The Worst Gig

by Jon Niccum

  “I also remember the first time we got into the Whisky [a Go Go] with Fear, and then X asked us to open up. We got the chance to play at the Croatian Hall, so we were like, ‘We’ll open up for them at 7:30, then we’ll rush back to San Pedro to play.’

  “I’d just had knee surgery, so I was doing the fucking gig in a chair with my leg in a cast. We got down there, and it was like, ‘Wow. A club with monitors. You can actually hear.’

  “Then we rushed back [to the Whisky] and it was a bunch of jocks dancing to new-wave stuff. By the time it was our turn to go on, it was maybe one or two songs before they started throwing things. First it was just the ice in the drinks. Then it was the glasses. I couldn’t dodge. I’m in a chair in a cast, and I’m getting hit with all this shit. Then somebody pulls the power and shut the whole thing off.

  “We also had this gig in Vienna. It was the first time Minutemen played over there. It was with Black Flag. The first note of the first song, all the power goes off. It comes back on, and I’ve got a dozen used condoms thrown all over me. They’re hanging on my neck, on my shirt. [Guitarist] D. Boon got hit in the face with a cup of piss.

  “We call those kinds of gigs character builders. But the ones where we got stopped and couldn’t play anymore, those are really the worst gigs. They’re failures because we don’t get to finish.”

  —Mike Watt

  Rufus Wainwright

  The son of folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright was already touring with his mom, aunt and sister by his early teens. While Wainwright certainly inherited his wry humor and lyrical skills from his parents, the style of music he chose to pursue proved quite dissimilar. The Canadian singer-pianist has established a bridge between commercial-pop songwriting and sophisticated theatrical orchestration. That coupled with his dramatic, vibrato-heavy voice has made the performer a unique commodity in the industry.

  • • •

  “It might have been one of those Lisa Loeb shows [where I was the opener]. I think it was in Tucson, Arizona, and I just stopped in the middle and said, ‘Good night, fuckers!’ and walked offstage. They wouldn’t stop talking and were very much into screaming—grunting, I should say—‘Lisa, Lisa, Lisa.’ I think it was because the boyfriends had gone to the show with their girlfriends, who had thus promised certain sexual favors if they would go to this show. They just weren’t into it. And they weren’t into an opening act—especially a little gay boy from Canada.”

  —Rufus Wainwright

  Tenacious D

  Originally conceived as the basis for an HBO comedy series in 1999, the “band” Tenacious D is the brainchild of actor-musicians Jack Black and Kyle Gass—two of the most unlikely rock stars to ever strap on six-strings. The wild-eyed Black is a household name for his leads in the films The School of Rock and Kung Fu Panda. The bald Gass has had cameos in several movies but is perhaps best known for being the less talkative foil of Tenacious D. The pair’s abrasive comedy spawns from their being two acoustic guitar players so convinced that their music is the very definition of stadium rock that they berate and mock all those who can’t perceive their rightful glory.

  • • •

  “We opened for Pearl Jam. We opened for Weezer. We also opened for Tool, which was a huge mistake we made over and over again—three times. They were too hardcore. The audience was very angry at us for being us…They didn’t want a joke. You don’t go to Tool to laugh. You go to be angry and vent…I can’t remember what they were throwing, but we definitely got pelted. We tried to play our hardest-rocking songs, but it never mixed.”

  —Jack Black, Tenacious D

  Bettie Serveert

  Formed in 1990 in Amsterdam, the group Bettie Serveert took its name from an instruction manual by Dutch tennis star Betty Stove. Translation: “Bettie serves.” Between 1992 and 1997, the sometimes jangly, sometimes gritty ensemble released three signature albums—Palomine, Lamprey and Dust Bunnies—which cemented its reputation in the college-rock scene. Years on the road with acts such as Dinosaur Jr., Buffalo Tom, Superchunk and Counting Crows helped buoy its indie fan base. While various drummers have come and gone, the core membership of Carol van Dyk (vocals and guitar), Peter Visser (guitar) and Herman Bunskoeke (bass) has remained solid through nine albums.

