No Encore!

by Drew Fortune

  We’re up there doing our thing, and Eric’s jumping around and doing splits like the madman he is. After the last song, he’s holding the bass up in the air, and all these girls are totally wide-eyed. It was a weird reaction, and we realized that Eric had split his pants in the front. Usually you split your pants in the back, but his gave out in the front. He was going commando like he always does, and his junk was hanging out the front of his pants for all of the UK to see on the jumbotron. At that moment, he was literally the biggest dick in the UK.

  He just had to own it. They say TV adds ten pounds? Those screens added 150. He had so much adrenaline going that he didn’t notice it. It might have felt a little windy down there, but he just kept holding that bass in the air. We were walking off stage, and he was kinda shuffling funny because those pants were split wide open. He looked down and looked up with these wild eyes. He played it totally cool and just had to laugh it off. Thank God he had to retire those pants.

  47

  GARY LEVOX

  (Rascal Flatts)

  I’m not a country music guy by any stretch, but I definitely didn’t want to alienate any genre based on personal taste. I’m not sure if LeVox was afraid to tell me any truly gnarly stories, but with sixteen number one songs, I honestly believe that they just didn’t have time to get truly out of control.

  This one is really weird, and it’s a miracle I didn’t get seriously hurt. It was the beginning of our tour a few years back, so the set and everything was new. A few weeks in, I told my stage manager, “Dude, I can’t see where I’m walking out there.” Usually there’s glow-in-the-dark tape to mark the edges and outline of the stage. When the spotlights went dark, it was totally black for me, and I couldn’t see squat. I was getting worried I would torpedo right off the stage, and it was about a ten foot drop to the ground. Sure enough, one night I was singing, and brother—I just walked straight off the stage. The weird thing was everything went quiet, and it was like I went deaf for about five seconds. I landed square on my feet, right in the middle of the audience. I didn’t really know what had happened, and I just stood there.

  All the camera phones came out, and it was like an out-of-body experience. It was almost like I had floated down there. The baseball player Johnny Damon was there, and we hung out with him after the show. He gave me a baseball that read, “To Gary, nice recovery bro.” Another bad one was when we were playing an outdoor festival with a huge, elevated stage. The camera guys were shooting up at us, and putting it up on the jumbotron. It was our second song, and the crotch completely ripped out of my pants. As it was only the second song, I’m thinking, “Dammit—what am I gonna do for the next hour?” I jumped up on the drum riser and yelled at our drummer Jim Riley, “Did my pants just rip?” He’s banging away and yells back, “Yep,” with a big smile on his face. I had to reach down and wrangle one of the camera guys. “Dude, please don’t shoot me from that angle!” I had to sing with my feet together for the whole show.

  When you go from being an opening act and take that lead to headliner, it’s either gonna work or it’s not, and it’s scary. The people suddenly weren’t buying tickets to Kenny Chesney or Brooks & Dunn with us included. It was suddenly all on us, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready. It was a really scary time in my career because the last thing you want to do is fail at something you love. Thankfully, that self-doubt went away because I knew we were ready. We started with Jo Dee Messina, Toby Keith, Brooks & Dunn and finally Kenny Chesney. We were building up hits, but even with four singles, that’s only thirteen minutes of music. What were we gonna do with the other forty-five minutes? Our plan was to build it up as big as possible before going out on our own.

  We’ve had people turn on us and been heckled a bunch of times. Early on, it was mostly girls coming out to the shows. There’d be a ton of high school girls who had dragged their boyfriends along. They’d come back for the meet-n-greet and would literally say, “I don’t even want to be here, but she made me come.” This one time in Colorado, there was a whole wrestling team at the show that was throwing rocks at us. They hit our fiddle player and drummer and banged up our instruments. Finally, the wrestling coach realized what was going out and threw them out. A few years ago, we were opening for the Rolling Stones at the Indy 500. Stones fans are so incredibly passionate and don’t want to sit through an opening act. They were flipping us off and heckling the entire show. I was thinking, “This is crazy! These senior citizens are flipping me the bird!” There was a woman who had to be at least seventy-eight, flipping me off and flashing me. You don’t forget that kinda thing.

