What real life event, that you saw in person, most reminds you of the film "Spinal Tap"? Have you ever, for example, witnessed a real band, a famous band, performing in circumstances reminiscent of the "Puppet Show and Spinal Tap" scene?. I've got a story about a Badfinger concert, attended by 15 people, that took place on a GOLF COURSE, but I'd like to hear some of YOUR stories before I tell it.

Let's see, there have been plenty over the years, playing in my own bands... More than once I've had guitar players stare puzzlingly at their amps as some trucker's radio dialogue feeds through, loud and clear... Stupid band arguments...
Showing up to a gig with the band name spelled wrong on the sign out front, i.e., played in a group called Old Brown Shoe once (after the Beatles song) and showed up to the big lit up sign out front "Tonight: The Old Brown Shoes"... my cymbals actually falling over on an un-level stage... the bass player saying "thank you, thank you vurry much," Elvis-like, after EVERY song at a gig where almost no one showed up... oh gosh, I could go on. Many Tap-like moments over the years.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-05-09 03:06 by Tate.

First thing that comes to mind is seeing the awful band Triumph back in '78. It was one of my first shows and I'd go to anything that came to town back then; I was 13 and didn't know any better. They had to cut the gig short when their pyrotechnics caused the back curtain to catch fire during their excruciating reading of Rocky Mountain Way. We laughed and laughed.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-05-10 23:47 by andrewm.

Saw Van Halen a couple years ago with David Lee Roth, and had behind stage seats. The music was great, thanks to the vintage set list from the DLR era, but DLR was weak voiced and forgetting his lines. Then during a extended guitar solo, he took a break where most people couldn't see, but I could. His weak voice was being serviced with a cigarette, and he looked beat and apathetic. Then back to the stage to let his old mates carry the otherwise stellar show.

a singer smash through the makeshift plywood stage in a divebar in Oslo, Norway....he went through the stage up to his torso...but kept singing...and a bassplayer fall off stage, land on his head and kept playing

I sat behind the stage at a Grateful Dead show once and saw the crew watching "Baa Baa Black Sheep" on a TV during the show.

Sort of 'Spinal Tap':

The Kinks, Greek Theater, Berkeley, CA, 1981 (not sure if it was 1980 or 1981).

I was very close to the front of the stage, stage left. I had a camera with a very big telephoto lens and I watched Ray Davies go backstage during a long guitar solo. He changed jackets, toweled off his sweaty face and then bent down to a BOMBER line of coke (or similar white substance). I watched the entire thing through my telephoto lens but did NOT take any pictures. It happened very fast and I really couldn't believe what I was watching!

He returned to the stage all smiles! :-)

Speaking of the Kinks, I was backstage at the US festival(southern California) in the early eighties, and saw Ray Davies tell Bill Graham to Feck Off, cause Bill ordered them to get on stage and start playing, and Ray was not of that opinion at all.They were in each others faces big time and had to be pulled apart.

I'm going to START my Badfinger story. (It's gonna be a LONG story if I tell it properly, so I'll tell it a little at a time.) In 1997, not long after I moved from NYC to Ann Arbor, Michigan, I saw a newspaper ad that said there would be a series of three concerts taking place at the local Moose Lodge. The three concerts were going to be, The Byrds, Rare Earth, and Badfinger. To understand how preposterous this seemed to me at the time, you would have to have SEEN this Moose Lodge. It was little more than a SHACK, located in the middle of a grocery store parking lot. You couldn't imagine a less likely venue for big name rock concerts. Tickets were going to be $30, which was still a lot of money for a "club" gig in 1997, but, as I remember it, I think there was going to be free food and beer. I guess they were figuring they could maybe cram 200 people into this tiny little building, and at $30 a head, that would be $6000 gross, which would be enough to pay the band, and pay for the food and beer, and maybe still make a little bit of a profit. Somehow, you sorta got the idea that this was not about making money. It was, you sensed, more about the pipe dreams of some guy who belonged to the Moose Lodge and fancied himself a promoter of big name concerts.

