Good luck Al!

My moment was when I was subbing with a group I'd never played with before, much less rehearsed with.  The bass player wanted to play a solo, and instead of letting me know he wanted to play alone with no drums, he just started playing in the middle of a break in the tune.  Naturally I just kept time for him and he blew up at me on stage!  He stopped playing and on the mic said, "You take it man!"  Now this was a shuffle that I was completely unprepared to solo over and sort of tripped all over myself.    I was not only embarassed, I was floored.

Of course after the show, the band leader apologised for the incident, but the damage had been done.  Ill never sub for those guys again.  Rehearsal or not.

Best of luck, Al.

One time I did a set on stage with my fly wide open. I was the guitarist at the time and I wore my guitars high  . Fortunately, that night, I was wearing undies.

Another time, still the guitarist, I did a rock jump across the stage and my cord pulled clean clear of my guitar. That might not be that noticeable had it not been that we were a three-piece band.

You know, with high-speed film or today's new ultra-sensitive digital cameras, you no longer need to use a flash when photographing the audience!  

Huh?  What?  Ohhh!  Never mind!

Back when I was still in high school, I was playing drums for this church thing. I had to bring my own set and while setting up I realized that I had left my kick pedal at home. I ended up bashing my foot down on the drum riser. It was hollow and kind of, sort of worked but I must've looked like an idiot because I really had to slam my foot down.

It looks like sptucker and me have both had serious drum stool problems.

hey!  I made it through the show without using the wrong patch even once.  must have been all the good vibes y'all sent.  Thanks!

But, as a band we had a hideously embarrassing moment last night - our lead guitarist plays this fancy Ibanez with some kind of outer space bridge.  He broke a string, just as we were getting the crowd really going and into it.  Usually, just an inconvenience but not this time - he had left his special tool needed for changing strings at home!  It took more than 20 minutes to find something to get the string change completed and when we started back up, we looked out and half our crowd had gone!   Another broken string incident, on a different guitar, resulted in us losing half the half that had stuck around.  These guys need to buy spare guitars!  

oh, and then there was the part of the show when the PA started picking up some hiphop radio station.

writing this makes us sound so bad that I'm embarrassed all over again - this was no small club or small show, either.

We played a banquet for law exam grads at some hotel.  Tons of lawyers and judges were there. We were idiots and got drunk as hell. The gig went ok but I was pushing my kit on one of those hotel luggage carts out to my car (still drunk) and sorta missed the ramp and the thing falls over and my drums go rolling across the parking lot after all these legal eagles,,,LOL

embarassing but kinda funny, too.

ox

Aha, so Xena and Darryl Hall share a common experience in this regard: flashing the audience.  

Hmmm, Either last year at a concert where i hit myself in the face with my stick while playing a super fast beat on the hi-hat.. While my friend snapped a picture at THAT exact moment.

or having the ride cymbal collapse and the floor tom falling all in the same song *school drumset* in front of a school of elementary school kids this year on our jazz band tour. but its ok, they are kids... and the other drummer fixed the prob before it turned into something major.

I cling to the forlorn hope that if I'm deft enough to get a stick in my eye ... behind a pair of glasses, without touching them ... that I can play like Billy Cobham. Sadly, my dexterity remains mostly accidental.

I once saw Stewart Copeland, playing with Curved Air, manage to hook a stick behind his glasses in mid-wail, and fling them high across the audience, glinting beautifully in the lights...