  Nowadays, somebody gets two hits and they’re out there headlining. You can only play “Sweet Home Alabama” so many times in a forty-five-minute set. You gotta be ready for that main stage. Our first single went number one, and it really hasn’t stopped. It’s been eighteen years and sixteen number one songs. Twenty-six million records sold. It really has been a whirlwind. We were in our early twenties and didn’t really know how to take it. I was the only one that was married. It was as crazy as you can imagine, with no sleep. We were working so hard, doing three radio stations a day. We were touring and cutting records while on tour, and it’s been that way for the past fifteen years. Last year, we only did thirty-five shows, and that was us essentially taking the year off.

  Because of that crazy schedule, you’ll never see us on Behind the Music: The Drug Years. There just really wasn’t time. We were doing stuff that no one had done before. We were the first country act to play and sell out Wrigley Field and the first country band to do three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. We were high on our career. The best training ground for me was the early days, playing bars and honky-tonks in Nashville. I learned what worked on stage and how to talk to the crowd. I really honed my craft in those whiskey joints. With American Idol or The Voice, you’ve got winners who have never even sang in a club with no training on how to be a front man or woman.

  Man, people love to fight in those honky-tonks. People get hammered and just lose their minds, and I’ve had to get physical a bunch of times. They’re trying to test you. The bars don’t close until 3:00 a.m. in Nashville, so we were up there from 9:00 p.m.–3:00 a.m. By the time we’d get outside, people were going to work. It was like, “What the hell are we doing? What kind of life are we living?” I had a bunch of moments when I thought about quitting, especially before we got our record deal. I’m originally from Ohio, and I had a state job for ten years. I left a good job with benefits to chase this dream and starve. I don’t know how many times I called my mom, freaking out that I couldn’t do it.

  When we first started, we were working off of tips only. One night, Jay [DeMarcus] had his keyboard set up on the floor by a cigarette machine. I was sitting on a stool, and that was our set-up for the night. We made twenty-seven cents one night, and that’s a true story. I looked at Jay and said, “How the hell are we going to split this?” Touring has gotten better with age for me because I appreciate it so much more. Country fans are loyal to the end, and I believe they’re the most loyal in the music business. With pop, hip-hop, or rock, I don’t think their fans are any less passionate—I’m just not sure that they’ll stay with a band for as long as country fans. We have four generations of fans coming out to our shows, from grandmothers to granddaughters. We had a lady schedule her C-section around our tour date. That’s fan loyalty, man.

  48

  STEWART COPELAND

  (the Police)

  I’m one of those people that finds Sting funny on general principle, so it was a total delight to hear Copeland yell expletives into the phone, describing one of the many battles he waged with the Tantric God.

  We were total straight arrows when it came to playing shows. I discovered at an early age that playing drunk or on drugs just didn’t work, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The worst thing that can happen to a drummer happened to me at Madison Square Garden. It was our first arena show, and it was a huge deal for us. We had worked ou
r way up from small clubs to big clubs, from theaters to big theaters. The jump from the biggest theater—around three or four thousand—to the smallest arena of eighteen thousand is a very big jump. Shit, I was nervous. Along with worrying about selling enough tickets, it’s a whole different audio environment.

  A few songs into our set, we were thinking, “This is really cold. The audience is so far away.” The Madison Square Garden stage is very high compared to a theater or club. It was lonely up there—just three guys in a very big room. Then the worst thing I could have imagined happened: The skin of my bass drum cracked. If you lose a snare drum, you pull it and put in another without missing a beat. Same thing with a tom-tom or really anything else in a drum kit. If something goes wrong with a guitar, it’s no problem. There’s always one waiting to switch out. With a kick drum, you have to stop the show, pull out all the mic stands and the cymbals and drums. Getting to the very bottom of the drum set is hell on earth.