Since the Moose Lodge was was just up the street, walking distance from my apartment, I was interested in maybe going to these concerts, especially since I was a fan of all three bands, but I had to ask myself, "Exactly WHO are these "Byrds" that are going to be performing? Certainly, Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and David Crosby had not chosen the decrepit little dump of a Moose Lodge in the middle of the Kroger parking lot up the street to be the scene of their long-awaited reunion, had they? As the date of the "Byrds" concert approached, the newspaper ads, which continued to run, never mentioned the names of the musicians who would be performing as the Byrds. I assumed it would be a band of impostors, playing the hits of the Byrds, fronted, perhaps, by one or two guys who had briefly been actual members of the Byrds near the end of their career in the early 70s, and were using the Byrds name, probably illegally, since the name "Byrds" is owned by Roger McGuinn and it's unlikely he would have given anyone else permission to use it.

Speaking of Roger McGuinn, it just so happened that HE was going to be in Ann Arbor, playing a solo acoustic show at another venue, right around the same time that the Byrds concert was supposed to be taking place at the Moose Lodge. Not long after the McGuinn concert was announced, the "Byrds" concert was mysteriously cancelled. I was actually a little disappointed. Though I hadn't bought tickets, I might very well have made a last-minute decision to go, if only to see just who or what was going to take the stage as "The Byrds".

Three weeks later, Joey Molland's Badfinger was scheduled to play at the Moose Lodge. About a week before the gig was to have taken place, the Moose Lodge, which was in terrible disrepair, was closed down, then torn down, and the Badfinger concert was relocated to a GOLF COURSE about 20 miles outside of town. A local oldies radio station began giving away tickets to the concert. I was listening one day when the DJ said that the seventh caller to get through would win a pair of tickets. I called up the station, and the DJ answered the phone. "You're caller number TWO. Try again!" I hung up and dialed again, slowly. "You're caller number FOUR. PLEASE keep trying!" I dialed again, VERY slowly this time. "Congratulations! You're caller number SEVEN. You're going to see Badfinger!" I drove to the station, picked up my tickets, and on the day of the show, my wife and I drove to the golf course to see Badfinger. We arrived to find the stage, a small, rinky-dink flatbed truck sort of affair, set up outside on the lawn, behind the clubhouse. A large area had been roped off for the crowd to gather. They clearly had been expecting a big crowd, because the area that had been roped off was large enough to comfortably accommodate 2500 people. No one was there. Maybe the concert had been canceled? No. The concert had NOT been canceled. It was just that no one had bothered to show up. The radio station had GIVEN AWAY 50 tickets. And NO ONE showed up!

A ticket-taker took our tickets and put them into a large, empty jar. My wife and I sat down at a picnic table off to the side of the stage and waited to see what, if anything, was going to happen. The first interesting thing we saw and heard was the opening act, two local guys with acoustic guitars, talking with the promoter. They were telling the promoter that they weren't interested in playing for the five or six people who had shown up by that point. He was telling them that if they would just get up there and play, he'd pay them a couple hundred bucks. They told him that if he would just give them their $50 cancellation fee, they'd be more than happy to just get the hell out of there. He gave them their 50 bucks and they split. I was surprised by their attitude. Sure, it sucks to play for a handful of people, but when would these two losers ever have another opportunity to open for a guy who'd performed and/or recorded with ALL FOUR ex-Beatles? How do you just walk away from something like that? They had something better to do that day? They had an important frisbee game they had to get to? I'm pretty sure they split even before Joey showed up.

Someone had a Bar-B-Q going, and we didn't want all that food to go to waste, so we helped ourselves to some grub, and to some booze which was being served inside at the clubhouse bar. Can't remember whether it was free or if we had to pay. I think we paid, but it was very reasonable. We were back at our picnic table, eating and drinking, when a large, but not very new, white car drove onto the lawn and stopped near the stage. Out popped a guy who could have easily passed for Paul McCartney's little brother. It was Joey Molland, and he was trying hard not to notice the vast, empty expanse of green in front of his stage. He was accompanied by his wife, his bass player, his drummer, and his roadie. They headed off in the direction of the clubhouse. After a while, it began to rain lightly, so my wife and I went into the clubhouse to get out of the rain. There were two small rooms, a bar in one of them, and some tables and chairs in the other. That's where we found Joey, hanging out with his little entourage, but also quite willing to converse with anyone else who happened to be there.

