Nobody gets it right all the time.Our lives are punctuated by defeat: losing isn’t so much the endgame as it is part of the game itself, and every single hard-won victory comes riding on a wave of a thousand fuck-ups.
The same applies for musos. Though we like to imagine our sonic heroes as crowdsurfin’, guitar-shreddin’ gods, forever forming one cool pose after the next, in actuality every rock dog on the planet has had their fair share of calamaties. After all, you can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, and when the hard times come, they come… well,hard.
In that vein, we reached out to some of our favourite failure-embracin’ bands and asked them to offer up their very worst gig story. Though we did so in partto prove that the flaws make the masterpiece, and that disappointment and disaster are human, we also did it for less highbrow reasons: namely, to indulge in that sick shot of vicarious pleasure that fills us whenever we see people walking into stuff.Read on, and prepare to cringe.
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Wimps
“We played a house party in Orange County, California on a hot summer night in August 2014. We showed up to a huge house packed with people. It was so sweaty inside that the floor was like a slip and slide, the crowd just barely remaining standing as they glid back and forth across the room.
“I set up my gear and then ran to the bathroom for a quick pre-show pit stop while [bandmates] Matt and Dave finished setting up their instruments. I waited in line for what felt like forever and then finally made it into the bathroom. There was no toilet paper (typical) and no soap (gross). I finished and grabbed the doorknob to exit – only when I twisted it, it fell out of the door and into my hand! I couldn’t put it back again because the part of the knob that holds it to the other side had fallen out. I tried to turn it with my finger, but to no avail.
“I realised I was stuck in the bathroom. ‘Uh, hello? Anyone out there? I’m stuck in the bathroom,’ I said, loudly, but not too loudly. I mean, I didn’t want to yell and sound like I’m freaking out. The party was very loud and all I could hear was yelling and music from the other side. ‘Uh, hello? Help? I’m stuck in the bathroom. I’M STUCK IN THE BATHROOM!’
“By now I was yelling and it was obvious no-one could hear me. I sent Matt and Dave a group text –Stuck in bathroom. Come get me –[then]waited a few minutes. Nothing. Frantic, I started looking around. We were supposed to have started playing ten minutes before. In a moment of what I like to call creative genius, I grabbed the nearest toothbrush and jammed it in the door, where the knob used to be, and turned it around and around. It caught, and the door opened and I was free!
“Elated, I rushed to the living room where my band looked at me, annoyed. ‘Where did you go?! We’ve been waiting!’ I guess they didn’t get my text. And then we started the show.”
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The Gooch Palms
“There’s been a few. From amps bursting into flames onstage (one time in front of Andre 3000 in Detroit) to the first time we played in Cleveland [for] five angry rednecks watching football on TV who didn’t turn around from the bar while we played except to scoff and laugh at us.
“But the worst show would have to be our very first show we ever played in Sydney. It was our third ever show. We had friends catch the train down from Newcastle – which is a big effort – and we were so excited to be playing a proper venue in Sydney. The sound guy was so angry and hated us as soon as we turned up. We had backing tracks that he was in full control of making sound good through the PA and he didn’t care enough to make them sound good – so it just sounded like really loud static noise.
“We tried to make up for the heinous sounds coming out of the speakers by putting on a good show but it was just so bad and embarrassing and it was really hard to pick ourselves up and keep going after that moment. Our friends said ‘Um, that was good?’ as politely as they could but we knew it was the worst.
“It’s funny to remember now and I definitely remember Leroy smashing a glass and screaming at the sound guy onstage then running around the whole venue like a chook without a head mid-set. But I guess that was the beginning of the idea of us putting on show rather than just standing there. So maybe it wasn’t so bad in the long run.”
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The Coathangers
“We played a DIY festival in Mexico when we were first touring … that turned into a nightmare. Basically it took us 14 hours to get to the festival [instead of] the six hours it should’ve taken, and then when we got there we had no money for food, only beer tickets. By the time it was our turn to play – hours later – the sun had gone down and it went from 80 degrees to like 40 degrees. We didn’t know it would get that cold so we didn’t pack anything warm and we were freezing!
“Luckily a really nice fan went back to his apartment and brought back gloves, hats, flannels right before we went on. So we were starving and freezing and we got on this ridiculously tall-ass stage and while we were playing the set the stage starts to shift forward… Luckily we didn’t collapse and we got through it. However, the trip back to Austin the next day also took like 18 hours … because all the buses scheduled to take us back both quit on us and then broke down… But ya live and learn right?”