  So the show stopped, and our whole crew swarmed the stage. They were tearing apart this jungle, trying to get to the bottom of that damn kick drum. I’m sweating, just waiting out the whole thing. Fortunately, our singer, front man, and star, had a couple tricks up his sleeve. Sting started doing running commentary: “Hey! Here comes Dave, and he’s got the cymbal! Oh, he dropped it!” He sounded like a carnival barker, that Sting-O. He had learned patter and how to bullshit an audience from our early club days. He’s cracking jokes, singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and whatever he could think of to keep the show going. “They got the skin! They’ve got the drum back on the stand! They’ve got the mic and the cymbals back! OK, are you ready to rock!” All of Madison Square Garden, in fact, all of Manhattan, belonged to us after that. When you make a mistake and there’s an epic car crash onstage, that’s what the audience remembers. That’s my advice to all young musicians.

  I don’t think most audiences were aware, but we had temper tantrums onstage all the time. We were playing an ancient stadium in Turin, Italy, that had since been turned into a football stadium. The stage was down at one end of the stadium, and the dressing rooms for the players and us were in the middle, at the center line. To get from the dressing rooms to behind the stage, we had to take these little mini-buses. There were 80,000 people in the crumbling stadium, waiting to see us. It was Sting’s birthday, and I gave him a tuba. Three happy, blond heads got into the minibus, ready to play a show. The bus started taking all these weird turns, and the next thing we knew, we found ourselves merging onto a freeway outside the stadium. I yelled, “What the fuck?”

  The giant stadium, which blocked out the sky, was suddenly in our rearview mirror. We had a police entourage with blasting sirens, escorting us away from our gig, heading God knows where. After some yelling, we took the next off-ramp and got back on track, but now it was rush hour. We must have looked ridiculous in that minibus. We had our headsets on—I had my headband going—with nowhere to go. We circled the entrance a couple times because the drivers didn’t know the proper entrance. We were essentially lost in the parking lot. We got on stage about thirty minutes late, but that was all preamble for the meltdown that was to come.

  For some reason, halfway through the first song, our illustrious, esteemed lead singer was not happy. I knew what it was. It was because I sped up that second verse going into the chorus. I just loved that chorus, but we were playing it twice the normal speed. Our singer was not happy, to say the least. He was looking back at me, hurling daggers and trying to show me where the backbeat was. Generally, that’s not something that cheers me up. I don’t like having the guy at the front of the stage, indicating the timing with his left hand, which should have been thumping his fucking bass. “You miserable, cocksucking, motherfucking, piece of shit, bitch, goddammit I’ll fucking kill you!” In front of 80,000 people.

  I had white-hot popping balloons for eyes I was so pissed. I was smacking those cymbals so fucking hard they were standing vertically. You can only hit a drum so hard before it clacks instead of thumps, so that was an exciting evening. Once again, the audience loves that shit! We would take that anger backstage too. So many nights we’d be screaming at each other unintelligibly. Since both of us lack emotional stamina, we’d desperately be trying to sustain this towering, glorious rage, but it would dissipate. It would end up being, “Aww fuck. You prick…c’mere!” Much to Andy Summers’s [guitarist] confusion and disappointment, we’d be back to hugging and kissing each other.

  It never came to blows between Sting and I, but there were a couple tussles. But during those tussles, we’d be laughing hysterically, so I don’t think that counts. There was an accidental broken rib at Shea Stadium though. All the British press and tabloids were there, signifying that another British band had conquered America. We were there, the three blonde heads, goofing around like The Monkees for the cameras. Sting grabbed my copy of The New York Times I was reading, by way of frolic, but I reacted with, “Hey, fuck you!” Immediately, these two young twenty-somethings were fighting it out over a newspaper, with all the cameras on us. During the course of this, I had an elbow, he had a rib, and the two reached unity.