We sat at a table near the one Joey was sitting at and I introduced myself. Joey greeted me with a smile. It was an aggressive, don't-give-me-any-shit kind of smile. I had no intention of giving him any shit. In fact, I really had no idea what to say to him at all. I suppose I could have asked him what it had been like to be onstage with George and Ringo at The Concert For Bangladesh, or what it had been like to play on Harrison's All Things Must Pass album, or Lennon's Imagine album, but I figured he must get asked about that stuff all the time, and must be sick to death of talking about it. I DID want to talk with him about the glory days of Badfinger, but the band's history had been so unbelievably tragic, with not one but TWO of its members committing suicide by hanging, that I wondered whether it was even possible to bring up the subject of Badfinger without saying something wildly inappropriate. I decided to just keep the conversation in the here and now, and tried to cheer Joey up, telling him not to worry about the absurdly poor turnout because, despite Ann Arbor's reputation for being a musically hip town, that reputation, I told Joey, was largely undeserved, since in reality, "No one out here has any idea what the hell is going on".

That was the smug New Yorker in me talking, and as soon as I said it, I realized how wildly inappropriate THAT comment had been. I was in a room full (well, not really FULL) of mid-westerners, who, judging by the looks they were giving me, did not appreciate hearing how out of touch they were. And Joey himself had been a mid-westerner for more than 20 years, having married an American girl, from Minnesota, at the height of Badfinger's fame in 1972, and settling down up there not long afterwards. More and more I had the feeling that I was in a SNL sketch. That's how it seemed. Not so much Spinal Tap. More like a SNL sketch. I went into the bar and got another drink. There was a CD jukebox in there. I thought I'd go and take a look at what they had on the jukebox. Maybe find a few songs I could play that might suit the mood. There was almost nothing on this jukebox that I could even remotely relate to, yet I did manage to find a couple of songs that I felt would "comment" rather poignantly on this almost surreal situation. One of these, on a disc of "Billboard's Top Hits Of 1970", was "Reflections Of My Life" by the Scottish group Marmalade; a Top Ten hit in the spring of 1970, on the charts at the same time as Badfinger's Come And Get It and the Beatles Let It Be. The only other halfway decent CD I could find on that jukebox was The Best Of Procol Harem. I played "A Salty Dog". Despite the somewhat morose lyrics, everyone seemed to enjoy "Reflections", and I even overheard Joey saying something about having played some gigs with Marmalade, but when "A Salty Dog" came on, the room went quiet. Everyone just sat and stared into space, listening to the oddly relevant lyrics. Released in 1969, before anyone had ever heard of Badfinger, it obviously wasn't written with them in mind, and yet, if someone were to TRY to write a song telling their tragic tale, with an appropriate nautical theme (Molland and Evans were from Liverpool, Ham and Gibbins were from Swansea), you couldn't do much better than this

All hands on deck, we've run afloat, I heard the captain cry
Explore the ship, replace the cook, let no one leave alive
Across the straits, around the horn, how far can sailors fly
A twisted path, our tortured course, and no one left alive

We sailed for ports, unknown to man, where ships come home to die
No lofty peak, nor fortress bold, could match our captain's eye
Upon the seventh seasick day, we made our port of call
A sand so white, and sea so blue, no mortal place at all

We fired the gun, and burnt the mast, and rowed from ship to shore
The captain cried, we sailors wept, our tears were tears of joy
Now many moons, and many junes, have passed since we made land
A salty dog, this seaman's log, your witness my own hand

TO BE CONTINUED



Edited 15 time(s). Last edit at 2010-05-17 06:38 by tatters.