  • • •

  “There’s a very small festival in Holland. It’s called—translated in English—Easter Pop. It’s the worst festival you’d ever want to play. It’s infamous for that. Most people are completely drunk by 2 p.m.…It’s in the middle of farm country in Holland. They get so completely wasted that it doesn’t really matter what’s onstage as long as they can sort of jump to it. There are only a couple of bands, specifically Dutch singing bands, who can play there and get away with it without getting bombarded. It’s not because they hate the bands; it’s just because they’re so drunk that they don’t really care. It’s usually rolls of toilet paper that they throw, for no apparent reason. We’ve only done the festival once. And we came offstage and were like, ‘Never again!’”

  —Carol van Dyk, Bettie Serveert

  X

  Credit: Diane Bonebrake

  One of America’s most acclaimed punk bands, X was part of the first-wave pack to emerge on the LA club scene in 1977. The visually distinctive act was aided early on by former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who produced the 1980 debut LP Los Angeles and the follow-up Wild Gift. Powered by the atypical harmonies of singers John Doe and Exene Cervenka, the quartet (including guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer DJ Bonebrake) brought punk’s raging tempos together with rockabilly and roots influences.

  • • •

  “It was the Elks’ Lodge in 1979 in LA, and we were headlining. The Go-Go’s were on before us, and The Alley Cats—might have been The Plugz…While The Go-Go’s were playing, somebody called the cops, and about two hundred cops came to the site and broke the concert up.

  “I was sitting out in the lobby. Nothing was going on, and I was bored. Then suddenly the cops show up and boot us out. There were cops outside in formation. There were helicopters. There were snipers. It was like, ‘What was going on?’ The Go-Go’s were playing.

  “They pushed everyone down the street. We were crying foul. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  “There were no riots. But some of the kids smashed a police car. Someone I knew got thrown in jail. I actually loaned her money to bail her out. It was in the news, these rioting punks. So a lot of the punk rockers went on AM radio and defended us.

  “What I heard is that a couple of the kids went into a wedding ceremony or wedding party, and they disrupted it somewhat. So I guess that’s a reason to call the police, but maybe not two hundred police. That was the rumor. I never got to the bottom of it. I should try to investigate what really happened…I wasn’t in a position to do that thirty years ago.

  “In a way that was the worst gig because we never got to play.

  “Another one I can remember happened to me but it wasn’t with X. I was playing [in] Oslo with Dave Alvin. We played two nights in 1991, and the first night the Gulf War started…But the next night we played and were about five songs into our set, and our road manager comes onstage and says, ‘Don’t ask any questions. Just stop playing!’

  “So we leave, and they announce that the king of Norway had just died and the gig was canceled. Some people were respectful, and other people were going, ‘Fuck the king.’ We got the info that there was no music allowed until further notice.”

  —DJ Bonebrake, X

  Vocalist-guitarist Rick Valentin, bassist Rose Marshack, guitarist Jim Valentin and many drummers have kept Poster Children humming along the indie-rock highway since 1987. With an impeccable reputation for do-it-yourself ethics and immersive live shows, the foursome from Champaign, Illinois, is also lauded for its groundbreaking use of technology (blogs, podcasts and enhanced CDs) when promoting its music. Marshack culled this t
ale from her extensive tour journals.

  Poster Children’s Colorful Array of Crappy Gigs

  By Rose Marshack

  Poster Children don’t really have worst gigs (and actually, we don’t play “gigs,” we play “shows”). We have what we call learning experiences. The Dalai Lama once said, “In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher,” and we extrapolated from this: There are no bad shows, only learning experiences.

  Throughout our vast continuum of twenty-five years of learning experiences in the United States and Europe, a few stand out. Most of the time it is easy to distinguish the lesson from the experience. For example, there was the time in Portland, Maine, where I couldn’t finish the show because I got food poisoning.

