The Worst Gig

by Jon Niccum

  Copyright © 2013 by Jon Niccum

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  Cover design by Will Riley/Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover illustration by Brent Cardillo

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Niccum, Jon.

  The worst gig : from psycho fans to stage riots, famous musicians tell all / Jon Niccum.

  pages cm

  (trade paper : alk. paper) 1. Musicians—Anecdotes. 2. Musicians—Interviews. I. Title.

  ML65.N33 2013

  781.64–dc23

  2013023162

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Wrong Venue

  Cowboy Junkies

  Alice Cooper

  Owl City

  Fishbone

  Kansas

  Pat Metheny

  Cross Canadian Ragweed

  Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

  Gillian Welch

  GWAR

  The Get Up Kids

  “Tales of Touring Terror: The Screamin’ Sirens’ Worst Gig,” by Pleasant Gehman

  Chapter Two: Insane Fans

  Rush

  Mutemath

  Juliana Hatfield

  After the Fire

  INXS

  Mike Watt

  Rufus Wainwright

  Tenacious D

  Bettie Serveert

  X

  “Poster Children’s Colorful Array of Crappy Gigs,” by Rose Marshack

  Chapter Three: Dangerous Malfunctions

  Flaming Lips

  Dweezil Zappa

  Ume

  Renaissance

  Yung Skeeter

  Otep

  Belle and Sebastian

  Wilco

  “The French-ish Connection,” by Jason Falkner

  Chapter Four: Communication Breakdown

  Flogging Molly

  Drowning Pool

  John Scofield

  Bernard Purdie

  Treasure Fingers

  Moby Grape

  New Duncan Imperials

  Bill Lynch

  Kinky Friedman

  R/D

  Steve Lukather

  “Semisonic’s Worst Shows Ever: A Conference Call,” by Dan Wilson

  Chapter Five: Mother Nature’s Wrath

  Garbage

  Concrete Blonde

  Def Leppard

  Fitz and the Tantrums

  George Winston

  Tower of Power

  “Eisley Braves the Snowpocalypse,” by Sherri DuPree-Bemis

  Chapter Six: Oops!

  Jane’s Addiction

  Blue Man Group

  Laurie Anderson

  John Mayer

  12th Planet

  Chamberlin

  Nada Surf

  Peter Frampton

  Rubblebucket

  Borgore

  Daughtry

  Anthrax

  “BR549’s Stomach-Turning Worst Show,” by Chuck Mead

  Chapter Seven: Violence

  The Sex Pistols

  Joe Satriani

  Tool

  Mike Finnigan

  Henry Rollins

  Translator

  Los Lonely Boys

  Jefferson Starship

  “Fugazi under Siege in Warsaw!” by Ian MacKaye

  Chapter Eight: It’s All Good

  Tori Amos

  Incubus

  The Wallflowers

  That 1 Guy

  Aimee Mann

  The Presidents of the United States of America

  Chely Wright

  Wynton Marsalis

  The Lost Brothers

  Drivin’ ’N’ Cryin’

  Led Zeppelin

  “Indescribably Not of This Earth,” by Ted Nugent

  Afterword: The Author’s Own Worst Gig

  “Bloody Wichita,” by Jon Niccum

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For all the music makers

  Introduction

  I began interviewing “famous musicians” as a print journalist in 1994, primarily doing advance “phoners” for acts that were touring through the Kansas City market. Typically, I’d spend several hours doing research and then map out a dozen or more questions in advance that were specifically tailored to an artist.

  One time an overseas call from the guitarist for The Cranberries arrived six hours earlier than scheduled, catching me off guard and underprepared. Following that, I assembled a batch of my favorite questions in a document called “Generic Interview,” in case something similar happened again. These questions were ones that usually inspired worthy replies:

  • “What’s the best advice you’ve received about playing music?”

  • “Do you have any superstitions or rituals that you follow to prepare for a show?”

  • “What line from one of your songs do people ask you the most about?”

  • “What’s been your career highlight?”

  The last question appeared reasonably provocative, but I noticed it never generated an answer worth publishing. The responses were either too gushy or prosaic. So I decided to try the opposite tactic during a few interviews, asking, “What is the worst show you’ve ever played?”

  That question unleashed the most brutally colorful stories.

  Since then, most of the performers I’ve interviewed have revealed their “worst gig.” When many of these salty chronicles proved unprintable in a daily newspaper, I proceeded to hoard them. I knew that someday they would find a proper home elsewhere.

  In 2011, I launched the website The Worst Gig (worstgig.com), and the reaction was immediate. The site was written up all over the place, from BuzzFeed to Gorilla Mask, and the accompanying web traffic was outstanding. After Salon raved about the site with the headline “Musicians’ ‘Worst Gig’ makes for best read ever,” I knew the stories wouldn’t remain limited to the Internet.

  Now after hundreds of interviews with national headliners, th
e project has made it into actual print, which is right where it started.

  The Worst Gig features unique tales told directly to me by the artists. Most of these I gathered through phone interviews or in-person conversations, with a few longer accounts penned specifically for the book. The collection delves into the times when things didn’t quite work out for performers—be it because of equipment breakdowns, psychotic fans, awkward mix-ups, violent confrontations or nature’s wrath. These incidents may have seemed horrifying, mortifying or unendurable at the time, but in the rearview mirror, they prove hilarious. Sometimes the worst shows inspire the best stories.

  —Jon Niccum

  Chapter

  -1-

  WRONG VENUE

  What happens when hard rock bands get booked at religious venues, pop artists take the stage at metal festivals and musicians find themselves playing oddball places that should never, ever feature bands.

