The Worst Gig
Page 8
Dan: “…the radio station.”
Icons and Labyrinths
Jake: Right, then there’s the Billboard Awards show. Let me make a case for the Billboard Awards being the worst gig ever, because…
John: You’ve already written this story, though, right? It’s in your book.
Jake: Okay, I have, I have. I’m happy to disqualify it purely on that basis alone.
Dan: Wait a minute, wait a second, hold on! We can recycle from Jake’s book. If you can only tell your good stories one time in life, you’re in for a hard life.
Jake: Let me tell you why it’s great: because everything right up until the ending is awesome. We get there, we’re interviewed by the media, we’re backstage mingling with our musical heroes and various pop stars, we graciously pass up our rehearsal slot, we take the 23-yard limousine ride around the corner to the front of the building, we get out, we walk down the red carpet and get screamed at by excited fans, we’re processing the sudden hugeness of our profile that has sort of surprised us.
Dan: Jake, Jake, why did we give up our rehearsal slot?
Jake: Because they were all running late, all of the production. Everybody was taking too much time, all of the big stars whom we were soon to mingle with and count ourselves lucky to be among—you know, the Mariah Careys…
Dan: (Laughing) Cher, Garth Brooks…
Jake: Courtney Love…
John: Right, and being interviewed with Natalie Imbruglia and getting to look at her and think, “Wow, she’s cute…”
Dan: Wasn’t the backstage setup like a cluster of mobile homes underneath a highway or something?
Jake: No, it was sort of like a locker room or big labyrinth. In fact, our guide got lost! It was so labyrinth-themed that on numerous occasions the woman who had been assigned to get us from our dressing room to the stage or to our seats didn’t know where the fuck she was going, and we followed her to various dead-ends so we had to keep turning around and going back to where we started.
The Billboard Awards Adventure
Semisonic went to Las Vegas in December of 1998 to perform our song “Closing Time” on the Billboard Awards. The awards show was held at the MGM Grand Hotel. For the performers, it was a three-day event. We all arrived on Saturday early in the day. Our crew quickly went to work gambling and drinking. Jake stayed in his room to read a book. John disappeared to play roulette with the band Hole. I went to an art exhibit in one of the casinos. In the hotel lobby and its environs we saw dozens of pop stars and musicians whose albums we had either admired or ridiculed. Later in the day there was a rehearsal and technical run-through. We were going to need it because for that particular show, my singing would be live but the band’s instrumental performance would be mimed to a playback of the instrumental mix of the song.
Jake: I remember that Saturday when we arrived I saw The Sugar Hill Gang, and I went up to Hank from that group and said, “Hey, I just want to say when ‘Rapper’s Delight’ came out I was just instantly hooked.” And before I could get to my second sentence he said, “Which way to the food?” And the day ended on a similar note, because I said to Jay-Z, at a party where there was loud music playing, “I really enjoyed ‘Hard Knock Life,’” and he exhaled from a cigar and spoke in such a low frequency that I couldn’t understand a word he said, and I just nodded politely and let him alone.
John: Then at the show itself, the performers were all in a kind of holding area together backstage, so we were waiting with Cher and Courtney Love.
Dan: Stevie Wonder was standing around backstage.
Jake: Magic Johnson sat near us during the performance. Musicians were coming up to him to pay him tribute.
John: It was the most shoulder-rubbing celebrity thing I think we ever did. Maybe the Grammys were a little more…maybe I was closer to a few more of my heroes at the Grammys than I was at the Billboard Awards, but the Billboard Awards was surprisingly well-stocked.
Dan: Wasn’t there something about Garth Brooks flying through the air?
