by Drew Fortune
These festivals never brought out confidence in me, so I was already nervous. The tent was packed, the sun had just set, and everything was primed for a normal, great band to kill it. I could barely play, so I broke one of my guitars almost immediately. I just stood there, feeling this hot embarrassment flowing through me. I approached the mic and just started rambling. I told the story of the very first time I played on stage, when I was seven years old. I had learned a few notes on guitar at school, and we had to perform at this little elementary school assembly. I was supposed to pluck out a few notes of, “My Hat, It Has Three Corners.” I got so freaked out that in the middle of the thing, which was packed with parents, teachers, and family, I threw my guitar and ran off stage, screaming, “I can’t do it!”
On that stage at Reading, that memory was all I could think about. I was recounting this story and how terrible it was, and my bandmates were kind of jamming behind me. Behind me and to my right, Courtney Love was just looming. Suddenly, she started screaming, “You’re disrespecting Kurt!” She thought that with me smashing my guitar and having this meltdown on stage, I was somehow disrespecting her late husband. Kurt and I were around the same age, and I was also ambivalent about the idea of fame, but that was it. Then I smashed another guitar, and a piece of it caught the back of my head, so now I’m bleeding, melting down, with Courtney Love yelling at me. I was standing in front of all these people, and the whole tent was just a chasm of silence. I’m still really high and didn’t know what to do with myself. Finally, we stumbled through the set, but I don’t really remember. There are tapes and streams of this performance, but I can’t fucking bear to listen to it.
After the ordeal, I got off stage and met back up with the speed guy. We hung out all night tormenting people. We found out where the guitarist from Ride was hanging out, and we started following him around. We ended up in this hotel room with him and his girlfriend, and they were looking at us like, “Get the fuck out of our room.” We were just wandering around on speed with guitars. Later that night, I ended up on a tour bus with Courtney and Evan Dando, who were hanging out together doing really heavy drugs. At some point I barged into the medical tent, screaming, “I’m cut!” Of course, my injury was completely superficial. In my mind, I was trying to blow the whole show into this monumental, really honest moment.
In retrospect, and certainly within days of the show, I knew that I had really blown it. I’ve never quite recovered from it. On top of it, I had discovered speed, which gradually became a bigger part of my life—to the point where it ran me into the fucking ground five years later and ruined everything. It’s hard to think that on that night, I set in motion something really negative.
3
Dean Ween
(Ween)
For over thirty years, Ween has been waving a middle finger at the musical establishment and conventional good taste. Notorious for their early, drug-addled live shows, Dean Ween reveals that playing for a Busta Rhymes crowd is more frightening than a psilocybin-fueled waking nightmare.
Written by Mickey Melchiondo, aka Dean Ween
My Worst Gig Nightmare
We got a gig at the State University of NY (SUNY) on the Plattsburgh campus. Plattsburgh is up on the border of New York and Vermont, so we figured it would be a bunch of hippies in the crowd. What actually happened was that there were two student councils at SUNY Plattsburgh: a black council and a white council. They got to decide the budget for the concert and who they wanted to play at their big Spring Fling event. The black students voted for Busta Rhymes, who was our label mate on Elektra Records at that time. The stoner white kids voted for Ween, and then it was settled. Ween would play before Busta Rhymes in a massive gym that held 5,000 people.
We rented a van for this single show and drove up, all excited. When we got there it was a giant empty room with seemingly no one in charge. Busta Rhymes’s posse was there onstage. They had the student sound guy setting up fifty microphones for his boys. They just wandered around the stage and yelled, “make some noise!” There were tough-looking ghetto brothers walking all around the stage and the gym, occasionally yelling into the mics, “Yo, yo, yo. Check one two.” Busta Rhymes wasn’t even there. The only thing they needed to soundcheck was a turntable and the fifty mics—the easiest soundcheck in the world. Somehow it took three hours. Finally, everybody wandered off, and it was our turn to soundcheck right as the doors were opening. So I wrote a setlist that heavily featured our new songs from The Mollusk, which is a very prog-rock record. We go onstage and the whole crowd, as far as I can tell, is black people. We start by playing “The Golden Eel,” a song about a fish in Aaron’s fish tank that we wrote while tripping on mushrooms.
