The Worst Gig

by Jon Niccum

  • • •

  “One of the most memorable ones we played was up in Wisconsin, called Nudestock. It was a nudist colony. Foreigner was on the bill and Alan Parsons. But you expect up in Wisconsin there’d be all these beautiful blond women. But the reality is never what you imagine. You get there and it looks like you walked into a Piggly Wiggly grocery store and suddenly everybody was naked. And you’re standing there playing and there’s some guy with a baseball hat and tennis shoes standing in front of you, wiggling and playing air guitar with his pecker swirling around. It bothers you.”

  —Rich Williams, Kansas

  Pat Metheny

  Jazz is often divided into the traditionalists and the risk takers. Pat Metheny considers himself a proud member of the latter set. For five decades the Missouri native has been releasing acclaimed albums, each one a new wrinkle in the development of jazz. Although best known for his freelance ventures and work with The Pat Metheny Group, the guitarist has enjoyed numerous collaborations, ranging from such stylistic stalwarts as Dave Brubeck to fellow experimentalists Herbie Hancock and Ornette Coleman to pop-music idols David Bowie and Joni Mitchell. And he’s dabbled in the world of film and television, composing soundtracks for features including The Falcon and the Snowman and A Map of the World. Along the way he’s racked up an astonishing nineteen Grammy Awards.

  • • •

  “I once was hired to play on a jazz festival in Palermo, Italy. The trio that I had at that time was [with] Charlie Hayden and Billy Higgins. First of all, we got to the gig and there were signs everywhere that said Pat Metheny Group. And what we were playing was nothing like that. I was completely freaked out about that. Then they said, ‘We’ll take you to the venue.’

  “So we started driving through Palermo, and I noticed that we were getting closer and closer to what appeared to be the largest soccer stadium on the island of Sicily.

  “I was like, ‘No!’

  “Sure enough, that’s where we were playing. We get there, and I notice that the stage is in the direct center of the soccer field. It’s 150 yards from the stands. I’m thinking they’re going to let people come out on the grass and they’ll all be standing around the thing. We get out there, and there were barriers around the stage.

  “I’m like, ‘Can we move these barriers and let people get closer?’

  “The guy looked at me and said, ‘We don’t let anybody on the grass.’

  “So the nearest person is like half a football field away in this stadium that seated about seventy thousand people—and there were about twenty thousand people there. And the PA they had was basically like the kind you’d have at a wedding. Plus, Charlie and Billy were the softest rhythm section in jazz. So we did our best, but that was a pretty rough night. It was just surreal and wrong.”

  —Pat Metheny

  Cross Canadian Ragweed

  The group Cross Canadian Ragweed was cooked up by singer Cody Canada, guitarist Grady Cross, drummer Randy Ragsdale and bassist Jeremy Plato—its name derived from a combination of Cross, Canada and Ragsdale. The band honed its sound in the early 1990s while based in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2001, the members relocated to Texas, developing a rabid following—in part because of extensive touring—before disbanding nine years later. The quartet became emblematic of the American Red Dirt movement known for merging country and rock.

  • • •

  “It was Gordon, Nebraska. It was the biggest shithole gig we’ve played. We’d been on a seven-week run…Everybody was missing home and missing families. We’d actually come home for one day for a friend of ours’ birthday party. Then we turned around and went to Gordon, Nebraska. We’d just been there. It was under one hundred miles from Sturgis [South Dakota], and we’d just played Sturgis. We thought, ‘This better be a pretty kick-ass gig if we’re taking two days off just to drive.’

  “We got there and it was in an outside rodeo arena. The trailer we played on had particleboard sides and roof, and they had gotten it stuck in all the cow shit and horse shit earlier that day. They were trying to pull the stage out and they swung shit all over—so it was green, dried crap. They asked us to have a bite to eat because they were cooking steaks. We were sitting in the horse-stall area, and there were flies buzzing all over the food. People were actually sitting in piles of horse shit.

