The Worst Gig
Page 5
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“With Zappa Plays Zappa we really haven’t played a bad show because everybody is so focused on doing the best job possible. If we’re going to give ourselves a hard time and say it wasn’t a good show, it’s still far better than a lot of other things. We never go up there and have a total train wreck. You might miss a few parts here and there, but that’s because they’re fucking hard. Outside of that…I generally try not to get involved in things that I don’t like…We’ve had things that have happened that you can’t control. Like we played in Roanoke, Virginia—I’m pretty sure that’s where it was—and we played one song, and I stepped on my volume pedal to turn it down so I could change guitars. Then the next song starts and I have no sound. I’m thinking maybe a cable or something is weird. Forty-five minutes later, I still have no guitar sound. At that point we have techs onstage, and I’ve been conducting the band and doing stuff. But we finally had to resort to putting on house music for a minute while we’re completely taking apart my guitar system. Come to find out what it was is there’s a little thread in the volume pedal that is part of the mechanism that when you turn it on or off this thread is involved. And it snapped, leaving it stuck in the off position. That’s the last thing you think of when it comes to ‘let’s find the problem.’ Forty-five minutes later that was, ‘Well, let’s look at the volume pedal.’ We had that little forty-five-minute snafu, then we played for another two hours after we got it fixed.”
—Dweezil Zappa
Ume
Credit: Matt Bechtold
Ume (pronounced “oo-may”) first earned raves from Rolling Stone in 2011 as one of the nation’s best unsigned bands. Now the trio from Austin, Texas, is touring on its sophomore LP, Phantoms, which showcases the intricate guitar chops and ethereal vocals of frontwoman Lauren Larson. The road-savvy indie band, which also includes bassist Eric Larson (Lauren’s husband) and drummer Rachel Fuhrer, evokes comparisons to Blonde Redhead, Metric and Sonic Youth through its mesh of textural melodies and anthemic hard rock. Ume was recently featured on an episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, taking the host on a tour of Austin eateries.
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“We have a van curse, where literally—I hate to say it—we are tens of thousands of dollars in debt from the van. The first van we ever bought was $400, and we got it at a salvage auction in Pennsylvania, where I was going to school. We didn’t even know if it was going to run. I don’t know why we bid on it. It had a rusted-out bottom. We’d taken it all the way to the West Coast. It broke down four times—blew a head gasket in the Mojave Desert. That was pretty bad. But then we had twenty bucks, and I ended up going to Vegas, renting a car, turning that $20 into $80…it was on a nickel slot called Filthy Rich.
“Then we had another van and ended up putting a new engine in it. We booked a tour…We’ve always done preventative maintenance. We didn’t even get eight miles out of Austin. We broke down in the middle of the freeway after we’d already had to replace the engine.
“Then we ended up borrowing our friend’s diesel, which had 450,000 miles. That could have taken him to the moon. So we said, ‘Let’s get a diesel van.’
“We get the diesel van, and it’s broken down every single tour.
“When I broke down in Nebraska this last time [in 2011], it was like this big rodeo day. [The people at the repair shop] were going, ‘Well, we’re gonna close at noon. It’s Rodeo Days.’
“I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’
“So I had to put on my country-girl accent: ‘Could someone work a miracle for me today? We’re on the road from Texas.’
“He’s like, ‘All right. Let me see what I can do.’
“They ended up taking our van in. We made it to the show. We ran onstage, plugged into someone else’s gear, played one song, and the stage manager was like, ‘You’re done!’”
—Lauren Larson, Ume
Renaissance
London’s Renaissance organized in 1969 as a folk-rock project for two ex-Yardbirds, kicking around England’s campus circuit with little fanfare. It wasn’t until 1973’s Ashes Are Burning that the ensemble became a mainstay on the English progressive-rock circuit, showcasing orchestral arrangements and extended instrumentals. The album also established the band’s core duo, guitarist Michael Dunford and singer Annie Haslam, whose pristine yet ethereal voice boasts a five-octave range.
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“We were driving along this highway in Pennsylvania, and we looked over at a truck stop and saw this yellow truck in the lake. It was on an incline, I guess, and it went over. So we had a good laugh about that and thought, ‘Thank God, it’s not ours.’ We’d had the whole day before we were to play Penn State, and we’d stopped for lunch and did whatever—there was a lot of time before the show. But anyway, when we eventually got to the venue, all the equipment was lying out on the grass drying. That was our truck in the lake…A [roadie] had parked the truck and put the hand brake on, and obviously the hand brake failed. Don’t remember if the truck had our instruments in it, but it had speakers and our whole PA—we usually had more than one truck. We didn’t think we’d be able to do the gig, but we did.”
—Annie Haslam, Renaissance
Yung Skeeter
Credit: Rony Alwin
Trevor McFedries transformed from a rural Iowa football star to LA producer and performer Yung Skeeter in record time. While teamed with Shwayze and Cisco Adler, he became the first DJ to perform during the entire Vans Warped Tour in 2008. Well respected for his live sets and remixes, Skeeter (formerly known as DJ Skeet Skeet) was recently on the road with Katy Perry on her California Dreams tour, exposing audiences to material such as his signature single “I Like It Loud.”