They hated it. They started throwing cups, bottles, change, chairs, and anything that wasn’t nailed down. By the third song, we were dead in the water. I just put my head down and played as best as I could, trying hard to tune out the crowd. All of a sudden, I felt like someone punched me in the stomach with a baseball bat. I got the wind knocked out of me and stumbled backwards. When I looked up there was a forty-ounce bottle at my feet. It had hit me in the gut/dick. The perpetrator was a 300-pound black sister who was standing right below me at my monitor. I looked her right in the eye, and she waved me forward, as if she was going to tell me a secret. I leaned in and she said “Baby, you gots to go.” She then stuck two thumbs down in my face to reinforce the point. Then to make sure I heard her, she said again, “Motherfucker, you gots to go!”
We started to make it a challenge; us against the crowd. We can do this with dignity, right? Wrong. By the time we finished our set, it was a game of dodge ball. The whole crowd had a mob mentality and was throwing everything with malicious intent. We were stretching our songs as long as they could go, and I was taking ten-minute guitar solos just to be a dick. For the record, we kicked ass. We were playing with the inspiration of fourteen-year-olds—absolutely fucking shredding to try and win the crowd over to our side. In some sick way I think we did. Anyway, we finish up and find out that Busta Rhymes hasn’t even left Brooklyn yet! He’s three and a half hours away. The teacher rep asks us to go back on, and we laughed in his face as we got our check and left.
That’s not the end of the story. We go back to our hotel, which was a Holiday Inn off the side of the interstate. Me and my guitar roadie, Mick Preston, go to the hotel bar and start drinking heavily, trying to forget the whole experience but not really caring so much. We get wasted, and the bar had a pool table that we held for four hours. Around last call, fifty scary looking brothers walk in, and some guy comes over to the pool table and says, “Last game fellas.” It was Busta Rhymes and his posse. I tell the guy that if Busta wants to shoot pool, he has to beat us first, and I also want to tell him a story. So Busta Rhymes walks over to the pool table, and I introduce myself and tell him the story about what it was like opening up for him. After all, we are on the same record label, and we both have new records out. Well, he thought it was the funniest story he ever heard, me getting hit with bottles and everything. He said, “This is Mickey from the Ween; they’re not very popular with the brothers!” He made me re-tell the story of our gig to every guy in his crew and posse, and they were laughing their asses off.
He paid for the drinks for the rest of the night, and me and Mick played doubles against him and his bodyguard on the pool table until like 5:00 a.m. I think he gave the bartender $5,000 to keep the bar open just for us. He was the nicest guy in the world. He kept high-fiving me and had me tell him the story of the gig over and over until I was hoarse. He bought all the champagne in the place; Moet, White Star—the best they had. It wasn’t Cristal, but Moet is pretty delicious. That’s pretty much the end of the story. We all stumbled back to our rooms, and I distinctly remember him giving me a hug and telling me we’d see each other again out there, but it never happened and probably never will again.
4
BLOTHAR
(formerly Beefcake the Mighty:
GWAR lead sing
er)
My first internship was at the House of Blues in Chicago in 2004. Walking in one day, I saw one of the show bookers with his head hung low. I asked what was wrong, and he said, “We just booked GWAR. Fuck.”
The craziest gig that we’ve played was City Gardens with Murphy’s Law back in the late ’80s, and all of these skinheads showed up. They had their nice, polished swastika jackets on, and there we were on stage, spraying blood all over the place. As soon as we sprayed blood on their jackets, they just lost their minds and attacked the band. They did this thing called the “Wall of Death,” which was this thing they would do if they hated a band. They would clear everyone from the floor and rush the stage. There was a steel barrier between us and the skinheads, but they pushed everyone to the side of the venue. Once they had everyone shoved out of the way, they went to the back of the club and ran full-speed towards the stage. They were trying to get enough speed to hop over that barricade. Security was present, but it was the old days, and they weren’t really doing jack shit.
