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What's the Weirdest Gig You Ever Played?


Anderton

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As you can imagine I've had some pretty weird gigs in my life, but I'd bet money that many of the noble denizens of SSS have had weirder ones.

 

For example, if I had to pick my absolute weirdest gig, it would have been a gig back when I was 16 or so, gigging with a rock band of fellow high schoolers. We showed up and all seemed perfectly normal - a large, afternoon/evening private party, with us set up in the pool area. Couples were walking around, making small talk, having drinks..the usual.

 

Then I started to notice the couples often went somewhere, and came back 10-20 minutes later as different couples.who seemed like a lot more than just friends, if you know what I mean.This went on all afternoon and into the evening. It is when the concept of "permutations and combinations" became more than an abstract mathematical term to me. Yes, we were playing a wife-swapping party.

 

Now, bear in mind we were all under 18. If that happened today, they'd probably be arrested but all I knew is 1) I got to play music, 2) I was paid so I could put more money toward the amp I wanted, and 3) whatever. :)

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One was pretty simple - We were playing for a group of forest rangers and they expected us to sing the Smokey The Bear song. If they had asked us before the gig, we would have learned it, but they were disappointed that we didn't already know it. "Everybody knows it" they said.

 

The really odd gig, but it had its really good moments, was six months playing at the US Pavilion at the World Exposition in 1970 (Expo 70) in Osaka, Japan. We had recently backed up a friend, Joe Glazer who was, by day, a labor negotiator at USIA and in real life was a well known songwriter and singer in the labor community. The head of the pavilion group knew Joe and asked him if he knew any folksingers who might want to perform in Japan. Joe thought of us (we were a trio) and asked if we'd be interested. We spent quite a bit of time with him working out what we wanted to do there, which he brought back to the Expo group, and after a lttle back-and-forth, they agreed that we'd have a stage to perform on (we knew a few people who played at the New York world expo and basically they were buskers - we didn't want to do that, even on salary), that we could do workshops, play for schools, and other generally good things. So we made arrangements to take six months off from our jobs and signed up.

 

When we got there, there was no stage, and it turned out that what they really wanted was some "wandering minstrels" to entertain the people standing in ling waiting to get in to the pavilion, often a 2+ hour wait. We had our return plane tickets and were about to head back to the airport, but in the first week we were there, we had made some friends in the pavilion administrative staff, and they told us to hang in for another week. Joe was coming over and he'd try to get us what he was told we'd have. We had a pow-wow and they built us a stage and got us a sound system. Both were too small, but the pavilion architect liked us and, when he saw what the local carpenters built for us, had something better built, and I got to pick out the sound equipment. This was in the days of the Shure Vocal Master and I'm happy to say that we did better than that. But still, the gig was playing outdoors to the waiting crowd. We played four sets a day and they wanted someone there every day, so we took turns taking days off and managed to get throught it.

 

It was an interesting place to play, we made friends with musicians from all over the world and played at other country's pavilions and had some of them come over to play with us. The architect became a famous Japanese architect in the US, we played for the opening of the first Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan,

 

Woudl I do it again? Nope. I didn't like being a professional musician even if the pay was OK.

 

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I was in a band that got a job playing at a wake. the person( a young man) had died in a car wreck. We got there( a private residence) and it was all subdued and somber. I thought what a buzzkill of a show. I decided to just go nuts and encouraged the band to do the same. opened up with BROWN SUGAR and just went for it. they wouldn't let us leave, did three sets twice and about fell off the stage, I was so worn out at the end of the night(wee hours of the mornin). the father of the dead dude gave us literally WADS of cash. ended up playing for the same group of folkes several times after that. go figger?

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I was in a band that got a job playing at a wake. the person( a young man) had died in a car wreck. We got there( a private residence) and it was all subdued and somber. I thought what a buzzkill of a show. I decided to just go nuts and encouraged the band to do the same. opened up with BROWN SUGAR and just went for it. they wouldn't let us leave' date=' did three sets twice and about fell off the stage, I was so worn out at the end of the night(wee hours of the mornin). the father of the dead dude gave us literally WADS of cash. ended up playing for the same group of folkes several times after that. go figger?[/quote']

 

I'd bet money that if the dead guy had been alive, he would have approved and given a big thumbs up.

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A long time ago my band played for a wedding reception in Rock Island IL. The brides relatives were in the sanitation workers union, and the grooms were all county deputies and city cops. By the end of the first set they were all out in the alley behind the hall fist fighting each other.

 

Since it was cops involved in the melee, nobody showed up to stop it, and it went on for the better part of an hour. All us band members, tired of playing to an empty hall, had gone out on the fire escape to watch the action after doing a couple songs from the 2nd set.