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“The most memorable was one of my first really big DJ gigs. I had a show in Las Vegas, and I totally stressed myself out about it. Basically, I got to the gig, checked my emails and I had a problem with the booking agent because I had a gig the next day in Orange County that was about as big. So I scrambled, bought myself a flight ticket and got that happening. I ended up losing a ton of money because the flight cost more than both gigs combined were worth. But I just knew I had to be there.
“I do the gig in Vegas and feel great about it. I got to the airport and decided to work on some things for the next gig that was happening that day. I had an external hard drive that I would work off of. I put it between my laptop computer screen and my keyboard, and then I dropped something. So I reached over to grab it and smashed my screen against my external hard drive, and it basically wrecked this computer screen. So I couldn’t use my laptop for my DJ set. I basically called every friend I had and asked them if I could borrow their computer so I could copy all my music over, all my sets. I ended up using my buddy’s laptop.
“I copied everything over, reinstalled the software with seconds to spare. Got onstage at this proper nightclub gig with one thousand kids or so there looking at me. I start playing a song, and I’m feeling good. ‘This is going to be great. It actually worked out.’ And I realize I had set both the channels’ ‘out’ on the software to the same side of the mixer. Basically, I couldn’t mix songs.
“It was one of those situations where I was like, ‘What am I gonna do now?’ I had to wing forty-five minutes of me playing a song, starting a song, looping it out, bringing another song in, talking on the mic.
“I’m sure a whole roomful of kids thought I was an amateur whack job. It was pretty dreadful. It was forty-five minutes of me looking at my clock: ‘How can I get off of here?’”
—Yung Skeeter
Otep
Otep (an anagram for poet, although the singer insists, “That’s my real name”) fronts the Los Angeles–based group of the same moniker. She gained her reputation by being one of the lone female voices on the male-centric Ozzfest tour. The vocalist is comfortable growling, whispering, lecturing and rap
ping her way through topics laced with virulent feminism and peppered with shards of ancient imagery.
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“There was a time on Ozzfest [in 2001] where a lot of things went wrong. We had two guitar players who are no longer in the band. I had to release them from the band because they had lost focus of my vision. One of the guys couldn’t get his gear working, and he couldn’t get his amps going. He didn’t understand why nothing was coming out of his guitar. We were fifteen minutes into our set time, so we only had five minutes left to play. The reason was he had forgotten to turn the amp on! Prior to this, he was an electrician by trade.”
—Otep
Belle and Sebastian
Credit: Glen Thomson
Although actor Jack Black famously described Belle and Sebastian as “old sad bastard music” in the movie High Fidelity, audiences and critics have been charmed by the band’s “wistful chamber pop” for years. Formed in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1996, the act’s reclusive approach helped foster a major cult following. After a several-year hiatus, the band is touring and recording again, with a lineup that includes singer-guitarist Stuart Murdoch, guitarist Stevie Jackson, violinist Sarah Martin, keyboardist Chris Geddes, drummer Richard Colburn, bassist Bob Kildea and multi-instrumentalist Mick Cooke.
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“It was Manchester Town Hall in 1997. The band hadn’t been going very long, maybe a year or so. We always had mad ideas. We had one where we would be onstage in the middle—like in a boxing ring—with the audience surrounding us. But the whole thing with being onstage is the band is listening through monitors; the audience is listening through speakers. That’s the classic performance model in the technical sense. What you hear and what the audience hears is completely different.
“When we started we always preferred playing cafes. Small places. Even at an acoustic bar with a very small vocal PA, you can get the sense if you angle things in a way that you’re experiencing the same thing. It gives it more of a communal feeling to the experience. Our idea was to get that same experience.
“But this was not a cafe; it’s a town hall. There were maybe 1,000 or even 1,200 people. We had two stages. The band members were offset in the center with people surrounding us. Then there was another island in the back of the room where the keyboards were…And there were speakers facing in on us—this being the idea that the audience and the band were going to hear exactly the same thing. This was the concept.
“It was a complete disaster.
“We were all playing out of sync with each other, especially the keyboards, because they were in a different part of the room. [From] what I could hear, I could tell it was the worst gig I’d ever been to. I was just going, ‘This is utterly dreadful.’ It was back in the days before computers, and Chris [Geddes] had a real Mellotron. It was completely out of tune.
“Performing at this was a huge nightmare. And then later in Manchester I found out Johnny Marr [of The Smiths] was at the gig. He was there to witness the worst band ever. My worst gig was probably one of the worst gigs in popular music history.
“But I think it looked pretty good.”
—Stevie Jackson, Belle and Sebastian
Wilco
Jeff Tweedy was a founding member of the influential alt-country act Uncle Tupelo. But his follow-up project, Wilco, has proved far more durable and successful than his formative band. Only singer-guitarist Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt have remained with Wilco since its formation in 1994, witnessing more than a dozen members come and go. The unifying factor that has kept the Chicago quintet centered through years of experimentation and internal turbulence is Tweedy’s inimitable Grammy-winning songwriting.
