by Drew Fortune
Everybody in the audience was dressed up like KISS. As far as I could see, they had all the makeup on too. Since it was New York, I said, “I see they’ve flown in an audience from Los Angeles for this show.” That really pissed them off, and they started throwing cups at me. I pulled down my pants, dropped my drawers, and pulled out my dick. I shook it at the crowd, then smashed my 1961 Stratocaster to pieces, and walked offstage.
Gene and Paul were standing backstage, as they had heard all the commotion and wanted to know what the fuck was going on. Bill Graham, God bless him, was in New York on his way to the airport. He heard on the radio that I had been added to the KISS show, so he had told the driver to turn around and take him to the show. So he’s backstage and had just walked in during my meltdown. He’s shaking his head, and his hand is covering his face. Gene and Paul were doing the exact same thing.
I unloaded on them, too, saying, “Fuck you guys too!” And that was it. I didn’t do any more shows with KISS. I stomped away to my dressing room. Paul was saying, “You can’t talk to people like that, man! You gotta go out and prove yourself. You can’t do it like that.” I’m still going, “Fuck you and your makeup and your fans!” Bill Graham was in my face, but I was furious.
That night almost made me want to quit the business. It was humiliating and disheartening, and my poor band didn’t know what to do. One of the guys, my rhythm guitarist who was the newest to the band, quit after that show.
Those are the two most embarrassing moments in my career. After that, things got pretty good. I never had that much hard luck, and I learned how to win over hostile audiences. As for my Jim Morrison, whipping-out-my-dick moment, I didn’t get in any trouble. Hell, it was New York, and they don’t care. They see that every day. Jim fucked up because he did it in Florida.
37
PAUL HARTNOLL
(Orbital)
Brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll were fathers of the early UK rave scene and are one of the most enduring sibling partnerships (save for a short split in the 2000s). This is also the only chapter to prominently feature a waterslide.
This one was painfully awful. In 1996, we were touring Europe, and for some reason, we weren’t popular in Germany, and I don’t know why. They like their techno music, but they didn’t care for us. We got an offer to play a gig by a rich kid whose father owned a resort somewhere in the Black Forest. We arrived, and there was this beautiful, rotund restaurant space, but the kid didn’t want us to play there. He said to us, “I’ve got a great idea for where I want you to play.”
He led us down to this massive swimming pool with two really tall waterslides connected to a gigantic tower. He pointed at the tower and said, “That’s where I want you to play.” We agreed, as it was a nice, sunny day with lovely weather. It really was a massive tower, and we had to lug all the gear to the top, which was a real chore. We had these blunderbuss, analog synths that didn’t take well to European power, so we couldn’t use those. I spent most of the day trying to reprogram the synths, so it was shaping up to be a really unpleasant, stressful day.
Everybody went off to dinner, and I was stuck with the goddamn synths on top of the tower. I finally managed to get some dinner in the lovely, round restaurant building, and all I could think about was how much I’d rather be playing in there. The waiter told me that it was asparagus season and that I had to try it. He came back with this horrendously over-boiled asparagus and an awful cup of tea. I left, hoping that some of the crowd would have arrived by then. I kept waiting and waiting, but no one was showing up. When we were set to play, to say that twenty-five people were there would have been excessive.
As we were getting ready to play, the sky absolutely clouded over with really ominous, black storm clouds. At that point, I decided I’d had enough and started drinking, which is not something I’d normally do. Occasionally, I’d have a nip of vodka before going on, but this time I was properly having a drink. I kinda staggered up the tower again, and we started playing, with the synths still broken. I never got them fixed after all that time.
We were playing for the twenty-five people below, hanging around the swimming pool. Way up on the tower, it was like we were playing to nobody. We watched as thunder and lightning rolled in from the distance. It seemed to be the exact height as our tower and was hitting these pylons a few fields away. My bandmate Phil started nudging me, saying that we needed to get down immediately.
I was drunk and starting to feel like Dr. Frankenstein at that point. I started yelling at Phil, “I’m going to finish this fucking gig if it kills me! I’m not fucking quitting now!” We were playing our track “The Box,” which is kind of gothic anyway. I’m still ranting, and I had brought a plastic bucket up there for a toilet, because I was so sick of climbing down the fucking tower to use a proper restroom. Since I was drinking, I was peeing in the bucket during the show, and I accidentally knocked it over.
At that point, it was about as bad as it could get, and then we started getting pelted with rain. It was pouring down on the equipment, even though we had a small roof over our heads. Phil finally grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “You’ve got to get the fuck off this tower. You’re going to get hit by lightning.” He had to drag me down the thing, kicking and screaming. They finally pulled the plug on it when we got to the bottom of the tower.
When we finally got all the gear down, the weather turned nice and peaceful again. We left all bedraggled, wet, and tired. We walked into the lovely, rotund building, and found a room full of people with a separate gig going on. It was transformed into a really nice little club. We were thinking, “Where the fuck is that little idiot who put us up on the fucking tower?” Here was this brilliant place, and he had stuck us on the back end of his land, where no one even knew we were playing.
