Dumbest Bandmember Live Moment

ECVail

Senior Member
To go along nicely with the Most Embarassing moment thread, we all have stories of bandmates doing ridiculous things on stage. What's your personal experience the silliest or most "lacking common sense" moment on stage?

Here's mine:

We were playing a daytime show on the mountain in Beaver Creek ski resort (Red Tail Camp for those of you familiar with BC). Our guitar player/vocalist was singing backup to the bass player on the bluegrassy version of Gin N Juice (a crowd favorite by the way that can be cleaned up if needed). The bass player, singing lead, realized that this was a daytime show, in a public place with lots of kids around and that we were hired by the resort. Unfortunately, the guitar player either did not comprehend where we were or didn't care. He plowed ahead with all of the cuss words in the song and even seemed to be emphasising them - like he could not figure out why the bass player was omitting them. As I sat there in horror, knowing Beaver Creek would never book us again if he kept it up, I was struck by genius and chucked a stick at him, popping him nicely on the back of his noodle. He whipped around, nasty scowl on his face and I was able to mouth to him "STOP CURSING YOU IDIOT." Thankfully he stopped singing altogether.

Later at the bar at the base of the mountain we were all having beers and he came in fuming at me. Yelling things like "don't ever throw sticks at me," and "you were way out of line." I took his verbal abuse and responded with one question, "do you ever want to play here again? Because if you do, you won't blatantly cuss on stage in the middle of the daytime, in public when we are hired by a ski resort who caters to families."

He got it pretty quickly and apologized. But I still cannot fathom why he thought it would be OK in the first place.
 
This isn't really a dumb bandmember moment, more of a funny moment.

We were playing at a restaurant, doinly mainly swing tunes, all kinda background music. We'd played the head, broke it down to solos, and it was our bass player's turn. For something different we all dropped out, just let him solo by himself and we all turned to watch him.

He was really getting into his solo, closing his eyes, digging into the strings, so much so that he accidently drooled down his double bass.

We haven't let him forget it.
 
We were doing "Salt Peanuts" (an old Dizzy Gillespie tune) in my HS big band. We added to the end of the song a bit, where we looped these 2 bars, with a different person playing the title line each time. (If you don't know the song, it's a little 2-note syncopated thing where Dizzy would sing "salt peanuts, salt peanuts" on the original.)

Anyway, our drummer (not me), who was a great example of the all-hands-no-brains drummer, completely blanked out when his turn came, and started playing some random half-time rock beat (in a fast swing tune) which he kept playing even when the band tried to come back in. The song ended as we all gave up on salvaging it, and just turned around and glared at the guy. To this day I still don't know what he was thinking.
 
1983 - Colonial Beach, VA Firestation -

Back then small towns would rent out their volunteer firestation for bands to play for young audiences. We were a crappy cover band but landed this $200 gig. In 1983 this seemed like a lot of cash.

One day before we drive down from D.C. our lead singer goes to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. We scramble for a singer and this guy swears he can do the gig.

With no rehearsal except for him singing to a crappy cassette player while we're setting up, he goes into a panic. There are 100 kids there and at least 50 adults. He is so overcome with stagefright.

We open up with Highway to Hell and after the guitar, then drum intro he panics and doesn't start singing. The guitar player bumps the intro and again the singer is frozen and won't jump in.

The firehouse is huge and even though there's alot of people, there are only 10 people right in front of the stage.

Just as the booing starts, he impulsively decides to dive off the stage into the audience. The ten people in front of the stage have no clue and he hits the floor. He breaks his collar bone and his arm. The booing increases and we stop the song.

This was before everybody was lawsuit crazy and the firehouse manager refuses to call an ambulance and the guitarist drives him over to the hospital while we embarassingly tear down our stuff in front of 100 baffled people.

With all our crap on the street, we wait for over 5 hours for them to return so we can go home.
 
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