  Playing with Public Enemy in Lawrence, Kansas, [in] 1992, was a serious learning experience. Public Enemy had just performed with Sonic Youth in Chicago, so we figured it would be OK, and since we liked Sonic Youth, we figured there’d be some audience crossover. So we were slightly surprised, and educated, when one thousand white college students stood in front of us as we played, screaming, “Get off the stage!” [and] holding up their tickets with their fingers covering up the words opening act.”

  Credit: Jamie Kelly

  We took a vote to see how many of them would rather hear silence for the next forty-five minutes (that was another learning experience) and then replied with “Too bad!” and played “If You See Kay” probably way too fast, but it had to have been fun for Rick to scream into his mic at that point. Public Enemy, by the way, were very complimentary after we played, although Flavor Flav had missed our set and was a half hour late for his own because, as he said, he’d lost his clock.

  Then there was a show where we asked Urge Overkill if we could play with them in Madison, Wisconsin. They said yes, but they made us play before the doors opened. One time we mistakenly arrived at Gabe’s Oasis in Iowa City, Iowa, a day early. When the woman at the bar told me we weren’t playing that night, I just started crying. I also cried, onstage, when I accidentally broke my Travis Bean bass in half, playing in Gainesville, Florida. Twice, our van caught on fire on the way to a show. Then there was our first time in New York City—we’d driven all the way from Illinois—and I entered the club and proudly stated, “Hello! We’re Poster Children! We’re playing here tonight!” And the man behind the bar answered loudly, “So?”

  But, by far, the best learning experience we ever had was playing to three thousand people in Detroit, Michigan, at an outdoor radio festival. We were sandwiched between The Smithereens, who were headlining, and Prong, who probably should have been headlining. Any band should know that playing a festival is a stupid move, but this was early in our career and for some reason, we had agreed to do it. “You’ll get added to the radio station if you play,” I’m sure we were told.

  I remember being on the stage for a soundcheck, scrambling around to finish within the allotted fifteen minutes between the leather heroes and the geezers, when, looking for an outlet to plug into, I asked a stagehand, “Excuse me, where is the power?” He looked at me and replied, “I’ll take ‘no-name bands’ for $50.”

  Fuming, I found the outlet myself, plugged my amp in and marched up to the front of the stage—only to find that my guitar cable was not even long enough to reach from the back line to the front of the stage. Yoink! We had to move all the amps up. Humiliating.

  Leather-clad Prong went on the stage and probably began to play some B-minor chords really quickly and loudly as the audience filled in. I can’t even imagine how upset they had to have been about opening the show. Then their fans jumped out of the assigned seating and rushed to the stage, raising their hands and fists and singing along with the band. The stage manager was horrified—and terrified. “We can’t have people out of their seats during the show dancing?!” he cried. He motioned to the security men. “Cut the power! Cut the power!” The power went dead. Poor Prong had no more electricity, only black leather and drums—and they were not happy

  The fans were not amused, either. “Prong!!” they shouted angrily. “Prong!! Prong!!” And then some fans jumped onto the stage. At this point, Rick and I were staring at the crowd, horrified. We were pretty sure that anyone who might have been even remotely interested in seeing us were at a Smashing Pumpkins revival show down at the other side of town, and I was worried the Prong fans wanted to beat us up even before the show started—or at least hold up their tickets with our name crossed off them. All of a sudden, the terrified stage crew started yelling, “We’re calling the riot police! We’re calling the riot police!” The next thing we knew, Detroit’s finest riot police, complete with helmets and weapons, had formed a semicircle in front of the stage. The power was still out, kids were shouting, “Prong!! Prong!! Prong!!” and filing out of the canopy.

  “Set up your equipment!” the manager told me. “And if anyone gets out of their seats during your show, your set will be over,” he threatened.

  I stood up and looked at the remainder of the audience. The front thousand seats were emptying out. “We dedicate this set to Prong,” I yelled.

