Conference mr1pst::music

Just a couple of weeks ago I played guitar and sang at a friend's
wedding.  There were supposed to be three of us:

    o	1st song, I sing lead, player B sings harmony

    o	2nd song, player B sings lead, myself and player C sing harmony

    o	3rd song, player C sings lead, myself (low part) and player C( high
	part) sing harmony

On the day of the wedding, player B doesn't show up :-(.  But the show
must go on!  I had to do song 1 without harmony, we had to scratch 
song two, and on song three I had to sing the high part instead of the 
low one (the low one doesn't sound right without the high one).  The part 
was a bit high for my range, too.  Managed to not crack too badly.

-Hal

P.S.  Lale, you should check out GUITAR :-), there's a whole topic of
"gigs from hell".

    Here's one you didn't mention:
    
    While the group is on a break, one member manages to get arrested,
    thereby missing the rest of the performance.
    
    							Brian

	In 23 years of club gigging I've never had a musician not show up.
Until last June when the drummer didn't show up.  And none of the possible
last second fill-in people were reachable.  And the staff kept asking, "So uh,
where's the drummer?"  Or "You *do* have a drummer, right?", and the owner just
shakes his head in disgust and walks away.  It was a thursday night gig and the
drummer just spaced it.  Amazing, even for a drummer ;-).

	It was a 3 piece gig so myself and the other guy did a blues duo, which
is actually how we started the band, and people actually liked it.  But the club
management didn't like it (and who can blame them!) and payed us a VERY reduced 
wage and cancelled all our remaining gigs.  I can't recall ever being quite so
embarrassed.

	Eventually they've hired us back in spite of themselves but I won't be 
forgetting that experience soon.

	Mark

    Gheeesh, Lale. You list all that stuff like it's unusual!
    
    74. A drunk will insist you play "Freebird".
    
    75. A drunk will insist you let *him* play "Freebird".
    
    76. Some woman in a black jump suit will insist you let her
    	precocious 9 year old daughter play keyboards. (This can be fun.
    	Set your digital delay to 50ms. And fully "wet". See Sally
    	squirm...)
    
    Edd

    and

    77. You're bass player books you into a biker hangout on
        "Wild Turkey Night" ($.50 shots) and 'round 'bout midnight
        one member of your band cops an attitude with the audience
        that they as a group take offense at thereby causing the
        evenings festivities to come to an abrupt halt and the balance
        of the members to do the fastest talking of their collective 
        lives getting away with only minor equipment damage.

    
    78.  Everyone shows, except the drummer is a bit, shall we say,
         smashed (actually, he can't walk, much less play).  
	 He makes it through the first set, but we lose track of him during
    	 the break and he finds more potent potables (for $100 Alex).  
    	 He passes out during  the second set, falling off the stage and 
    	 generally knocking down a bunch of equipment.  End of gig, and we 
    	 don't get invited back (management was not pleased).  
    	 The next week we get a new drummer.  BTW, this was while I was in 
    	 college and the drummer was only 17 at the time.
    

    the only potent potables i can think of that cost
    $100 do NOT make people pass out.  he should have played
    all NIGHT for $100 worth.
    
    or at least that is what i read in newsweek ;-)

    He didn't pass out, his body simply couldn't keep up with his mind.
    
    Edd

>    74. A drunk will insist you play "Freebird".
>    75. A drunk will insist you let *him* play "Freebird".
    
    You BETTER be prepared to handle these situations because if I had
    a nickle for every time this happened to me, I could have retired
    years ago.

    Ooooh, yeah. Make that bass player and I am there. We had to practically
    prop up our bassist one night after he fell off the wagon in a big way.
    There's nothing like counting down a tune, everybody starts in
    except...where's the bass? We look over to stage left and there he is
    staring at with this "doe caught in the headlights" blank look. While we
    look back as to say "JERRRRYYY"!!! He responds by thumping out something
    in the wrong key.  Whoa. We had a talk with that boy. Put him right back
    on the wagon.

    > Tip: Charge them a nickle each time...
    
    I'd rather be broke than play "Freebird"...
    
    Edd
    
    

    I'd rather be dead than let a drunk play Freebird at my gig and on MY
    instrument. Even though saying "over my dead body" makes for bad PR.

Drummer calls the club 10 minutes before set time "Well, the singer
said to call if I couldn't make it".  ARG!  We borrowed the drummer from
the 2nd band and I coached him all the way. Actually, it didn't work out
too badly, esp. being all originals.

Play to empty clubs a lot %^). One time our singer grabbed one of those
full-size cardboard beer-ad blonds and stood her up on the dance floor while
we were playing! She was actually pretty cool, until our guitarist tried to
dance with her and she got crushed.

Droid

    RE: .7
    
    I guess you're not a big Jeopardy fan, that's what the "for $100 Alec" 
    was in reference to (Jeopardy very often has a category named "Potent
    Potables").
    
    
    

>    (Jeopardy very often has a category named "Potent Potables").
    
    You watch this show often, Al?  %^)
    
    Dave

    
    After 20 years of gigging, I've lived thru way too many "gigs from
    hell" and I won't bore you with any of them ... 
    