  “The guy walked up to our road manager and said, ‘You know, Randy Travis said this is the worst gig he ever played.’

  “We thought, ‘Why in the hell would you repeat that?’

  “They were harping on us all day to play country-friendly songs for the crowd because there were a lot of older people there who were sponsors. But we said, ‘You hired us, so we’re going to play what we are.’

  “Halfway through the set, the guy came up to our road manager and asked if we could finish the night playing nothing but Willie Nelson—which if it was our idea, we’d have done it.

  “That was the worst gig ever. Usually our contract is ninety minutes, and we play two hours and fifteen minutes. But that was one of those where right when the clock hits that ninety-minute mark, ‘We’re out of here!’”

  —Cody Canada, Cross Canadian Ragweed

  Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

  Credit: Matt Bechtold

  Grace Potter possesses one of the most commanding voices of any singer on the festival circuit. The multi-instrumentalist developed the group Grace Potter and the Nocturnals in 2002 while attending St. Lawrence University. Soon her Vermont-based act was logging two hundred shows a year before it had even released a proper record. The band’s style has been described as “a modern-day version of Tina Turner stroking the microphone in a spangled mini-dress while fronting The Rolling Stones circa ‘Sticky Fingers.’” Elsewhere, the Nocturnals can be heard performing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” on the companion soundtrack for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Potter also wrote and performed “Something That I Want,” the credits track on Disney’s animated hit Tangled.

  • • •

  “We’ve been touring for I would say, realistically—nationally—about six or seven years. And when we were just getting started, I have not just a worst gig but a worst tour. It’s all connected.

  “We were asked to go on tour with a huge star. Our booking agent was like, ‘Well, what you’re going to be doing is playing [as] the second-stage band. This particular star wants to have a very festivally vibe wherever he tours. So you’ll be the band that’s by the beer tent the whole time.’

  “We were like, ‘Oh, that’s so great. We’re on tour with so-and-so. This is going to be killer.’

  “I think it was three months over the course of a summer. We just sort of picked up in major cities—we’re going from arena to arena. We’d look at our schedule, and it was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre here, and the Nissan Center there, and the casino over here. This is gonna be great.’

  “So we get there on the first day, and not only are we not in the beer-tent area, we’re actually in the parking lot. And the stage had no mic booms. It was meant to be [that] we were gonna bring our own sound, I guess. Nothing was really advanced. So every single place we went we thought, ‘OK, so cool. We’ll have our backstage passes, so at least we’ll be able to go backstage.’

  “Well, we found out the first day that not only were we not allowed backstage, we weren’t allowed to park where the normal fans were allowed to park. We had to park off-site and walk our stuff on. So we were allowed to come in, pull up, unload our gear, but then park our car off-site because we ‘didn’t want to get in the way of the fans.’ So we’d have this mile walk between wherever the stage was, and we were supposed to bring our own sound.

  “We fixed that problem, luckily, and by the end of the first day, at least there were mic booms onstage.

  “And then there was the infamous Red Rocks. Three nights at Red Rocks [in Colorado]
, which was unbelievable. Finally, we got the invitation to go backstage after touring with this guy for several months…We were starving and poor, and they said, ‘Sure, come get some catering or whatever.’

  “So I got catering not just for me but for the whole band because not everybody was allowed backstage; it was just me. So I come out of the catering area with every piece of food I could get. After three months of touring I felt like I earned this food, right? So I’m walking with all this food in my hands. I’ve got plate after plate after plate of lamb and all this good stuff. ‘Wow, we haven’t eaten this well in a long time.’

  “I feed the band. Everybody’s happy. It’s the end of the night. The third night at Red Rocks. Of course, we weren’t at Red Rocks on the main stage. We were up in a little baby tent somewhere. Then we continued on our tour. About a week later I got a phone call from my booking agent saying, ‘Yeah, about that catering you took. I just got a $350 bill…’

  “It was just one thing after another. And every once in a while I tried to zip backstage and grab a shower. Sometimes I would sneak in. But one time the big star was walking down the hallway. So all this security locked down the hallway. They’re like, ‘We’ve got a bogey!’ And I was the bogey…because I was in the shower.