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Torres
“Last year I played Primavera festival in Barcelona alone, sans band. I hadn’t begun using in-ear monitors yet, and the stage was so massive that my guitar-picking ended up getting mushy and extremely reverbed out. It ended up being ok until the end of my set when I actually lost the key I was singing in because I couldn’t hear the guitar. Embarrassing!”
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Georgia Mulligan
“It was pretty bad when my guitar kind of cut out in the middle of a set. I hadn’t set it up properly yet and the tuning pegs were ancient, so between songs it just started refusing to tune. I stood there alone on the stage trying to tune, mind imploding, for what felt like an hour, but it was probably only five minutes. Eventually, Julia Jacklin, who was headlining, called out from the crowd, ‘Hey, you wanna use my guitar?’ and rescued me. I rushed through the last songs on her Tele and couldn’t wait to get offstage to vomit from stress. Everyone there said it was fine but it felt pretty pathetic. Finally got my guitar fixed though.”
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Ouch My Face
“We [once] played in the basement of a bizarre club in Sydney. We had to load in down a lift that surely could not have legally accommodated more than one person at a time, and it smelt like dead fish. Then, mid-gig, the ladies’ toilets, which were located just off to the side of stage, exploded – spewing forth their delights and aroma into the main room.
“Another time [Celeste] Potter, Ben and Steve (original bass player) toured NZ after the first EP. Great time, fun shows. Then at the airport on the way home, they realised that they didn’t have enough money collectively to pay the departure tax (about $15 each) to leave the country and had to call family/friends for a lifeline.
“And then, another time, Celeste once had a punter jump up onstage and decide to take over the mic to tell a joke. With all eyes on him he begins ‘What’s the difference between ET and Asians? Asians went HOME!'”
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Bleached
“A couple years ago we flew to NY to play a show on the pier in Manhattan. It was sponsored by Sailor Jerry’s new liquor so people were getting pretty annihilated – including us. Anyways, as we were playing a vending machine on the pier sitting right behind us caught on fire. We had no idea there was a fire happening so we just kept playing. They finally stopped the show and afterwards everyone was saying they thought we purposely lit it on fire. To make matters worse we all ended up getting kicked out of the after party.”
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WAAX
“One night in Melbourne we were smacked in the face with a bad luck shit storm. Our snare stand, which is made of metal, somehow snapped in half during soundcheck, [so] the wizard sound guy made a replacement out of half of the broken piece and a microphone stand. Then, during the second song our bass amp broke. It took five minutes to replace it with a spare they had – we awkwardly jammed an outro until it was finished. Then a guitar amp stopped working [during] a song for no reason. To cap it off, our guitarist tripped over some cables and fell backwards into the drum kit, taking out half of it and almost knocking himself out in the process.
“In hindsight it was really, really funny.”
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Bully
“Our greatest disaster show happened in the summer of 2014. We were headed to Memphis by way of Arkansas at the end of a three-day run. We spent half the drive gritting our teeth through a tornado-producing storm, arriving in Memphis to flooded, empty streets. The storm had knocked out the power to the venue so we left our gear onstage unable to soundcheck. Pools of standing water in the back of the room grew until the rain let up just before doors.
“Hospitality consisted of some PBRs [Pabst Blue Ribbons] and a separate room with a fan and one chair. After someone figured out how to fix the main breaker, we played our set to a solid 12 people, most of whom drove from other towns. Hurrying to leave, we discovered Reece’s pedals had gone missing off the side of the stage. We would have liked to spend the night hanging out with our tour mates and new buddies, but their hotel was openly being used for prostitution. We decided to get a few more miles towards home that night.”
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Tom Stephens
“A couple of years back my bass player Cam and I played at a small pub in Laguna, NSW as part of a tour covering a bunch of rural towns along the east coast. We arrived at the pub and discovered that the sound guy was on holiday, so the manager had to drive to a mate’s place to get a PA and microphones for us to play through. He came back with a couple of stands that looked like he’d built them himself in the backyard. We pushed on and got set up, cracking into the first couple of songs. The blokes at the bar, who were accompanied by their dogs, immediately began requesting classics from Deep Purple and INXS. We politely shook our heads and pushed on with our mellow original numbers, knowing that it wasn’t what the gents were after on this particular Sunday afternoon, but persisting anyway.
“All of a sudden, two of their dogs began growling and barking at each other, moving closer to the stage. Next thing you know, one of the woofas has got his jaw round the other’s throat and a full flare dog fight has broken out on stage. The other dogs began barking and howling hysterically, along with the blokes at the bar. We quickly finished our set, packed up and high tailed out of there. Happy to have survived.”
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Dilly Dally