Used to do a lot of roadie stuff in the 70's, mainly for mates, though got to know a few people in better know bands,but the funniest thing I saw was one night when a mate of mine was playing drums with some local blues pick up band, when he suddenly stopped drumming because the bass drum pedal had got inside his loon pants and every time he tried to use it all he hit was the inside of said pants, so he does no more than roll up the pants to his knee and carry on playing much to the amusement of the whole club they were playing at.

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doubledoor
Saw Van Halen a couple years ago with David Lee Roth, and had behind stage seats. The music was great, thanks to the vintage set list from the DLR era, but DLR was weak voiced and forgetting his lines. Then during a extended guitar solo, he took a break where most people couldn't see, but I could. His weak voice was being serviced with a cigarette, and he looked beat and apathetic. Then back to the stage to let his old mates carry the otherwise stellar show.

This is going a bit off the topic, but in regards to the above, I've recently come across the early demos for Van Halen's first album, and it's amazing what Ted Templeman and Donn Landee did with his voice. I always thought Dave had an amazing voice, especially with that signature, high pitched yelp, and his ah-hah-hah's and what not. After they split, whenever I would here Eddie or Alex talk about how they struggled with him as a singer, and I mean technically, not as a person, I never understood that. After hearing these demos, and seeing/hearing some live stuff from back in the day, now I get it.

His voice isn't the worst ever on the demos, but the difference in quality compared to the Van Halen album is night and day. Everything on the official release of course is more polished, so it's neat to hear everything so raw, especially Eddie's guitar. All of Eddie's licks are there just like you remember, along with everything else (apparently they used a lot of the actual demo tracks on the final release), but minus that famous sonic sheen that is on the final release. Everything, EXCEPT for Dave's voice, and surprisingly, to my ears, Alex's drumming. They both are pretty rough in spots.

But what they did with Dave's voice is truly amazing. They took an at best average singer and made him sound like he had one of the strongest voices in rock.

Which is pretty Spinal Tapish in and of itself, when you think about it. Isn't it?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-05-11 03:07 by boogie1969.

Was anyone at the U2 concert where the band were trapped in a giant Lemon? I would love to hear about that

This is very Spinal Tap and very funny. It´s from Ian Gillan´s web-site:

"I did an album called Born Again with Black Sabbath in '83. The artwork for the cover was a startlingly tasteless imitation of a bright red, newborn baby with long yellow fingernails and two yellow horns on its head.

In preparation for the world tour we rehearsed in Birmingham, the Sabs' home town, and one day we visited the production company L.S.D. (Light & Sound Design). We were asked if anyone had ideas for a stage set.

"Stonehenge", said Geezer Butler.
"Yeah, that's great", said the set designer, "how do you visualise it?"
"Lifesize, of course", replied Geezer.

So, they made, from fibreglass, a full size replica of Stonehenge; the entire Stonehenge, which is pretty big.

This was all broken down into sections which sat inside each other, packed into containers and shipped to Canada where we were to open the tour at the Maple Leaf Gardens, an ice hockey arena in Toronto. Most of it stayed in the containers as, with great difficulty,we were only able to erect three of the monoliths, with two cross pieces, reaching some thirty feet in the air.

The day before the show, some of us were disconcerted to see a dwarf busying himself backstage. At the full production rehearsal the sound of a newborn baby screaming, with the voice flanged, came roaring out of the massive PA system. Simultaneously, the dwarf, dressed in a crimson leotard, long yellow fingernails and two horns on his head, edged his way in a grotesquely contorted fashion along the top of Stonehenge, miming to the baby's voice.

At a certain point the dwarf fell backwards off Stonehenge into the darkness behind the set, onto a pile of mattresses, strategically placed. The screaming faded and the intro tape segued to the sound of a tolling bell, at which point some of the roadies, dressed as druids with cowls pulled over their faces and Reeboks barely showing under their robes, trailed across the stage in deep pagan thought.

Then, the band started and I walked to the front of the stage, casually glanced at my cue book and off we went through the set. For some reason I'd been unable to absorb the words of the opening song, and for safety, had them taped to the floor by my microphone.

