Give us your top 5 'hairyest' moments!

[John Willett]

Originally Posted by edva

Haha, good story, reminded me, many years ago, I was the drummer, we got a festival gig, outdoors, big crowd, as we take the stage, the guitar player swipes the floor tom mic, and sticks it on his amp!!! Unfortunately, the FOH guy didn't see this, and literally proceeded to BLOW THE SYSTEM UP as he kept trying to get more floor tom, and the guitar player hit the boost for a solo. Ah, youth, an interesting time.........

And they say drummers are stupid - well, these two stories certainly prove it wrong.

[Beyersound]

I was an A2 on the Billboard Awards in 98' or 99' (one of several that I did). I was the guy that made sure all the subsnakes and mults were where they belonged, and properly plugged in. We had 10 acts to get on and off stage, as well as plugged in, during the commercial breaks of the live 2hr broadcast. We had a changeover of Lauryn Hill into Whitney Houston. I guess Lauryn wanted to pull out all the stops, and decided to bring as many band members with her as she could. There was a huge amount of rented setups on stage, including a Hammond B3 with Leslie, and a big, ragtag DJ setup, complete with grounding issues that I ended up troubleshooting and fixing during rehearsal. Most acts we see on those shows have nice, clean, properly packaged touring rigs that roll right on and off the stage. Not so with LH, everything was just thrown together. No cable looms, pedalboards, racks, or custom drum platforms, just stuff. As the show went on I realized how close to impossible the changeover was going to be. I got all my A2s together, along with the stagehands, and scripted the moves like an offensive coordinator, well as close as I could get to that. We scrambled like crazed ants, people running offstage with armloads of stuff. Luckily Whitney's band had great clean setups that rolled right on stage easily. The stage manager yelled out the one minute warning while I was still connecting subsnakes. What seemed like an eternity later, I lunged behind the drum riser, grabbed and landed the 56pr main mult in one motion, and jumped off the stage. Lots of high fives ensued. I checked the time, we made it by 8 seconds!

Sorry about the lengthy story............

[GuitarRuss]

Originally Posted by cram

Holy Cow: Group of girls show up to the show and muscle their way to the front of the stage, pull down their tops and rest their dangly bits right on the stage. We didn't miss a note.

Bar and Grill: first song, I step up to the mic and an arc goes from the grill to my lip. Knocks me cold and fuses my pickups to my strings. I had a bruise on my lip and face the size of a baseball.

Liquid Joes: During a live radio broadcast a drunk guy throws his shoes at our guitar player (?). I tell him to chill out and he takes a swing at me. I jump off stage and proceed to kick his ass live on the radio. When I'm done I jump back onstage and the band hasn't stopped playing and they don't miss a note.

Kamakaze Cafe: We finish the gig and the owner tries to pay us in coke. When I protest he pulls a gun, so we politely accept his offer. When we come back later with the cops he tells me he is going to kill me, right in front of the cops. They proceed to show him the error of his ways while we help ourselves to the money on his desk.

There are so many more...

Awesome... simply awesome!