind Bender (we were a classic rock band). i usually play with a 15 ft. chord or longer, but that night i was using a 12 ft chord. who would have thought i could jump more than 12 ft from nearly a stand still? the chord wasn't looped through my strap like it should have been and came unplugged at the start of the solo. so there i was burning through this classic rock guitar solo with an unplugged guitar.


another time i had a brain fart at the beginning of Born To Be Wild and started playing China Grove....just a few measures. i had to stop and get with the other guitarists because i was getting the two songs confused. and now, i wasn't really buzzed much. i just had a major brain fart at the worst possible time. i guess it's contagious because the other guitarists couldn't remember, the bass player couldn't remember, and the drummer couldn't even hum it for me. after about a two min. conference with the band on stage the song's intro finally came to me. that kinda sucked. =]
 
Let's see, there have been so many of them...

There was the time that I kicked off "Tequila" all alone on acoustic guitar and the band came in on bar 9 in the correct key, only I had been one fret sharp all through the intro.

There was the time I got to an out of town gig only to realize that I had left both my guitars at home.

There was the time that 5 seconds before we kicked off the set opener, the bass player came over to me and told me how great the mushrooms were that he was just coming on to. He had a bit of a problem focusing that night.

There was the time our female singer (who had just started taking antidepressants) drank four glasses of wine before the gig and then fell backwards into the drum kit in the middle of the first song, out cold.

There was the time that I didn't have a strap, so I tried to sit up on a piano, hung my jeans up on a hinge, and ripped my pants nearly off in front of several hundred people.

There are plenty more...
 
I was doing one of those idiotic over the shoulder guitar throwing things....straplock broke and I launched my strat into the middle of the dance floor.
 
i decided to be cool one night and jump up on the drum riser to have a moment with the drummer and ended up falling right through the middle of the kit......hurt like hell, pissed him off too cause he fell off his throne and off the riser on his back........so much for being cool.....damn i miss the 80's.....lol
 
i got one

I had just got a korg rack tuner. I changed guitar strings before the gig on one of my guitars. Well... i didn't recognize the sharp/flat lights on the new tuner so the guitar was tuned to a half step up or down (cant remember). So when it was time to use that guitar my monitor had very little of the bass guitar. So I was just rockin on for 3/4 of the song until i notice some ugly faces and relized it was my guitar. It was a real rrrr.... moment. I apologized to the audience and didn't use that guitar the rest of the night.
 
I was on acid one night in about '87, playing a top 40 dance gig. I spilled bongwater on my parachute pants and tried to cover it up with a half a bottle of Chaps. I didn't smell exactly like a porta-potty, but let's just say the smell was reminiscent of one.

The first step is admitting you had parachute pants.
 
ggunn said:
There was the time that I kicked off "Tequila" all alone on acoustic guitar and the band came in on bar 9 in the correct key, only I had been one fret sharp all through the intro....
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haha - i've never done it, but for most of the bands we play with, it appears to be standard practise :p i'm always scared because we have a brilliant bassist, but she's overconfident and plays most stuff to ear (she can't be bothered remembering what key each song starts in) so we have a discussion at the start of every few songs about what key she's meant to play in. once she knows she's fine - but i could tell her something different and she wouldn't know, she'd just play it note perfect in that key, the little freak :p

Andy.
 
This was on tour in Iowa. The first night I ever had hard-liquor, I first downed a 20-oz bottle of smirnoff ice (worst drink ever, but it's all we had left in the cooler), and had a good 1/4 bottle of 15% alcohol beer in the span of about 5 minutes. We had then run out of alcohol, so we ran to the liquor store and I bought a traveller of Jim Beam and a 2-liter of coke.

Now, nobody had told me how much to mix, so I took an empty water bottle and mixed in 3/4 jim beam, 1/4 coke. Then I downed that just like I downed beer: in about 5-10 minutes.

Bad idea apparently, paying special consideration to the fair amount of beer I'd had before hand.

After throwing up for a good hour/hour 1/2 into a nearby dumpster, it was out turn to headline the show. I'll be damned if I didn't wipe myself off, walk over to my guitar rig (which my band had kindly set up for me) and start the first notes of the song. I kicked in my noise suppressor about 2 bars in, and lo and behold: it was set to mute!

So I started the song over, and played through our 5-song (long songs) set, including all of the solos & leads.

Then I put my guitar down, walked over to the dumpster, and threw up for another hour or so haha

Yep, not my best moment.
 