It wasn’t like there wasn’t room for our gear in there or anything; we obviously could have played inside. Thankfully, we didn’t get hassled from the rich kid about quitting early. After all, I bet it wasn’t his money anyway. He was actually a sweet guy, just a little daft. I think he was quite horrified by what had happened.
Being in a band with my brother hasn’t always been a bed of roses. Thirty years of working with any one person is going to be difficult, but thirty years of working with my brother, who is four years older, gets really annoying. I think we’ve gotten off lightly when I look at the in-fighting between the Kinks, Oasis, or even Dire Straits. Look at UB40! God almighty! They’re still at each others’ throats. Those are my cautionary tales, and I’ve always told myself, “Don’t end up in those situations.”
38
MARK FOSTER
(Foster the People)
Here’s something that will make you feel old: “Pumped Up Kicks” is approaching its ten-year anniversary! I figured we needed some input from an act that wasn’t active in the ’90s, so here’s band leader Mark Foster on the terror that any serious, young band must face: the “big break” show.
When thinking about this book and what I would share, my mind immediately went back to the first time Foster the People played Coachella. It was in 2011, before our first record, Torches, had even come out. The public had only heard three songs of ours at that point, with “Pumped Up Kicks” being the one that took off. We were on our first US tour, and Coachella was the final show. We were only playing to three hundred or five hundred capacity rooms, so Coachella looming at the end was already daunting. We had no crew, only a monitor guy who ran front-of-house sound, and a tour manager, who would help us load gear.
I had been going to Coachella since 2003 so, for me, it was a really big deal personally. It was gonna be a hometown crowd, with my friends and family in the audience. It’s an incredible rite of passage to play Coachella, especially if you’re from the West Coast. It was also our first time playing any festival. When we showed up and I looked out into the tent, it was completely packed, with people flooding out into the fairgrounds. There must have been 15,000 people there. The most people I’d ever been on
stage in front of might have been 700 tops. The whole band had experience being on stage but not at that level. It was terror, exhilaration, and a million other feelings coming out at once.
The main thing that freaked me out, apart from the crowd, was the simple fact that we weren’t ready. When we started and I put “Pumped Up Kicks” online for free, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, even though I had been playing music my whole life. While I had been building toward this Coachella moment, I couldn’t have felt more unprepared.
I was pacing backstage, and before we went on, I looked out at the crowd and saw Clint Eastwood, David Hasselhoff, and Usher all talking to each other. I thought, “What kind of fucking weird movie am I in?” David Hasselhoff and Usher walk into a bar…it’s like the setup to a joke. Management, our label, and my girlfriend at the time were all there, and I told them all to get away from me. I walked out the back of the tent and sat with my back against the fence. I meditated, and went into a full visualization of how the show would go down.
There was only a twenty-minute changeover between bands, so without a proper crew, we were gonna have to hustle because we had a lot of gear. YouTube was live-streaming our show, and the band before us went long, which cut into our changeover time. We ended up going on about twenty minutes late, but the YouTube stream had been going the whole time, and it was this mad clusterfuck of us trying to set up our gear. The Coachella house guys were helping, but I couldn’t go out yet—I was still sitting with my back against the fence, trying to find my happy place so I wouldn’t have a full-on panic attack.
People were shouting at me that we had to go on, and I remember thinking, “What would Michael Jordan do?” I sat up and called my bandmates over. I said, “Look guys, don’t let the crowd see you sweat. Let’s walk out there, smile, and have a blast. We don’t have to kill it, and even if everything goes to shit, we just have to survive.” That was my thinking, because nobody had really seen us live at that point. Nobody knew what we were made of, and this was the first time that music journalists and the world would be seeing us live.
First impressions—for any artist—are so important. Walking out onto the stage, all I kept thinking was, “We’re not ready…we’re not ready…we’re not ready.” The crowd roared, but it was like an out-of-body experience. We opened with the song “Warrant,” which is the last song on Torches. Before every band started using toms, I’d like to emphasize that we were doing it. Me and our drummer Mark Pontius would both play this tribal drum beat intro before I would throw my sticks and jump behind the piano, hitting the first chord of the song.
We were pounding the drums, and everything was going fine. But when I hit my first chord on the piano, I couldn’t hear a thing. The piano was not in my monitors at all, and the people running the festival monitors had no idea what our record sounded like. They didn’t know which parts needed to be loud, or have any idea what the proper balance should be. My piano was super low, and Pontius’s snare sounded like somebody flicking a piece of cardboard twenty feet away. It was just nothing, and the piano is the instrument that grounds where my vocals rest.
Our first fucking song, in front of all these people, and this was just about the worst thing that could have possibly happened. I played the entire song just by watching the note patterns of my hands. I could hear the bass guitar, so I did my best to sing along to that. I didn’t freak out, and I don’t really remember what happened after the first song, but I remember closing with “Pumped Up Kicks” and the whole crowd singing along and clapping.