 

Finally they tired themselves out, dragged the unconscious and injured out to the street for ambulance pickup, and went back into the hall were we did 2 more sets. Interesting gig.... I sometimes wonder how that marriage went.

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So here's another maybe not weird, but unusual gig. This was back in high school, where we played for a hospital for children with learning and other disabilities. We did a fair amounts of benefits and such.

 

We pulled up and started unloading the gear. One of the staff greeted us, told us where to set up, and was very personable and super-nice. He helped us out with setting up, and mentioned that the hospital was grateful we came out there. I was a little taken aback that someone that young was running the show, but hey, competence is competence.

 

After we did a sound check and figured we were good to go, another administrator came up to us and apologized for being late, but appreciated that we'd been able to set everything up without any help. We said actually one of the staff had already been very helpful, and took care of everything. She looked a little confused.

 

Turns out the "staff" member who was so helpful was one of the patients.

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I have two weird gig stories (actually many but these two stick out in my mind) -

 

One is recounted here: http://www.harmonycentral.com/articles/new-year-new-gig

 

The other - I played for a band called The Foundations for about 6 years in the early 1980's. They had the hits Build Me Up Buttercup and Baby, Not That I Found You (Later made famous by Allison Krauss). We were doing a Department of Defense tour and playing in a "square" at Guantanamo Naval Base in Gtmo Cuba. During one of our songs a siren went off and within 15 seconds, we were the only people left out of a crowd of a couple of thousand. We were just sitting on stage in the open air looking at each other with shrugged shoulders. Turns out a couple on the Cuba side of the inlet tried to swim across to the US base side to escape Cuba. The Cuban's were firing at them, and the US jumped into action to pull them to safety. We got the rest of the night off.

 

D

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So here's another maybe not weird' date=' but unusual gig. This was back in high school, where we played for a hospital for children with learning and other disabilities. We did a fair amounts of benefits and such. [/quote']

 

Sometimes the disabled aren't as disabled as you think.

 

Some bluegrass friends of mine had a gig at a mental hospital, and when they got there, were warned "Don't bring anything shiny in there." They and their instruments managed to survive.

 

 

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Well... all my gigs have been at least a little weird, because pretty much all of the bands I've played with have been some variety of challenging for an audience- playing psychedelic glam music for (at?) hardcore punks and skinheads, or a 9-piece noisy garage band with 4 female standup drummers, or an improvisational pop band with three guitarists, electric bassoon and contact miked toy percussion (no bottom end really separates the men from the boys... guess we were boys). Don't know how I got in this bag... ars gratia artis.

 

At least the band always had fun. But there were a few exceptions. One short-lived projectbandthing was based around a first-time bandleader songwriter fella who wrote catchy, intuitive songs, and sang and played guitar very amateurishly... which attracted the support of me and another friend, who responded to his Shaggs appeal, and gave him our crudest. The gig was doomed from the start for us, because the tighter we got, the less charm it had. Anyway, he was a great schmoozer and got a lot of gigs. One was for his art opening... which sounded good (I always liked playing non-bar gigs, and art galleries were always the right places for the groups I was in).

 

Except this one turned out to be on the sidewalk- his stuff was in a weird civic art space, behind a glass case built into a parking garage. Berkeley is an awesome place.

 

And because I was coming straight from work, I had entrusted the others to gather my drum kit. Nice of them. Except they forgot the bass drum beater pedal.

 

So I had to wing it with the old two-handed floor tom/snare technique. Well... I'd heard about the technique. Never done it, but it definitely knocked our tightness back a few notches. Be careful what you wish for.

 

Actually, outside the mental safety of four walls and an audience that presumably came to see you and knew something of what to expect, the whole thing was profoundly embarrassing. Our amateurish racket bounced off the buildings and down the block. People walked past looking away. It was a travesty.

 

But it got even worse. A teacherish-looking woman came up to us, waited until the end of a song, and told us that her class (yep) of UC Berkeley students were trying to focus on their final exam, in the building across the street. Could we... stop?

 

 

Hmm, that just reminded me of the time another band I was in was busted on-air during a live radio gig by campus police... 1AM and the students were trying to sleep.

 

 

 

 

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Naturally I thought about musical performance gigs, but a discussion on the Ampex list today made me think that this is a recording gig worth laughing about after it was over.