  I had an uncomfortable sensation elbowing him, and the next thing I knew, Sting had a fractured rib. I mumbled, “Ahh shit. Sorry dude.” We still played the show that night, and Sting killed it! It turned out to be a little hairline fracture, but I know he was still in pain. That’s the true story, and don’t believe the legend that I broke his rib in some crazy brawl.

  49

  DAN AYKROYD

  (Blues Brothers)

  This chapter was bizarre from the start, as I never actually got a chance to correspond directly with Aykroyd. Even his manager was surprised that he wanted to contribute, and a few weeks later, I got a short story written by Aykroyd. He misunderstood or just didn’t want to share stories about the Blues Brothers. I like the way it’s written, so I hope you’ll enjoy it as well, even if there’s no dirt on Belushi. Sorry!

  Please find below my written account for your use as you see fit of the worst rock ’n’ roll concert I ever attended. On March 2, 1967 Eric Burdon and The Animals were booked to play the Coliseum, a 5,000-seater in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario Canada. The group was at their peak with the hits “House of the Rising Sun,” “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “Help Me Girl,” etc. At the time, I was on the cusp of mid-teenhood, attending St. Pius the Tenth Minor Preparatory Seminary for Boys. A few of my dormmates and I pooled our altar boy service fees to buy tickets for the show.

  It was a windblown end of winter night as ten of us put on our jean jackets and Half-Wellington boots to conform with the look of every other male who would be there. Joining us were our handful of lady friends from the local mall in beehive hair, pegged jeans, and black Converse sneakers or boots. We were all set with flasks of rye and mixed vodka anticipating the coming onslaught of this dynamic English band’s powerful and, for us at that age, very evocative music. After a tremendous organ-driven set by Question Mark and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”), we awaited the feature artists, and we awaited and awaited and awaited—a half hour, then an hour going into an hour and a half. We began to chant: “We want The Animals! We want Eric!” At this point a muted strain of conversation began to ripple through the crowd: “They aren’t going on! The promoter bolted with the money! He didn’t pay the band!”

  As half the house now registered this information, multiple clusters of concert-goers began to smash chairs on the floor, storm the stage, and destroy benches in the stands. My friends and I were swept up in these frenzied waves of protest at the grave injustices being perpetrated: Our idols were being robbed, we wouldn’t get to see them play, and the promoter had already left the building. My own personal hand in the destructive riot was assisting in the dismantling of a couple of telephone booths. When someone—not me—threw a lit, fluid-coated, flaming Zippo onto the torn pages of the Ottawa phone book, our contingent exited the building just as squads of city police began to arrive.

>   Upon returning back to the dorm at St. Pius, we were more adrenalin-fueled, exhilarated, and indeed happier than if we actually had heard The Animals play. 2000 teens became animals instead. Moreover, the night was a perfect outlet for us young seminarians after a long winter. Plus, the Coliseum needed a complete renovation anyway.

  50

  ROBERT POLLARD

  (Guided By Voices)

  Best known for power pop anthems, high-kicks, a lo-fi aesthetic, and seriously heroic drinking, GBV broke out during the indie rock explosion of the early ’90s. Notoriously interview-shy, Pollard wrote his own chapter, revealing that New York hipsters are far more terrifying than aggro metalheads.

  Written by Robert Pollard

  “Lost at Gonesville Station”

  I’m not speaking for the entire band because I wouldn’t say it was a great show. I was far too nervous for it to be one of my better performances. I think it was part of the CMJ new music seminar in maybe 1994, and it was at the behest of Scat Records owner Robert Griffin who signed us in ’93. We hadn’t performed on stage in six years, and Robert told me that this particular showcase in New York City could do a great deal to enhance our profile as an “up-and-coming” band—the “real” band that we had now become, having signed to a “real” indie rock label. Also “up-and-coming” even though we were all around thirty-five years old at the time and had been playing in bands for close to twenty years. Before Scat, it was all make believe with six vanity-pressed LPs on make-believe labels.