Walking off that stage, with everyone giving us love, was the first time I had ever felt that validation. It was the sensation of surviving trial by fire and living to tell about it. We didn’t kill it, that’s for sure. But we survived, and that’s all I really wanted. If we had fucked that show up, we might have been done. Career over. As a band, we might have been done before anything had really started. The blogosphere was maturing in 2011, and I can’t imagine what artists have to go through now. Even back then, Twitter had just started. Instagram was something I had only been hearing about in whispers. The days of doing something embarrassing and having it plastered all over the internet in ten minutes, weren’t there yet. Thank God.
I feel really lucky that we still have a career and that things are still working. When “Pumped Up Kicks” got so big, and because we had no foundation at the time, we did every interview, every in-store, and every radio morning show. I felt we needed to work three times as hard to show the world that we weren’t just this one song. It was really stressful because I moved to LA when I was eighteen and had been a starving artist up to that point. “Pumped Up Kicks” started to happen when I was twenty-six, so it was eight years of sleeping in my car and delivering pizzas.
I was over being a barista and never having any savings in the bank. My mom gave me a 1993 Toyota Camry that I drove from Ohio to LA. It was so beat up by the end, and I had logged over 350,000 miles on it. I drove that thing around LA for four years with no A/C and two broken windows that were duct taped. In the middle of summer, my driver-side window wouldn’t roll down. Then the muffler broke, so the car became insanely loud. The California emissions are so strict that I had to bribe an emissions guy to pass my car.
If I had lost my car, I would have had no way to make money. My car was loud as fuck after the muffler kicked. You could hear me coming six blocks away, and it was so embarrassing. When all my dreams were coming true, it was exciting, but it was also “don’t fuck this up!” Coachella was our shot, and it didn’t come when I wanted it to, but I had to take it. I would have loved six months with the band playing shows and getting really comfortable. We just had to put our heads down and make it happen.
Here’s a quick, fun one. We were in Minneapolis at the 7th St Entry, the smaller room of First Ave. It was the weekend, and playing Minneapolis on a weekend is pretty nuts. It gets lit, and our keyboardist Isom Innis was set up on the edge of the stage. He suddenly felt this thing in his butt, in the middle of a song. I saw him jump, and he turned around to see two women giggling. It looked like a mother and daughter. The older woman was somewhere around fifty-five, and the daughter was around twenty. He started playing again and felt the same butt sensation again a couple minutes later.
He kept scooting in closer to the stage, as he began to realize that the cougar was fingering his butt. The third time it happened, she stuck her hand all the way down his pants and fingered his butthole. At that point, he yelled, “Whoa! Are you fucking kidding me?” All the guy wanted to do was play music and not screw it up, and he was suddenly forced to do battle with a butthole-obsessed cougar. We finished the show, and as I got off the stage dripping sweat, I grabbed a cold tall boy. I was drinking the beer, cooling down, and this sixty-year-old guy with gray hair grabbed my beer and started chugging it in front of my face.
The guy was pretty big and ex-military looking and wore a white shirt with a sheriff’s badge logo on it. After he finished, he slammed the can down and wandered onto the stage. We were in the process of loading up our gear, and the fucking guy fell into our drum kit, knocking the whole thing over. This was a few shows before Coachella, and our tour manager, who is an ex-rugby player, grabbed the guy. “Alright mate, you’ve had enough,” he said, as he dragged the dude away. We were dying laughing the whole time because I cycled from being scared, to confused, to amusement. I think Isom was just happy to get out of there quickly after being violated.
39
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
(Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV)
Arguably the creators of industrial music, Throbbing Gristle were far more concerned with the deconstruction of music and live performance than delivering cohesion, and gender-neutral P-Orridge, suffering with leukemia, reflects on the entire journey.
I was a huge fan of Brian Jones, and I grew up buying every Rolling Stones single the day it came out. Then he was murdered, and I went to see the “new” Rolling Stones in Hyde Park on July 5th, 1969. There were
half a million people there, and it’s still the worst show I’ve ever seen. It was impossible to get anywhere near the stage, and we were way back in the trees. When they started playing, it was so fucking shambolic that people started leaving. Within twenty minutes, I was able to walk to the very front of the stage.
They had boxes of white butterflies that they released to symbolize Brian’s rising to heaven. All the boxes had been left in the hot sun, and almost all of them died. The roadies were chucking them into the air to make it look like they were flying. It was really gross and embarrassing. If you see video footage of the show, it doesn’t show how many people walked away in disgust. There’s a deathbed confession by the foreman who was working on Jones’s house, and he admitted he killed him. He had grown to hate Brian Jones because Jones treated him like shit. He got sick of it one night and held Brian under water until he died.
The first real rock gig Throbbing Gristle ever did was supporting Hawkwind, featuring a young Lemmy Kilmister, at Bradford, St. Georges Hall in 1971. It was a benefit for hippies who had been caught smuggling hash, and I was already into my “anti-rock” music ideas. I brought a dwarf with me to play lead guitar, who’d never played before that night. We had Cosey Fanni Tutti dressed as a schoolgirl, strutting around and firing a starter pistol in the air. Our singer was a surfer from Bridlington who stood on a surfboard atop a bucket of water on stage.