Jake: He did, during the show. Well, we saw him run in backstage to get made up so he could run out to the front of the auditorium to make his entrance from the sky. From above. You know, from the catwalks or whatever. Anyway, we’re backstage and Garth Brooks storms into the dressing room in a rush because he’s gotta get to his zip-line to make his flying entrance onto the stage and we’re eagerly watching. We’d been such good sports to skip our soundcheck, and all the crew was so appreciative of how we gave up our rehearsal time and allowed ourselves to get pushed back further and further in the show. I remember walking by Whitney Houston and her background vocalists as they were singing and snapping their fingers in the hallway rehearsing their harmonies, and I was like, “I can’t fucking believe I am walking by Whitney Houston singing a cappella.” Their singing was mind blowing.
John: Yeah, they did sound awesome. Whitney in particular was really sweating.
Dan: A lot.
Jake: We had been outfitted with special suits.
John: Quite sharp, tight-fitting English-cut suits.
Jake: That was part of the whole Cloud Nine thing before the gig…before the cold chute-ride to the bottom. So, Hole goes on right before us and then it’s the end of the show and our big moment and we’re thinking about performing for Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Jay-Z. And the production people are nervously looking at their watches, in a panic about running over the network time limit.
A Race Against “Time”
The conceit was that Semisonic would come on at the end of the Awards show and play “Closing Time.” The song would “close” the show. But due to the structure of these events, the last performance in the show is 1) the least likely to get a proper rehearsal, and 2) the most likely to be cut short if the rest of the show runs long. So, unbeknownst to the band, there was some concern among our label and management that the band might not even get a chance to perform. Nobody told us because they knew it would enrage us and possibly cause us to telekinetically trigger earthquakes and tidal waves in distant countries.
John: And the union, any time you’re doing a union show…you know the union guys. The show had already gone over so much that they’re at time-and-a-half, and if they go to double-time then the producer makes no money.
Jake: Yeah, and there was a guy in a truck, because Jim (our manager) and Jay (the president of our label) were backstage, in contact with the truck, and the guy in a truck basically had his hand on the power lever because union hours have now gone into quintuple overtime and the production guy has got his ear on that. So as soon as the network cut the live show’s signal, the lever came down, and with the lever the pants came down.…So we got out onstage at the end of the awards show. Dan starts singing and then John and I are just waiting to come in, and we come in, we hit the first chorus, we’re rocking along, I’m about to play the drum fill into the second verse and just as we get there…the power to the stage goes off, our mics are cut, the house lights go on and a voice says, “Thank you for coming to the 1999 Billboard Awards!” And we’re left standing…
Dan: …cut off halfway through the song, with no warning.
John: You know, we’re depantsed.
Jake: We’re completely depantsed in front of Stevie Wonder, Carole King, the whole audience at the MGM Grand Arena.
John: Whenever anybody asks me what the exact sensation of that moment was, I’m like, think about being out in front of your gym class and the girl you have a crush on is there and all of your friends are there and then the creepy stinker from your class creeps up behind you and pulls your pants down thinking that you have on a jockstrap but you forgot your underwear and you’re just there swinging in the wind in front of everyone. It’s just a classic depantsed moment where, maybe they didn’t even intend for you to be fully naked, but you were fully naked.
Dan: The thing about the Billboard Awards is that
we were actually sort of rocking. Or I was singing and you guys were pretending to rock and I was half pretending to rock, but you know, it was a big crowd of people and it seemed to be going really well and it was dark—the audience is dark and there are lights on us. It was very production-y and then suddenly, halfway through the song, very instantaneously the sound from the stage stops, and the house lights come on, and we’re standing there awkwardly in silence in front of the crowd.
Jake: Right. It was over in a flash.
Dan: It was crushing!
John: I mean, we literally got through one chorus and that was it. The producers really just wanted to hear that one line because it was “closing time” and that would wrap up the show.
Jake: Perhaps the coda to the story is when we showed up to play the Penn and Teller show six weeks later, also in Vegas, and some of the same crew members saw us. They came up to Dan and said, “We’re so sorry about what happened to you guys and we’re gonna bend over backward to make sure everything goes well tonight.” And Dan said, “Yeah, after we bent forward last time!”
