Category: Gigs

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Gear Gigs Rants

To the asshole who stole my hardware case

There’s an armpit of a town about an hour north of here we play gigs in. This town is like the freaking twilight zone. It’s a combination of dumbass rednecks who love Lynard Skynard and mullet wearing city slickers who listen to Metallica. My band plays neither of those.

Strange thing about this town (among many) is that the clubs cycle crowds. One month a certain club is the hot place and sells out constantly. Next month it’s a ghost town.

Fortunately (I guess) we were at the hopping place and played a fairly successful gig. The stage is in the back of the club. There’s a back patio about 12 feet deep and then the parking lot. The load out is easy: off the stage, 12 feet of patio into trunk of car.

I have to pack my gear in a certain order for it to fight right. I loaded out my hardware case, ran back inside to grab a couple of drums, and when I got back outside my hardware case was gone. This had to be no more than 30-45 seconds.

Inside my hardware case are all the stands and pedals for my kit, drum sticks and about 300 pairs of ear plugs. What a haul for this asshole eh? For his efforts he gets a hi hat stand with no hi hats, a bass drum pedal with no bass drum, bass drum legs with no bass drum, a tom mount with no tom, a snare stand with no snare, a drum stool with no top and 300 pairs of ear plugs. How much crack can he buy after he pawns that useless shit at the pawn shop?

Much of that hardware had to be special ordered to be replaced…. Ever order a drum stool without the stool?

So to the asshole who stole my hardware case: I hope you got a great hit of crack. Maybe you got lucky, overdosed and choked to death on your own vomit.

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Gigs

Fell off the drum riser

Playing a big gig one time and my kit was on a very small riser. Right at the peak of the grand finale song my drum stool leg slipped off the riser. I fell off the riser, the stage and back behind these big black curtains. Total fall and distance from kit: 15-20 feet. Fortunately I wasn’t injured.

The other guys in the band said “all the sudden the drums stopped, we looked back and you were gone!” They wondered if I had been abducted by aliens.

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Gigs

Someone had sex on our stage while we were playing

There was a big club we used to play at in a very “touristy” town. The stage was VERY big and had black curtains all around it.

This particular night there was a big stack of risers to the right and ON the stage.

Apparently a female patron of the bar and one of the bar tenders climbed to the top of this stack of risers and “got it on” while the band was playing in front of 900 people.

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Gigs

Surprise beer glass modification

At gigs I have fun by hucking drumsticks to my buddies in the audience and catching them when they huck ’em back at me (all while playing).

One time I hucked a stick at this guy by the side of the stage but he never saw it coming. The stick perfectly lopped off the top half of his beer glass without spilling one drop. The guy didn’t even know his glass was broken until he lifted his glass up to take a drink! He had no idea what had happened.

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Gigs Musicians

Shocking gig in Sun Valley

We played a weekend in Sun Valley a few years back. We hadn’t played this place before and we were already in some trouble because we were starting late.

We busted into the first tune which is instrumental for a little while. When our guitar player/singer walked up to sing, something terrible happened. When he got about 1 foot from his vocal mic, a giant blue lightning bolt flew from the mic to his tounge. She shock flattened him and he hit the floor unconscious.

I thought he was dead.

We woke him up and he was F’d up. His hair (or what is left of it) was sticking straight out. His tounge was bright red and very swollen.

The bar owner was even more irritated that we’d have to go on break after 30 seconds of 1 tune and starting late…

The reason for the lightning bolt was that we’d had that vocal mic repaired and apparently the stellar repair man didn’t connect the ground or something.

From that day on if you watch our singer he always slowly goes up to the mic and touches it with his hand first before he sings. Similar to my always sniffing the milk to make sure it’s not rotten…