At the time, we had this piece of equipment called the “Spew Chandelier.” It was a chandelier that spewed blood on the crowd, but because of the way it was designed—poorly—it sprayed blood backwards too. This may have been the only show that we used the fucking thing, and the Sexecutioner, our bandmate Chuck Varga, noticed that some of the skinheads were slipping on the floor. Chuck took the hoses out of the Spew Chandelier and started spraying the floor with the fake blood. When the skinheads got close to the stage, they all started falling down. It was like watching the Keystone Kops…they were falling all over the place and wriggling around. After that, their attack pretty much fizzled out. We all thought it was hilarious.
Back in the early days of GWAR, we had a lot of weird shows. The weirdest was this tiny little room in Bielefeld, Germany called AJZ. This was the first time we’d ever played there, and the audience didn’t know anything about us. The entire crowd was made up of these politically conscious, straight-edge punk rockers. Once we got on stage and started playing and spraying shit, they all ran away to the back of the room. They were terrified of getting sprayed, and we figured that once the shock wore off, they’d come forward and start liking it. But that never happened. They stayed pinned to the back of the club the entire show. When we got off stage after the show, they started questioning us. I’ll never forget the line of questioning, which was basically, “Why do you do this? What are you trying to achieve?” We didn’t really know how to answer. We were like, “Because we’re fucking GWAR, and we spray people with shit! That’s what we do!”
The most trouble we ever got in at a show was when our lead singer Dave Brockie (Oderus Urungus) got arrested. He’s no longer with us, and it happened at a show in North Carolina back in the early ’90s. Brockie was Canadian, so he had to cop a plea to this. Otherwise, he would have been labeled a sex offender and would have had to leave the country. What happened was we were playing this show in Charlotte, and I look out to the back of the crowd and see this line of uniformed policemen. I figured a fight or something was going on. Suddenly, I noticed this group of guys in cheap dress pants and ties lining the stage. They were fucking detectives, but we didn’t know it at the time. They started motioning to us to come off the stage. Their attitude was, “Hey! This is over. Get off the damn stage!” They walked on stage, with all the blood and shit spraying all over the place. We thought maybe it was just over-zealous security, so started yelling, “Get the fuck outta here” while pushing them down.
That’s when they started flashing their badges and guns. We immediately were like, “Oh! OK officers!” By that point, they were amped. They thought they were gonna have to fight us. We weren’t trying to fight them, we just didn’t know who they were. The show stopped, we went off stage, and the crowd was going fucking crazy, booing and throwing shit. Backstage, they told Oderus to take off his mask and shoulder pads. The one thing they made clear to him was, “Leave the big, fake dick on.” They made him remove his entire costume, except for the big, fake penis. I distinctly remember yelling, “Wait, fuck that! Don’t do it.” They were trying to make it seem like that was all he was wearing on stage—just a big, fake dick that wasn’t attached to a costumed monster. They yelled at me to, “Shut the fuck up,” so I did. I was only twenty years old at the time.
I shut up, and they took all of these pictures of Brockie wearing the fake dick. Then, they put on rubber gloves and put the penis in a five-gallon bucket. They sealed it up, took our prop, and disappeared. We had no idea what to do. Eventually, the promoter and Brockie were arrested. Dave had to be arraigned and was set to appear before a judge. It’s ridiculous that this is true, but it is. The judge was named Richard Boner. I swear to God. He was pronouncing it like “Bonner” but c’mon. On the day of Brockie’s trial, there was a family of little people who had been in some kind of domestic dispute. It was a husband, wife, and their kids, who were all small. Then, there was us and the fake dick. You couldn’t make this shit up.