 

I was using a Revox A-700 for remote recording in the mid 1970s (it has a handle on it, but today I have trouble even lifting it) and I was recording Martin, Bogan and Armstrong in a dive bar in Elkins, West Virginia. The building was so old, I couldn't find a free AC power outlet, but they let me remove the light bulb in a pantry and take power from there with a screw-in adapter which, fortunately I had in my tool kit. Everything was fine until the refrigeration compressor for the beer cooler started up. Then the line voltage dropped to around 80 volts. The Revox has a servo motor driving the capstan, so the tape didn't slow down, but the power supply for the electronics dropped out of regulation and there was a couple of seconds of bad distortion until the line voltage came back up.

 

In a dive bar in West Virginia, you don't ask, no matter how politely, if they wouldn't mind turning off the beer cooler while the band was playing. ;) By the next trip out, I had a line voltage regulating transformer.

 

 

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Craig Anderton wrote: "What's the Weirdest Gig You Ever Played?"

 

Between 1988 and 90, (during my years of exile in the wilderness of Alabama), I did an early one-man band thing, playing mostly original songs. I alternated from solo acoustic numbers to MIDI-based arrangements using Texture and later Cakewalk for DOS. I did not know I was a Folktronica pioneer because the word 'Folktronica' had not been invented yet.

 

I also played bass in a neo-psychedelia band. And we played at this bar at least once. As I recall, I played solo at the bar at least twice.

 

http://www.al.com/entertainment/inde...e_chukker.html

 

NB: The article doesn't mention the late, great New Orleans poet Everette Maddox was once the resident poet at the Chukker before moving down to Nawlins. He later became poet-laureate of the Maple Leaf Bar. That's how I knew about the place.

 

Anyway, the gigs were strange because the bar had a large day-glo mural behind the stage featuring prominently, a certain sexual device. IIRC, it dwarfed any musician on stage. I guess the bar was undergoing one of its several transitions.

 

As you can see, a lot of well-known bands played there. It couldn't have been for the money though. I think the best and strangest, was the Dada Jazz ensemble, the Reverend Fred Lane and his Pataphysical review.

 

Alas, it was probably the only place in Tuscaloosa that was even partially civilized. And like civilization - it fled the scene of the crime.

 

FQkxyobL2iI

 

 

wXT8reSEmA0

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in a past lifetime I had the privilege of being a music therapist / recreational therapist in similar settings... your statement, " competence is competence" is exactly on the mark. As an ex rec program director I could easily imagine scenarios where one would indeed be better off in the hands of certain residents instead of certain rec staff... no problem. Just from my own perspective I've found that if one is able to become free of the constraints of ego, and erroneous common conclusions, the role of student and teacher is not always what it might appear to the casual observer.

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The gig playing for the Pope at Williams Brice stadium was kinda weird. The USC orchestra played the last movement of Beethoven 9. I was concertmaster. I'd never been on a football field before. I'd never been in front of 86,000 people before. I'd never been on a football field in front of 86,000 people with a violin in my hands before...playing for the frickin Pope. ( Father Guido voice) It was 102+ degrees and we all had these white styrofoam pith helmets they handed out to us, which seemed kinda Monty Python at the time. There were ambulances and paramedics hanging out waiting for the overcome too. What's really weird is that I wasn't nervous, or much bothered by the heat, and everything went really well. I've been more nervous for 4 people, though. Weird.

 

Then there was the Conductor's Institute. I played for the orchestra while I was in school at WVU, and then later at USC. Conductors are people too. Some are quite nice, and some are not, and some are really strange. Some of the most ridiculously difficult music I've ever played was at this gig, and we were instructed by the conducting teachers to play exactly what the conductor showed with his hands. No helping the music along in spite of the conductor. Many of these conductors learned to be very nice to us. And some gave us very dirty looks. Sometimes we'd get caught saving someone and we'd hear a bellow from the back, "Orchestra, please play what the conductor is showing!" Anyway, at no other gig will anyone ever have cart blanche to play just how a particular conductor moves them to, even if it's badly.

 

And the there was The Singing Christmas Tree, which I was concertmaster of the orchestra for. You haven't really lived until you've played for The Singing Christmas Tree...

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I've had a few, don't know which is the weirdest.

 

Candidate 1:

 

We played for a grand opening of a woman's 'beauty salon" and we were placed between the sinks where the beauticians would wash the hair of the customers. So I like to say we opened for "In Sink" (NSYNC)

 

Candidate 2:

 

On the roof of a gas station, the part that covers the gas pumps. Hey, it paid!

 

Candidate 3:

 

Nudist colony. Not everybody is nude at night, but most are. It's not sexy, you get conditioned pretty quickly to most everybody being naked or nearly so.

 

The first year it was a Halloween party. Leilani wore a flesh colored unitard, she dyed a t-shirt and a pair of skivvies flesh colored for me, and we attached black cardboard rectangles over the private parts like they used to do when censoring pictures in old magazines.