After the rehearsal Bev Bevan and I questioned the integrity of the whole dwarf thing but our manager, Don Arden, said "Don't worry, the kids will love it".

Showtime - the lights went down, the packed house roared. The tape started. The audience looked up and spotted the dwarf. Peering through the wings I saw ten thousand open mouths. The dwarf fell. The screaming faded. The bell tolled. The druids trailed. The screaming continued. Someone had moved the mattresses.

The band started. I made my move, just a fraction late. For some reason the one element missing from the production rehearsal was the dry ice; and now a chest high white cloud was billowing at a fearsome rate towards the front of the stage.

With a blank mind and a greek smile I set off on a hopeless race for my words. Overtaken by the cumulus a yard short and three bars to go I ducked into the cloud and started vailnly swatting the mist for a clue to the first line. At this point the footlights came on, increasing my difficulties. On cue, I stood up, not entirely, just my head above the dry ice and sang some lines of total gibberish. Then ducked down again - more frantic arm waving - I saw words, the first verse, but what the hell. As the dry ice was beginning to lower and thin so my flapping and crouching became more bizarre and I was reduced, along with the audience, to a hopeless giggling wreck.

We saw no more of the dwarf. I learned my words and the rest of the tour was just fine".


© Ian Gillan 1996

I used to go to the Glasgow Apollo in the seventies / eighties (and saw the Stones there twice). It was formerly a cinema - "Europe's Largest" and had a REALLY high stage. Front row seats were not the hot ticket as you couldn't see the whole band (I used to always try for five or six rows back - further if I didn't want the close up and personal experience).

I saw the Dutch band Golden Earring a couple of times after the release of Radar Love around '73. One of the band's gimmicks at the time was for the drummer to put his feet between the toms and jump over his kit.

Sure enough, one time at the Apollo, he went over the kit and.....right off the end of the stage, over that high drop.

He did manage to soldier on, but the audience got a laugh that night!

RATT's Barry Blotzer calling the promoter of a club show they were headlining to whine like a diva that he hadn't been given the right sort of GUINESS. He wanted the draught in the can. The promoter said to Barry (whose band had sold roughly 75 tickets for that evening), "Barry, I'm sorry you're not playing arenas anymore so spare us the attitude, OK?" Barry was unamused and hung up on him. This was a couple years after RATT had played a bowling alley in my town.

I saw Cheap Trick a few years ago playing for a few hundred people at the Raleigh North Carolina barbecue festival. The sound system they were playing through kept blinking out on one of the channels, and then someone through a full cup of beer that whizzed over Rick Nielson's head, which was basically the highlight of the set. They'd fallen a long way down from their best years, for sure.

1. Jimmy Page, lost in the fog with his e-bow, Zep circa 1979.

2. The Outlaws when they all came out at the end with guitars, something like a line of five guys with guitars. I think Tap parodied this with basses.

Michael Monroe lost a piece of his false hair during a Hanoi Rocks concert in Stockholm a couple of years ago. He grabbed it from the floor and quickly left the stage. He was back 30 seconds later with the hair re-attached.

I once heard that Siouxsie Sioux went to a punk party and someone knocked off her wig and a lot of kids started kicking it around like it was a football. She wasn't very happy.

What I would like to have witnessed is the No Security show where Jagger is sitting in that special cage, totally prepared to sing Out Of Control, but then the cage disappears again with Jagger stil enclosed!

You Tube?

Probably ELO's last tour with Jeff Lynne. They had a little robot, somewhat reminiscent of R2D2, roll out on stage from the side, face the audience, and introduce the band at the beginning of the show. Well it rolled a little too far forward and fell face first off the front of the stage. Some roadies came out, picked it up with a bunch of lights and stuff hanging out of it and carried it off.

Also, there was a CSN concert here in St. Louis where Graham Nash says he's playing a song for one of his friends that lives right here in Cincinnatti, while Stephen Stills is standing right next to him wearing a St. Louis Cardinals jersey.