Brockie was on the stand, and they lifted the “Cuttlefish of Cthulu” (which was what we called the dick) out of the bucket and presented it to the court. They started reading the charges, which were: “He was wearing this on stage. He simulated sex with a dog. He was eating feces and his own vomit.” The entire courtroom was aghast. They were reading this stuff like it had really happened and wasn’t just part of a normal GWAR show. There was no context. At the time, the principal figure in North Carolina was Senator Jesse Helms, who was extremely conservative. Charlotte was very politically backwards at the time, so they were trying to make an example out of us for obscenity and whatever else. The best part was that with all that went down, we didn’t miss any show dates! We grabbed Brockie straight from the courtroom, split, and kept right on touring.
5
TALIB KWELI
One of my regrets with this book is that I wasn’t able to get more hip-hop artists to share. It wasn’t for lack of trying, and I wasn’t about to pay Luther Campbell from 2 Live Crew his interview fee of $3,000. I’m thankful that Talib was so open about the problems hip-hop artists face from venues who don’t respect the craft.
My absolute worst gig was in North Carolina, a long time ago at the start of my career. I was staying at a hotel that was really far away from the venue, and I couldn’t find a cab service. Meanwhile, I was running really late, the crowd at the venue were getting anxious, and I’m steady trying to find a damn taxi. When I got one and finally pulled up to the venue, a fan came up to me really irate. This dude was spitting and yelling in my face. I had a road manager at the time who was a very aggressive type, and he grabbed this guy by the neck and pushed him away from me. That person’s friend came up to me, acting like he was a fan, and punched me right in my face. So now, me and my road manager are fighting with these guys outside the venue, and we got separated. The people we were fighting with ran into the show.
I went onstage, all disheveled and bloody. I said into the mic, “I’m not performing, because I was just attacked.” I saw the guy in the audience while I was talking, and I jumped into the crowd to try and get at him. The crowd, not understanding what was going on, wouldn’t let me. It turned into a situation where we either had to perform or not get paid. I performed, even though I definitely didn’t want to. In the ensuing chaos, I ended up not getting paid anyway. I had blood pouring out from the top of my head for my troubles. Because of that incident, I got wise really quick. The idea that I would do a show because I had to get paid, even though I didn’t want to, is something I never did again.
I tour and perform more than any other hip-hop artist. Touring and performing is my life’s blood. The stage is my life. As a performer, everything I do is preparation for me hitting that stage. When I’m onstage, that’s real. Everything else is just leading up to that moment. As a professional, I’ve learned how to drink responsibly and to exercise. I grew up smoking weed but not drinking alcohol. I did develop alcoholic tendencies over time, but that didn’t
happen until after I became a professional rapper. I consider myself a working-class MC. Working-class people drink a lot. People who have to constantly work need a few beers, a couple glasses of wine, or a few whiskeys on the daily.
As a species, we self-medicate. As I’ve gotten older, it’s taken a toll on my body. I can’t do it as much as I used to when I was younger. The key was knowing my body well enough to know when to stop. I don’t trust a man that doesn’t have vices. I wrote a song called “Get By,” which is that responsibility of knowing your limit. My vices of choice are alcohol and weed, and I used to get drunk and high before shows a lot back in the day. There were years where I didn’t do a sober show. You didn’t see me onstage without a drink. I had one show in Amsterdam at the start of my career with Mos Def that, in my mind, I remembered as being excellent. I remember it sounding great and having an amazing time. But then I remembered the look from everybody on my team as I finished, that was like, “What was that?” The look from El-P and Mos Def read, “You look high.”
To be a rock artist, you have to study musicality a little bit. Punk rock is kids who pick up instruments without any training. Punk rock is the closest thing to hip-hop in the rock world. Hip-hop comes from city, after-school, and music programs being cut. That’s where the disco era came from. The rise of the DJ came from New York City music programs getting cut. People stopped being interested in what instrument you played or hiring bands for their parties. The DJs were cheaper, and kids were growing up not knowing musicality. Hip-hop has never been dependent on knowing an instrument. You literally can get up and rap a cappella or rap over an existing record.