 

The audience and managers had a great sense of humor, and it was a hit. We play there a couple of times a year now so I guess they obviously like us. In fact we have a gig there coming up soon.

 

Candidate 4:

 

A bar in Miami Florida. The manager told us the only reason we were there is so that the people in one table couldn't hear the drug deal going down at the next one. This was during the cocaine years.

 

The customers used to score and go to the rest room (at stage right) in pairs. All night long, couples (M&F) going to the rest room together. Of course we are used to seeing females go together, but perhaps 20-30 times a night a male and female going to the head together is weird.

 

Sometimes they never came back. We figure there was a door to the kitchen down the hall from the restrooms, so they probably went out that way, but it took a while to figure that one out.

 

Candidate 5:

 

We got hired for a private party. A German hotel manager was scouting a location here, and heard us at the local Yacht Club where we were gigging and he was brought in as a guest of the property owner who was a member. The hotel manager was having a birthday and was flying 10 of his friends from Germany to join him.

 

He had rented a house, and set us up in the kitchen. All the guests partied in the living room where they were out of sight. We saw nobody except when someone went to the refrigerator to get more beer and give us signs of approval.

 

Leilani and I generally play without taking a break (we charge them for that) and at the end of 4 hours, the birthday guy put a few hundred dollar bills on the keyboard and asked if we could play another hour. Of course being greedier than sane we accepted.

 

At the end of the fifth hour, a few more hundreds and another hour request and we kept on playing.

 

By the time the sixth hour was ending, we were secretly both hoping for more hundreds and at the same time for an end to the party. We were whipped and used up all our better songs (we were running about 300 songs at the time). Luckily they ended the party.

 

The most profitable house party gig we played, it felt like we played to nobody, but the 10 people in the other room loved us. Plus 6 hours is the longest we ever played without taking a break. (We have the biggest bladders in the business). :)

 

After the gig was over, they all came into the kitchen, told us how much they enjoyed the music, and insisted on helping us carry the gear back to the van (something we usually decline).

 

I'm sure I'll remember an even weirder one after I click "post", but these are among the strangest in a lifetime of gigging.

 

Insights, incites and some nice memories (thanks for the topic) by Notes

 

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The gig playing for the Pope at Williams Brice stadium was kinda weird. The USC orchestra played the last movement of Beethoven 9. I was concertmaster. I'd never been on a football field before. I'd never been in front of 86' date='000 people before. I'd never been on a football field in front of 86,000 people with a violin in my hands before...playing for the frickin Pope. ([i'] Father Guido voice) [/i]It was 102+ degrees and we all had these white styrofoam pith helmets they handed out to us, which seemed kinda Monty Python at the time. There were ambulances and paramedics hanging out waiting for the overcome too. What's really weird is that I wasn't nervous, or much bothered by the heat, and everything went really well. I've been more nervous for 4 people, though. Weird.

 

Then there was the Conductor's Institute. I played for the orchestra while I was in school at WVU, and then later at USC. Conductors are people too. Some are quite nice, and some are not, and some are really strange. Some of the most ridiculously difficult music I've ever played was at this gig, and we were instructed by the conducting teachers to play exactly what the conductor showed with his hands. No helping the music along in spite of the conductor. Many of these conductors learned to be very nice to us. And some gave us very dirty looks. Sometimes we'd get caught saving someone and we'd hear a bellow from the back, "Orchestra, please play what the conductor is showing!" Anyway, at no other gig will anyone ever have cart blanche to play just how a particular conductor moves them to, even if it's badly.

 

And the there was The Singing Christmas Tree, which I was concertmaster of the orchestra for. You haven't really lived until you've played for The Singing Christmas Tree...

 

 

I played many a time in William's Brice Stadium!

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I can sorta understand my not remembering the apostrophe. The capital S in Stadium not so much. lol

(Wish I could blame it on the 60's.) And I sorta wish I could say I ripped a wicked solo to the screaming delight of ...well, you know. But it's a nice memory as is. I was so comfy out there compared to oh, say, The Koger Center. I bet we've a few other places that we've frequented in common, too. A restaurant down in 5 Points comes to mind. :-)

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I can't say for certain if this was the weirdest gig I ever did... concert production back in the 70s and 80s was the veritable wild, wild west.

 

But one that continues to pop into my mind was a gig at the very rural, Sundance ski slope in the summer of 1979. The audience sat on the steep grassy hill that was the last stretch of slope before you hit the bottom of the ski run. The platform housing the two-person ski lift had been re-tasked as a stage.