  “So there’s a security guard standing in front of the door not letting me out. I’m in a towel trying to get back out to my bus…I’m dripping wet. I don’t have my hair dryer or anything with me because they said I could only be in there for like five minutes. So I’m hiding behind a door and there’s a security guard literally telling me that I can’t go anywhere.

  “I said, ‘Can I at least get out of the bathroom and get my clothing, which is in that other room?’

  “I go into the other room, and the room is the catering area.

  “I’m like, ‘Oh, sweet. Food.’

  “And the security guard goes, ‘Don’t eat anything!’

  “It’s like everywhere we went, we weren’t supposed to be. It was three months of getting over red tape that we didn’t even really want to get over. It was really humiliating, but it was also one of those moments where [we thought], ‘The rock gods are testing us. They’re asking us if we really want to be here.’”

  —Grace Potter, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

  Gillian Welch

  Listeners unfamiliar with the music of singer-songwriter Gillian Welch might conjure an image of her as a gingham-wearing Southerner who grew up in dirt-poor conditions and learned to play guitar from her granpappy. In truth, Welch is a New York City native raised primarily in Los Angeles by parents who cowrote the Emmy-winning musical numbers on The Carol Burnett Show. The Grammy-winning Welch is the poster child for a blend of neo-traditional country and rustic folk, which she dubs “American primitive.” The list of performers she’s worked with is impressive and eclectic. It’s doubtful anyone else can claim to have shared a microphone with Ralph Stanley, Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes.

  • • •

  “In Nashville, before we ever had a record out, I decided I wanted to play this writers’ night. I went down there by myself and waited like three or four hours to play. They kept me waiting and kept me waiting as the crowd thinned out. Finally, the guy who had been playing his own songs between every three writers, he got up when there were about three people left and played three more songs. Then he said it was my turn. There was literally nobody left in the place but the bartender and the MC. The MC said, ‘OK, you can play now. Will you turn the PA off when you’re done?’ So I got up and played a couple songs to the bartender, then I walked over and turned the PA off.”

  —Gillian Welch

  GWAR

  Credit: Gil Perez

  Satire is rarely so loud. GWAR (purportedly an acronym for “God What an Awful Racket”) took shape as a marketing experiment by musicians and art students at Virginia Commonwealth University. The collective concocted an elaborate backstory about alien warriors enslaving the human race, matching it with an equally elaborate stage show characterized by exaggerated latex papier-mâché costumes and simulated graphic violence. Members perform under aliases and behind masks, with singer Oderus Urungus (Dave Brockie) steadfast today as the lone original member. Much to the chagrin of GWAR’s critics, the band has seized two Grammy nominations.

  • • •

  “The worst place we ever played was in Germany in ’93 or so. They’d just knocked down the Wall, and East Germany was just becoming available for metal shows. We played in a town called Halle, in a giant slaughterhouse where apparently there had been some kind of radioactive accident.

  “Like any curious creature, as we got to the gig, we started poking around. We found all these lockers full of people’s stuff. It looked like they had to leave really fast. Whatever happened had happened recently. It’s not like the stuff we found in lockers was from World War II.

  “We also found all these photographs of cows—not just living ones—but dead ones being inserted into body bags. First of all, it’s a body bag made for a cow; it’s a lot bigger than a normal body bag. They’re zipping up these cows in bags that have radioactive symbols on them. What are they doing with them? Turning them into hamburger to send to Thailand?

  “It was East Germany, so nobody spoke any fucking English or else we would have gotten a better idea what was going on. But we guessed that whatever happened there had happened very quickly. They tried to get it under control. They decided the best thing to do was evacuate the facility. Then metal heads squatted the place because ‘no one goes there.’ That led to parties, and the local authorities probably didn’t care if it was just metal kids.

  “We realized the people working in the place were decidedly Mongoloid looking—like something was in the water. As we played, they kind of stood there as if they had witnessed a collective horror.