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“It’s a tie. There are two. The Sasquatch Festival in 2004 with this [current] lineup of the band. We went on after Arcade Fire, which is kind of hard to do anyway. They had so many instruments that the monitor lines were crossed. We had a hopeless monitor situation. It was completely messed up on the monitor front. Not only did we have no monitors, we [also] had really strange sampled sounds coming back at us at a huge volume. That was the most disconcerting show I’ve ever played. That was the most uncomfortable hour onstage ever. I saw it on YouTube. It actually sounded pretty good—he had everything coming out front. But it’s a very uncomfortable-looking band onstage. We also did a festival in Indiana in 1995. The first record had just come out and we hadn’t toured much, and we had no concept [of] how to get sound through a festival stage with monitors. There was a lightning storm. I remember it was the most ham-fisted live gig ever. We couldn’t blame youth either. We weren’t really that young. It’s hard when there’s nobody to pass the buck to.”
—John Stirratt, Wilco
An erstwhile member of Jellyfish, The Three O’Clock and The Grays, journeyman Jason Falkner eventually found his songwriting and performing niche as a solo artist. His 1996 debut Jason Falkner Presents Artist Unknown represents one of the essential power-pop efforts of the era. Whether producing, arranging, or contributing various instruments to albums by artists such as Paul McCartney and Beck, the Los Angeles musician displays a mastery of many talents.
The French-ish Connection
By Jason Falkner
There are various reasons a gig can go south. In my experience it can start with the venue itself. Nothing nearby to eat except a 7-Eleven hot dog, no stall doors in the bathroom, grounding problems and/or spilt beer on the stage floor resulting in electrocution every time your lips touch the microphone. The list goes on.
My particular worst gig happened in the lovely city of Paris, France. I was flown there to do some solo shows at what I was told was a very authentic Parisian club that also served traditional French cuisine. In other words, it was supposed to be happening.
It turned out to be a touristy Hard Rock Cafe–type bummer.
I brought three guitars with me—all vintage and worth way more than your average road guitar. I should’ve known things weren’t gonna go my way when the record company guy left all three guitars in the trunk of the cab he was following me to the gig in. After a full-blown panic attack and several calls to the car agency, the driver returned with my babies minutes before I was supposed to take the stage.
Credit: Greg Allen
At this time in my career [1998], I was doing a lot of solo electric guitar shows and had just started using some of my instrumental (nonvocal) mixes onstage. I had a Discman (RIP), and I would do a few songs late in my set with the instrumental tracks as my backup band. Hey, I thought it was cool.
So I enter this joint and climb onstage, and all I can say is that the clatter of cutlery and conversation is louder than the PA speakers. A lot louder. I start my show with my acoustic guitar. Things are going well, and the people seem to be enjoying what I’m doing enough to take less frequent bites. This gets me a little excited, and I start jumping around (during this solo show era of mine I would often pretend there was a band behind me), at which point my foot becomes entangled with my guitar cord and the jack rips out from the back of the guitar during a particularly spastic move.
So now I grab my electric and usher in the backing CD portion of my show. After a couple of songs, people are shouting for me to go back to the acoustic (probably because it was less of an assault). I ignore this request, of course, because my acoustic is broken! So I’m rocking out, and then my strap rips where it connects to the front strap pin.
Holy shit, what else can go wrong?
I pick up the acoustic and do my last couple of songs with no amplification, and perhaps because dinner service has ended, people seem to be paying attention and rooting for me. I finish the last song with a bang and lift my guitar above my head to take a bow…and the crowd goes completely bananas!
I’m standing there amazed at this reaction when I look down in horror to see that my willy has exited my accidentally unzipped trousers.
Now tha
t is a finale. Vive la France!
Chapter
-4-
Communication Breakdown
Language barriers, cultural misunderstandings and onstage musical collaborations gone awry—oh, my
Flogging Molly
Credit: Matt Bechtold
Few bands have blended two seemingly unrelated styles more successfully than Flogging Molly, a rollicking mix of traditional Irish music and punk rock. Dublin native Dave King had established himself as the lead singer of 1980s metal act Fastway when in 1993 he decided to team up with some friends for a weekly gig at LA pub Molly Malone’s. Eventually, the lineup became permanent, featuring fiddle player (and King’s future wife) Bridget Regan, guitarist Dennis Casey, accordion player Matt Hensley, drummer George Schwindt, bassist Nathen Maxwell and mandolinist Bob Schmidt. Flogging Molly continues to enjoy an unusually loyal following, which celebrates the band’s poetic collision of Old World and New World sounds.
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“One of my horrible touring experiences was in…the United Kingdom. We were on the bus, and you can’t take a shit on your bus. So when you stop at a truck stop, that’s when you have to do your business. We were driving, and I had one of those times when I woke up and ‘you got to go.’ There are no questions. I won’t get into too much detail. We’ve all had the experience.
“I got to run off the bus because it just stopped. Perfect. I threw on my shorts and my flip-flops, and I run into the gas station. I do my business. I come out and the bus isn’t there. I go, ‘Oh, they probably went around back because they were in front.’ I walk around back. The bus isn’t there. I walk around front again. The bus isn’t there.