Chapter
-5-
Mother Nature’s Wrath
Snow, rain, flooding, extreme cold, scorching heat— it ain’t easy being a performer.
Garbage
Credit: Elias Tahan
Devised in 1994 by Scottish ingenue Shirley Manson and veteran record producers Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson, Garbage surfed the decade’s alternative wave with hits such as “Only Happy When It Rains,” “Stupid Girl” and “#1 Crush.” Before long, the group’s studio wizardry, songwriting skills and charismatic waifish singer made it an MTV mainstay and multi-Platinum seller.
• • •
“Two stick in my head. Part of it is because of the extremes of the gig. One, we did a radio show on the first tour called Snoasis, which was in upstate New York at a ski lodge in front of twenty thousand kids. It was this outdoor festival and all the kids were in parkas. Oasis was supposed to be the headliner—there were ten bands each doing a half-hour set—and they canceled when Noel Gallagher said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not going to sing in twenty-below weather.’
“It was absolutely freezing out. They said, ‘You guys have to go on and play a longer set.’
“So we went on, and we couldn’t keep the guitar strings in tune. I was wearing a parka and gloves—you can’t really play drums in that. Shirley had a complete face mask. It could have been anybody singing. You wouldn’t even know it was her until you heard her voice. It sounded so bad that after two or three songs the kids were getting impatient because they wanted to rock out and we kept stopping and changing guitars. Finally, we just played a couple punk covers, and after fifteen minutes onstage we bailed. Then the kids started throwing snowballs. It was an absolute disaster.
“The other extreme is we played the Fuji Fest in 1998 right before Korn, in front of thirty thousand kids who were moshing like crazy. But the Japanese mosh more politely, so it was a different vibe. But it was so fucking hot. It was 110 degrees out and 95 percent humidity. It was just sweltering.
“We went onstage and we’re playing with a pretty intense c’est la vie [joie de vivre], and about halfway through the second song we were all crushed by heatstroke. Shirley had to sit on the front of the stage. There was no escape from the sun. It was like three or four in the afternoon, and the sun was right in our face. There was nowhere to hide from it. I remember one of the crew guys brought out an umbrella to hold over her. I was having water poured over me between every song. We made it through an hour set, but we were all beet red. I thought Steve—who was still valiantly trying to thrash on the guitar—was going to have to be hospitalized. He looked like a lobster. Shirley was sunburned. Even though she put on sunscreen, it just melts and goes in your eyes.
“Physically, it was a terrible show. We’re not a band that likes the sun. If you’re a Blink-182 from California, you can go onstage and jump around in your boxer shorts. But we’re from Wisconsin and Scotland. We like mood lighting. We need all the mood lighting we can get.”
—Butch Vig, Garbage
Concrete Blonde
A three-piece band that never got pigeonholed into one style, Concrete Blonde was one of the rare harder-rock groups in the late 1980s and early 1990s to be fronted by a female singer. Johnette Napolitano’s undeniable voice—gritty, passionate, honest to a fault—made quite an impression on the legion of fans that remember Concrete Blonde as among the best of the college-rock acts to precede the alternative boom. Taking shape as Dream 6, Napolitano and guitarist James Mankey kicked around the LA club scene for five years before landing a contract with IRS Records. While its self-titled debut yielded the punky MTV hit “Still in Hollywood,” Concrete Blonde didn’t crack the top twenty until its 1990 album Bloodletting yielded the plaintive anthem “Joey.”
• • •
“Chicago, and it was years ago. It was 116 degrees, and we had to drive in our RV from New Mexico to Chicago. Chicago has always been a good town for us…and the show was sold out. We had a crew that was—let’s say—‘substandard’…It was so hot—and I had my cat on the road with me—that I had to put my cat in the refrigerator in the RV. We blew a couple tires, and it was hell getting tires on the RV because it’s an odd size, and it’s Sunday or whatever. And the crew kept going, ‘Let’s blow the gig.’
“And I’d say, ‘We can’t blow the gig.’