  I’d never even met Prong, but, man, did I feel bad for them. And so we played—ferociously and then angrily and self-righteously to show the Detroit riot police, The Smithereens and the waning crowd (“This isn’t Prong anymore, right?”) just how punk rock we were. And then Rick lobbed his Musicmaster guitar (complete with American flag sticker) over the riot police’s head, straight into the audience, where a lucky crowd member came to, grabbed the guitar and ran off with it. The riot police held their ground in front of the stage to protect us from the crowd, who were leaving in droves by that time.

  Touring for twenty-five years was wonderful—every last minute of it. I’d do it all again. Turn your prisons into playgrounds, The Situationists said. And so we did. And so should you.

  Chapter

  -3-

  Dangerous malfunctions

  Faulty stages, suspect electronics and antagonistic props are a few of the things that can go amiss at a live show—and that’s just the beginning.

  Flaming Lips

  Credit: J. Michelle Martin-Coyne

  Since emerging in 1983, Flaming Lips—singer-guitarist Wayne Coyne, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, bassist Michael Ivins and drummer Kliph Scurlock—have been rock’s go-to act for genre-pushing reinventions. The Oklahoma City group remains one of the rare bands to master both the studio and the live stage with equal acclaim, complementing its Grammy-winning music with elaborate costumes, puppets, mounds of confetti and Coyne’s man-sized plastic bubble in which he navigates across the audience.

  • • •

  “There’s always some catastrophe that we think in our minds is ruining it for everybody, then a lot of times people don’t even notice. But we were playing at a not-that-great-of-a-little festival, opening up for Cake and playing with Modest Mouse in 2002 or something like that. We were playing at Red Rocks, the big prestigious venue in Denver, Colorado, to a sold-out crowd of about ten thousand people. We were working on our smoke machine backstage, and it kept triggering a fuse, blowing the electricity.

  “We’re there all day fucking with our gear and all that, and I went to one of the technicians at the place and said, ‘This is blowing a fuse here. I’m worried that when we go onstage we’re going to blow the electricity.’

  “He laughed and said, ‘Look, dude, we had Slayer play here. Give me a fucking break.’

  “I said, ‘We’ve played places where Slayer has played a lot, and it’s just kind of ramshackle.’

  “I put it to the back of my mind. That having been said, we go onstage, the smoke machine goes, and the fucking whole place blows. The whole place. We stand in the dark apologizing best we can because there’re no fucking microphones [working]. The electricity comes back on, and we say, ‘Sorry about that. We’ll trudge on.’

  “Two minutes later, bam,
the electricity goes out again. I see this guy who told me Slayer played there, and I’m like, ‘Dude, it’s just a fucking smoke machine. It’s not like we’re [Nikola] Tesla trying to get our coil to reignite the stratosphere.’

  “Again we trudge on, and when the electricity comes back on we apologize best we can. And it happens yet a third time.

  “At some point we’ve used up the allotted forty-five minutes for our set just with them mucking around trying to get us working again. And yet it’s not really humiliating. You just stand there and think, ‘Fuck, we want to present this show and you wanted to see it, and this moment has been messed up by people not being prepared.’

  “But I have to say I’ve run into people who saw us at that show since then, and didn’t even know who we were because they came to see some of the other bands, and [they] said, ‘You stood there, and just seeing you stand there trying to make this work, I really loved you guys.’

  “You never know if it’s the music you’re playing or the way the light hits you…You never know what it is that lets the moment become magical. So I welcome all the calamities that come with performing. Sometimes within the disaster is that elusive magic.”

  —Wayne Coyne, Flaming Lips

  Dweezil Zappa

  Virtuoso guitarist Dweezil Zappa is obliged to respond to two questions his whole life: Yes, that’s his real name. And yes, his dad is Frank Zappa, one of rock’s greatest musician-composers. Whether releasing his own solo albums, guesting on other people’s records, or attempting to honor the music of his late father through the Zappa Plays Zappa act, Dweezil is an industrious guitarist and frontman.