  “We called the place Cowschwitz.”

  —Oderus Urungus (Dave Brockie), GWAR

  The Get Up Kids

  Platinum-selling acts such as Fall Out Boy and Blink-182 regularly cite The Get Up Kids as their primary influence. The Kansas City quintet—singer-guitarist Matt Pryor, guitarist Jim Suptic, bassist Rob Pope, drummer Ryan Pope and keyboardist James Dewees—became a major component of the emo scene in the mid-1990s. Their 1999 album Something to Write Home About remains one of the most acclaimed in the genre. While The Get Up Kids officially broke up in 2005 (with members dispersing to acts such as Spoon and My Chemical Romance), their core lineup reunites occasionally to tour and record, and they released their fifth album, There Are Rules, in 2011.

  • • •

  “The Get Up Kids played at Brownies in New York on our very first tour. We rolled up and there were like thirty-five people inside. They were all there to see us. But some band from New Zealand was on the bill, and they actually closed the show. Nobody stuck around to see them, but they had a guarantee so they got all the door money. Brownies paid us only $20. We’re like, ‘We came all the way [from Kansas] to New York and you’re going to just hand us a twenty?’ So we went into the basement, found out where all the alcohol was stored and stole a bunch of beer. We basically got paid in beer for that show. An 1,100-mile drive for beer.”

  —Matt Pryor, The Get Up Kids

  Screamin’ Sirens offered a countrified twist on the all-female punk bands that sprung from Hollywood in the late 1970s and mid-1980s. Led by singers Pleasant Gehman and Rosie Flores (and a fairly transient lineup), the group was infamous for its flamboyant live shows and hard-partying offstage antics. Gehman went on to write for Spin and LA Weekly, in addition to writing several books. She’s also appeared in a handful of movies, including as the subject of the 2008 documentary Underbelly, which focuses on her subsequent career as an international belly-dancing star. She composed this brassy recollection of life on the road.

  Tales of Touring Terror: The Screamin’ Sirens’ Worst Gig

&nbs
p; By Pleasant Gehman

  I think it was 1987, and my crazy, liquor-soaked, thrashin’ all-girl “cowpunk” band The Screamin’ Sirens were on tour promoting our albums Fiesta and Voodoo. The Sirens were gigging at a roadhouse called Rooster’s in Nashville, Tennessee, when this entire chain of events occurred.

  Living like full-on Spinal Tap–style road pigs, we were in the midst of a self-booked tour, playing every night and, if we were lucky, sleeping on strangers’ floors. We traveled in an unheated old Winnebago conversion van, whose ceiling was festooned with fishnet stockings, crepe-paper streamers, bumper stickers and our own lipstick graffiti. The windows on one side of the van were covered with torn-apart Tampax boxes to block out the sun. This story unfolds on the eve of Sirens’ bassist Laura’s birthday, on a chilly November night.

  As twilight fell, I stepped outside the stage door of Rooster’s, and as my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: a mossy Victorian-era gravestone, leaning up against the building in the weeds. There were new dirt and clumps of grass stuck to the bottom of the monument, and it looked to be freshly dug up. Even more amazing, the headstone was for a girl who had died at age twenty-four: the same age Laura was turning that very night. Not only that, the girl had died on Laura’s birthday!

  Going inside the club to report my find, I asked if there was a graveyard anywhere in the nearby vicinity. Everyone I questioned assured me there was not.

  Thinking that the headstone would make the ultimate birthday present, I borrowed a hand truck from the club and cajoled some boys to help get the headstone to our dressing room, then blindfolded Laura and dragged her into the room to see her present. Laura was a tough, hard-drinking, wisecracking punk chick who, before joining the Sirens, had been in a band called Hard as Nails, Cheap as Dirt. She had a macabre sense of humor and, like the rest of us, always appreciated a low-budget splatter flick. So the whole band assumed she’d be delighted with her present, especially since we were too broke to be able to afford anything else.