“We got there just as the opening band was coming off, and we loaded the stuff in. The record company rep was there, and she said, ‘We just flew in all the retailers from Canada.’
“She tells me this before a show, and I got nervous. And I shot back some tequila and hadn’t eaten all day. It was just too much. When I got out there, I hit the floor. Uh-huh. And I felt really bad. I felt worse than bad.
“I got letters that were like, ‘You heroin addict…’
“Shit, I’ve never had a needle in my arm in my fucking life. I’m not a heroin addict. It was just a lot of stress, and a lot of heat and a lot of pressure. And I just didn’t handle it right.”
—Johnette Napolitano, Concrete Blonde
Def Leppard
Credit: Helen Collen
Arguably the hard-rock act most emblematic of the 1980s, Def Leppard has sold more than sixty-five million records, with such powerhouse works as Pyromania and Hysteria. The band from Sheffield, England, surfaced in the late 1970s as part of the new wave of British heavy metal. But the quintet really flourished as an early juggernaut of the MTV era by utilizing its collective good looks and melodic spin on heavy metal—a potent combo once dubbed “stainless steel.”
• • •
“I could probably go on all day because we’ve done so many gigs over the years. The first one that springs to mind is the Narara Festival in Australia in ’84. I’ve never seen rain like it. It was like biblical, Noah’s Ark, baseball-sized drops. It covered the place up. There was a crowd of about thirty-five thousand. Everyone left. There were only three thousand people left in the mud—honestly, three feet deep in this mud and rain. And we thought, ‘Shit, we’ve come all the way from wherever we were at—it was our first time in Australia—we’re going on!’ It wasn’t a bad gig, actually. It was pretty triumphant.
“Another one that springs to mind was in Switzerland, and the audience just left at the same time. We thought, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Then we got hit with tear gas. Someone had let tear gas off at the gig, then it got to us at the stage. I don’t know if you’ve been tear gassed, but it’s not very cool. You can’t see. They brought in cold towels and stuff to wipe our eyes. But I don’t remember if we went back on…It was just some idiot in the audience goofing around…It was a mass exodus, immediately. Bizarre.”
—Phil Collen, Def Leppard
Fitz and the Tantrums
Credit: Matt Bechtold
Few modern bands have so effortlessly captur
ed the sound and feel of 1960s Motown hit makers better than Fitz and the Tantrums. The noticeably guitar-free unit features the emotionally charged interplay between vocalists Michael “Fitz” Fitzpatrick and Noelle Scaggs, buoyed by the stellar musicianship of saxophonist James King, bassist Joseph Karnes, keyboardist Jeremy Ruzumna and drummer John Wicks. The ensemble’s 2009 full-length debut, Pickin’ Up the Pieces, spawned the monster single “MoneyGrabber,” leading to performances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Conan and Jimmy Kimmel Live.
• • •
“We did a whole tour through the Midwest and the Northeast when it was the dead of winter…There was one night we played in Columbus, Ohio, that was one of the greatest shows we ever did because the crowd was just raucous, and insane and into it. But as soon as I stepped out on the stoop—I had never been in an ice storm before because I’m from California—I didn’t know what was going on. I had my sax on my back, stepped out on the stoop, went backward, landed on my horn and then bounced on my ass down ten steps. So that sucked…I had to get through two and a half more weeks of tour with a bad back…I had sprung on fancy Sorel snow boots. I thought I was the pimp. But they’re useless against ice. I gotta get the ice-climbing gear next time we go to Ohio in the wintertime.
“But that’s really not a bad gig; that was just a bad fall. Other gigs I can tell you about were from when I did a lot of touring with hip-hop artists…We were out with the Hip-Hop Live tour in 2007. We were backing Ghostface Killah, Brother Ali and Rakim…We were in Baltimore—roughest crowd of the tour and a rough part of town. We were backstage waiting to go on. Ghostface slayed it. Brother Ali came out and did a good job, but the whole crowd was chanting, ‘Rakim. Rakim. Rakim.’