Van Halen's 1984 tour, saw Eddie Van Halen doing some of his jumping scissor kicks or whatever you want to call them, hit a step and fell on his guitar. Made this awful sound and the turned all the lights out for a short time, only to return with a rather subdued Eddie for the rest of the show.

Actually had a guy ask me "who's that guy playing guitar?". Had to tell him it was Keith Richards, one of the original members. Later he asked, "what's that song?". Quickly explained it was "Gimme Shelter" from the Let It Bleed album. Who are these people?

These are memories of my local bar band. We were Bear and the Bobcats but
folks got that wrong a lot of times. We'd be listed as
Bob and the Bearcats. If we stunk, we didn't bother to correct them.

One time we were one of the opening acts for America at Stone Mtn, in GA.
They gave us a special pass to get in the park for free and directions for
how to get up next to the mountain and the stage. I was driving the van.
We got lost. I turned around and said to the rest of the band ...
"This is just like Spinal Tap!!"

Marv Peck

Y'all remember that rubber legged boy

tatters:

We must hear the conclusion of your amazing story!

Here is an absolutely true story. Early on I spent several years playing in a big dragqueen rock'n roll revue. Great time, I had. But DL, our mistress was so damn cheap; always trying to skimp on the $. Part of the set every night was a small coffee table with an old style telephone on it. At some point she'd frantically be trying to dial Mr Lover on the phone. Also on the table was usually a big bucket of Fried Chicken. It had to do with the deep Grease motif, haha..She would throw the drumstix and wings out into the crowd at some highlight. One night in a smallish club we had misplaced the table, and couldn't find the right kind to replace. So we rigged up a music stand; bent it so far backwards that the upper part was horizontal; threw a table cloth over it and it looked okay. This was a lousy stage; all droning wood, vibrating.
Usually we would play a big intro number and she came up through the audience. So we are playing, and the spotlight is on her, and everybody is yelling and clapping. But the musicstand was built on a spring mechanism; and pulled back that far is was basically a loaded slingshot just waiting to go off. The vibrations from the kickdrum, set it off, and that ancient telephone with bells and all goes flying across the club, closely followed by an extra large tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Haha.. I have to laugh again remembering this.

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scaffer
tatters:

We must hear the conclusion of your amazing story!

I managed to add another paragraph. Hope that will do for now. (LOL)

Thanks tatters for the additional info. Can't wait to read how this turns out! Maybe you and your wife joined Badfinger for one day?

1.
In 1996 our Jazz Band was booked for on of our first gigs at a local pub. When we arrived, ready to play swing music, there was a sign at the front to with our band name spelled wrong, and a big headline reading: "Tonight: Oldies Night with...".

Inside, Deep Purple and Led Zep were played over the clubs PA. Lots of people with leather jackets, not quite in the mood for any jazz music.
My first announcement was "It's Oldies Night, and so we're going to play songs that are at least 50 years old." As our guitar and bass player we're well educated in rock music, we served them a setlist that included "Sing Sing Sing" and "Bei mir bist Du schön" and "All Of Me" as well as "Johnny B. Goode", "Soul Kitchen" and "D'yermaker". Strange evening. Never were asked to play that pub again.

2.In 2003 I played bass in a coverband, playing at a public festival. Maybe ten people in front of the stage, nobody paying any attention or applauding.
Out of routine, our lead singer said "Thank you very much!" after one song.

"What for?" came a loud, male voice from the "audience".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-05-13 20:38 by Papo.

Buenos Aires, second "rain" show of the Bigger Bang tour in 2006, when the moving part of the "B" stage got stuck on a wet t-shirt about halfway out to the entire B stage... The band just kind vamped on Miss You for a few extra minutes as the crew scrambled to figure out what was wrong. Gotta say, they handled it like the pros they are.

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scaffer
Thanks tatters for the additional info. Can't wait to read how this turns out! Maybe you and your wife joined Badfinger for one day?

I think you're going to find the climax to be really anti-climatic. I'll try to finish it this weekend. It'll help distract me from all of this Exile madness. In the meantime, I've added a bit more.