Nothing too bad, just the standard "forgetting lyrics" and playing after too many drinks.

I replaced a whole verse with "Na na na's" at my bands first Battle of the Bands. The song was old, but the lyrics were redone just a few days before the gig, and I still wasn't used to singing them.

Then, about two years ago I played for friends and family in my yard drunk as hell at my graduation party (was my first time drinking). I still haven't mustered up the courage to watch that video, but I'm sure it was horrible.

The only other time I played when I wasn't sober was at another graduation party last year. I had smoked some "premo" (marijuana mixed with coke) with a friend of mine without knowing it was laced with anything. I figured it would wear off in the couple hours I had until the gig, but nope. I was high for...somewhere around 4-6 hours I think. Maybe more. We played most of the songs well, but there was one song with a speedy bridge that I couldn't handle in the state that I was in, so we had to stop mid song.

Yeah I felt bad after all of these for letting my band mates down. I still don't like to think about it a whole lot.
 
I've had my share over the years but have forgotten most of them.

One that comes to mind is when, performing in a blues band, I was playing a short unaccompanied solo as an introduction to "The Blues had a Baby" that the singer would key to when he started the song. One time instead of ending the solo on a G note, which was the key of the song, I did something a little different and finished up on the 7th above the root note, an F, and that's the key he picked. :eek: I had to flag him down and start over. :o

There are a couple of other instances of imbibing waaaaaayyyy to much of something or another and not being able to feel my fingers, much less move them in a manner simulating guitar playing.... :o :o
 
Its so funny how closely related the occurences of over-indulgence in one substance or another goes hand-in-hand with embarassing on-stage moments.

I played one show stoned and never again. I have enough trouble remembering the chord changes even when I haven't had my short-term memory artificially impaired.

Did a show on speed and I have no idea how the show sounded, but I do know that my pick was torn to shreds by the end of the show.

A show on acid? Oh shit I cant even begin to imagine how difficult that would be. I'd probably be in a stall in the bathroom playing air guitar thinking I was on stage.

Me: I'm playing the star spangled banner!
Band: We thought you were taking a dump.
Me: Can't I be doing both?
 
cephus said:
I was on acid one night in about '87, playing a top 40 dance gig. I spilled bongwater on my parachute pants and tried to cover it up with a half a bottle of Chaps. I didn't smell exactly like a porta-potty, but let's just say the smell was reminiscent of one.
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jesus man! thats crazy! hehe, i tried playing on acid once back in the late 80's and couldn't do it. it was just too funny. i can't imagine trying to play a gig on it.

cephus said:
The first step is admitting you had parachute pants.
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ok......i had parachute pants. errr...actually i still have them. they're packed away in the closet somewhere. i guess that makes my problem chronic. =]
 
Tadpui said:
Its so funny how closely related the occurences of over-indulgence in one substance or another goes hand-in-hand with embarassing on-stage moments.
Click to expand...
One time another band I was in rented a local theater, charged for admission, all that stuff - we were doing what we hoped to be a good, professional show.

Five minutes before we started the singer announced that he had dropped a tab of acid 30 minutes previously. :eek: :mad: He got pretty manic and sung himself hoarse in the space of three songs. :mad: No tempo was fast enough for him. (I think that acid must have been cut with a healty dose of crystal.)
 
OK here's mine, sober even :o

This was right before the Strokes blew up real big, but I had heard of them so I suggested we add "Last Night" to the set, and we'd be extra hip :cool: :o So the guitarist and I (bass) knew the song, we taught the singer and the keyboard player (strange I know, but he was in the band, so therefore there was a keyboard part).

Somehow the drummer missed the practices where we rehearsed the tune, but he heard it once, and he was a really good drummer, an old clubbing pro, so I figured no worries.

So the gig starts off and we are three tunes in and the crowd is dead. I mean DEAD. We aren't used to that, we had a very uptempo classic rock set (early Beatles, Stray Cats, etc.), and people always got up dancing real quick.

So song #4 is the Strokes tune, and that tune has a drum intro, and I realize too late we are doomed. The drummer starts in, and he's playing the wrong beat. He's doing a beat like the intro to the reprise on Sgt. Pepper's. I'm staring at him, he knows something isn't right, so I tell him the only thing I can think of quickly, which was to double it :confused: so he starts gradually speeding up. Pretty soon the guitarist comes in at a vivace tempo :eek: and then the vocal . . . . and the whole band manages a ritardando to a reasonable pace.

Oh did I want to crawl backstage and die :(
 
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