 

The first thing we noticed… there was no way to get our semi close to the stage. So we had to off-load gear in the parking lot onto a flatbed truck, and then run it one load at a time up to the stage. This wasn't all that unusual; tours playing Red Rocks outside of Denver back in the day had to do the same thing. But at Red Rocks, they had it down to a science... as long as you backloaded the truck the night before. Here we were working with unpaid volunteers who had little or no experience being stage hands.

 

The second thing we noticed, the platform was tiny... certainly not what we were used to playing, and there were no side wings on which to stack the PA. We carried enough flying sound to cover large auditoriums, but this setup had two problems. One, there was very little room width-wise to stack the PA, and two, the speakers had to be tilted back and pointed up the slope. So, the first order of business was to talk to the promoter and find out how many people they expected. Because the gig was out in the middle of nowhere and for all practical purposes unadvertised, they estimated 1000-1500 people. Since this wasn’t my first rodeo, I doubled that just to be safe. So my tech and I found some wood in a nearby maintenance shed, laid out some rustic platforms on either side of “the stage” and pulled out as much PA as would fit. We would have liked to pull out more, but that was about the most we could realistically stack on the ground and safely tip back to aim up the slope. I guesstimated the crowd “area” and figured if we were lucky, we'd be able to cover the majority of the audience at a fairly decent level… but those further up the slope might just have to make do with less than optimal volume.

 

I wrung the system out, patched an 1176 (as a limiter) between the output of the console and the crossover and prayed it would be enough. As you might have surmised, the attendance estimates were woefully inadequate. By the time the show started, we had 8,000-10,000 people packed in like sardines on the slope extending much farther up the hill than I'd expected nor allowed for. So I dialed up the limiter and ran the system wide open all night long.

 

Unfortunately, one mountainous drunk (not only lived in the mountains but really BIG) made his way down to my console and threatened to kick my ass if I didn't turn the sound up. I tried to reason with him but to no avail, and he finally took a swing at me. To my surprise, several of the people sitting around me - who I had been chatting up before and during the show - came to my rescue and helped subdue the rather large fellow. He was "escorted" out to the edge of the crowd where two of the local gendarmes arranged accommodations for the night.

 

The other thing I remember from that night… not only was there little (read that as NO) light to load out, but when the sun goes down in the mountains - even in the summer - it gets really cold, really fast. This was a summer tour... I had a suitcase packed mostly with shorts and t-shirts. I must give belated thanks to that fellow who traded me his ski jacket for a cassette of the show. It may not have been the weirdest gig I ever did, but it's definitely in the top 5.

 

Now, about that “generator-powered” show in a South Dakota field where we ordered a water truck, fifty pounds of rock salt, and sent a go-fer into the nearest town in search of a six foot copper rod…

 

 

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I guess this one rates...I don't come close to getting my a** kicked by a full - size action rock star every day.

 

A mutual friend (roadie) hooked me up to play violin for Sebastian Bach at his wedding. We drove 10 hours all the way out to NJ, and there we were doing the hang in his kitchen just like that. On the wedding day, another violinist, a professor from a major university was on hand as well and we traded sets for a while. He hadn't brought any of his own music to play from, and all that he had available to him were the heavy violin concertos (sans orchestra) that he had committed to memory. I'd thought he was just awkwardly showing off, until I came back from the can and there he was playing from one of my books. He didn't even ask! angry02 And yes I did...I swiped it back. :D

 

So anyway, said other violinist and I were not the best of friends as we stood waiting to play the processional. (And he played it out of tune no less, on purpose I think.) Cutting to the chase, the bride was making Baz wait at the altar a bit. Normally I'd have had something ready for that, but I was kinda off my game at that point. After a while, Baz yelled over, "Hey! Somebody play some Led Zep or something!" Needing no further cue I dropped right into a favorite, tried and true LZ riff. I know a lot of Zep riffs. Did I play "Whole Lotta Love"? No. "Goin To California"? Uh uh. Nope, I played "Heartbreaker". :facepalm:

 

After the ceremony I had an encounter with a man nobody in their right mind would want to make angry. He was not happy. "Dude, I asked you to play some Led Zeppelin and all you could come up with was Heartbreaker?!" And thinking quicker than quick I said, "Think of all the gals out there whose hearts surely just broke today because you are no longer available. At least I didn't play, "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You".

 

 

And believe it or not that worked and he chilled. I then played for 3+ hours under a tent, in the rain and when I took a break, *somebody* made sure it wasn't for long. The other violinist left. I got to hang out and party for a few days, he was a very gracious host I even got to play the violin parts I'd made for "Quicksand Jesus" (a Skid Row song) for him. :cool11:

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