    However, I vividly remember a theatrical "show from hell" ...
    
    I was in a theatrical group doing "Jesus Christ Superstar" back in
    the 70's. One night when we were doing a show, everything was going
    fine right until the end. "Jesus" is up on the cross, arms tied to the 
    cross-beam...there are lots of people gathered around the base of the 
    cross, looking up, and suddenly the cross-beam decides to part company
    with the rest of the cross ... One serious concussion, one "Jesus" with
    a broken arm, lots of various bruises and contusions and loads of
    laughs from the audience ("gees, I didn't know this show was a
    comedy...")
    
    /Billy_K
    

           <<< Note 537.6 by AIMHI::KERR "Caught In The Crossfire" >>>
                -< I bet this has happened to others as well. >-

    
>>    78.  Everyone shows, except the drummer is a bit, shall we say,
>>         smashed (actually, he can't walk, much less play).  
>>	 He makes it through the first set, but we lose track of him during
>>    	 the break and he finds more potent potables (for $100 Alex).  
>>    	 He passes out during  the second set, falling off the stage and 
>>    	 generally knocking down a bunch of equipment.  End of gig, and we 
>>    	 don't get invited back (management was not pleased).  
>>    	 The next week we get a new drummer.  BTW, this was while I was in 
>>    	 college and the drummer was only 17 at the time.
    


     A variation of this theme happened to me....


    Drummer drunk. Plays at varying speeds mostly too slow. During first
   break he falls on top of the lead guitarists' SG which.... 

     .....BREAKS THE NECK OFF!!!

   Needless to say the l.g. was not happy and Lord knows I was totally 
 disgusted. I sat out the rest of the night (rhythm guitarist) so the lead
 player had a guitar.

    - Bob

	1. One of the players doesn't show up.

Yes.  It's how I got the job of lead singer added to my job of bass 
player.  The no-show lead singer was fired two weeks later.  Not that 
*I* was all that great, but he was really baaaaaaaaaad.
	
	3. All players show up, the show is on, but someone 
	forgets his/her costume at home.

Yes.  Me.  Everyone else was in 3-piece show suits; I was in corduroy 
Levis and an Izod shirt.  Everyone thought I was with Talking Heads.  
:-)
	
	5. All players, with all their costumes, with all the pieces are 
	there and the show is on but we have no audience. We dance to an 
	empty room.

Too often to recall without shame & embarrassment!
	
	6. Everything is perfect, we have a full house but the audience 
	is depressed about the ozone layer and they watch us as they 
	would watch a doorknob.

Yes.  However, I had a tape unit patched into the mixer with 3 Stooges
clips of Moe smacking Curly around for just such occasions.  We'd fire off
a salvo during quiet parts of certain songs.  It usually worked.
	
	The Practice:
	
	1. At least one person does not show up.

Sure.  Very often.
	
One last thing... I had a 40-watt Traynor amp as a spare just in case 
something happened to one of the guitar amps.  One night Mark dumped a 
beer into his 50-watt Marshall, and the Traynor was put into service.  
Mark loved it so much, I never saw it again.  Those EL34s!  :-)  Served me
right for using tube amps for bass.

- craig (former bass player with "Joker" from Franklin, MA, ca. 1976)

                                   

    Geez, where to start?....
    
    1) You show up for a gig where what your drummer thinks is the drum
    riser (for his 3,326 piece custom sonor kit), the club thinks is the
    entire stage.
    
    2) Your agent books you a gig playing a Prom, despite your best
    protestations that the material may be a tad bit heavy for a prom ("but
    they LOVED your demo, and the older sister of the class president saw the 
    band at Sanctuary and LOVED you"), you show up to find that the Prom
    has a "theme", which is "We've Got Tonight", and it has been promised
    that the band would play an extended version of "We've Got Tonight" by
    Bob Seager, which of course no one in the band really knows, let alone
    hasn't played before.  So at the appointed time, your lead guitarist
    figures that maybe "Stairway to Heaven" will do, despite the fact that
    the band hasn't played that before either.  He's actually pulling it
    off fairly well, until about 2/3 of the way through, he completely
    loses his place, stops, yells "*$^& this!", and instead we get saved by
    the bass player who seques into "Psycho Chicken" by The Fools, which we
    do pull off.  About 15% of the audience (and the band) are in
    hysterics, about 85% of the audience (including the Prom committee and
    the faculty) want to kill us.
    
    3)  Your very-single female lead singer decides that she likes what she
    sees among the herd that has gathered to drool at the front of the
    stage during a gig, and takes off between the 3rd and 4th sets, not to 
    be seen again until the next practice the following week.  "Ok, who
    wants the vocals on this one?"
    
    4)  Your agent books you for a private party at top $, because the
    purchasers (who are throwing a going away party for a friend) say
    they've seen the band and really want us to play.  They rent a large
    hall, and plan to pay the band from the entrance fee which is charged
    to everyone who comes (by invitation only, several hundred people). 
    When they send out the invitations, they put THE WRONG CITY on them, so
    only about 50 people show, and half of them went to the wrong city
    first.  Most had figured that they got the date wrong.  We get just
    enough to pay our sound company.
    
    Cheers,
    Ken