  Cowboy Junkies

  Credit: Stephane Boule

  The antithesis of the loud, distorted music of the alternative-rock boom, Toronto’s Cowboy Junkies became known for quieter, haunting material that explored country, blues and folk. Sustaining the same sibling-loaded lineup since 1985, the band features singer Margo Timmins, guitarist Michael Timmins, drummer Peter Timmins and bassist Alan Anton. (Margo Timmins once netted the People magazine distinction of being one of “the 50 most beautiful people in the world.”) The quartet’s indelible venture remains The Trinity Sessions, an acclaimed 1987 album recorded with a single ambisonic microphone at Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity. In 2007, the band released Trinity Revisited, a reinterpretation of the previous album featuring guest appearances by Ryan Adams, Natalie Merchant and Vic Chesnutt.

  • • •

  “The worst, worst, worst one that sort of affected me for life was our first major record-label gig. This would have been ’89, so we were not a young band, but we were new to the corporate world. We’d signed to RCA, and they were having their international conference. So all the heads from around the world were meeting in Marbella, Spain, to drink and get stupid. We were sort of going to be the surprise new act that they’d signed. A lot of them didn’t know we were signed to RCA. That’s what they do: They all stand up and say who they signed and what their plans are. Blah, blah, blah.

  “So they had this big dinner up on top of a mountain where there was this famous bullring—like a private bullring—and it had a dining area. The only way to get to it was to get on the bus from the hotel and go there. So all these corporate dudes were pretty much trapped up there for all sorts of conference things: lots of speeches, lots of drinking, lots of eating. It goes on and on. We’re stuffed in the bullring area, which was OK—we didn’t want to be in the party—and we’re waiting to be told to go on and play.

  “It’s now really late, and they are pissed drunk and tired. Just as we are about to go out, Heinz Henn, who was the president of the company in the States, comes up to me and says in his German accent—which I can’t do, but it was very stern—‘I want you to sing “Mining for Gold.”’ And I never sang [a cappella] ‘Mining for Gold’ in those days. It was not that I was shy, but I was not confident.

  “I was like, ‘I can’t do that.’

  “He was like, ‘No, you have to sing it. You have to sing it.’

  “Again, in those days you’re feeling as a band that every gig is so important, and you’ve got to do what you got to do. I don’t know what I thought. I wish it was now and I could have turned to him and said, ‘Go away!’

  “And the boys were like, ‘Look, Margo, we’ll stand up behind you and get up onstage so you’re not alone.’

  “So I go out, and the place is either everybody’s talking or they’re literally asleep. There’s a guy sitting in front of me—and I’ll never forget his face. He’s a Japanese guy, and he’s, like, drunk-asleep. His head is back in the most uncomfortable way, his mouth is wide open, and he’s drooling. And he’s snoring.

  “I’m like, ‘This is hell.’

  “They don’t care. It’s late. I’m tired. They’re tired. Everybody wants to go home, and they’re trapped. They can’t go until we’ve done our thing.

  “Heinz comes out and introduces us like they just signed U2 or something. So we go out, and I start to sing ‘Mining for Gold.’ The guy is snoring, like loud. I’m beginning to lose it because I can’t focus. I can’t find anybody to focus on. Nobody’s listening. And then I look up and there’s one guy listening, and he has a very large head. He’s staring, like, piercingly staring, from across the room.

  “I’m like, ‘OK, I’m going to focus on that guy.’

  “As I’m focusing on him I go, ‘I know that guy. It’s Gene Simmons of Kiss!’

  “I’m like, ‘I can’t do this. I’m in some sort of weird alter-world. I don’t know what’s happening to me.’

  “So we do our gig. No one listens except for Gene. Through the whole deal I was bonding with him. ‘Thank you for listening.’

  “He came up afterward, and he totally knew the gig.

  “He said, ‘That was a hard gig.’

  “And I said, ‘Just tell me they get better.’”

  —Margo Timmins, Cowboy Junkies

  Alice Cooper

  There would be no Kiss without him. No Rob Zombie. No Slipknot. And certainly no Marilyn Manson. Alice Cooper was, and continues to be, the undisputed father of shock rock, a title he’s embraced since the late 1960s. The Detroit native and member since 2011 of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is best known for his classic rock hits “School’s Out,” “I’m Eighteen” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” And who could forget Cooper’s immortal appearance playing himself in the film Wayne’s World?

  • • •

  “I don’t think that we’ve ever done a bad show. I can say that honestly. I always design our shows so that there’s no such thing as a bad show. The audience won’t know if we play a bad show. We will, but they won’t. But you get audiences sometimes that are just asleep. I don’t care what you do, they just will not wake up.

  “The worst one was at [University of Guelph], in [Ontario] Canada, back in the ’70s, where by the end of the fifth song we turned around and played to the walls. Then we found out that The Kinks were there the week before, and after about the fourth or fifth song they turned around and played to the walls. They did the exact thing we did, the audience was so dead…It’s an agricultural college. The people were sitting in Samsonite chairs holding hands.

  “‘Now here’s Alice Cooper…’

  “They just sat there and would not move. I didn’t know if they were threatened, like, ‘If you move you’re going to get expelled or something.’

  “Out of the thousands of shows we’ve played, that was the one show I can remember as being the worst show.”

  —Alice Cooper

  Owl City

  Credit: Matt Vogel

  Adam Young is the brainchild behind Owl City, a poppy electronica project that the Minnesota-raised artist created to thwart his bouts with insomnia. Young attained massive buzz through online grassroots networking and released two indie albums before finally inking with Universal Republic. Owl City’s ensuing major-label debut, Ocean Eyes, featured the number-one hit “Fireflies,” which went quadruple Platinum. He followed that up in 2012 with the top-ten hit “Good Time,” a duet with Carly Rae Jepsen.

  • • •

  “The worst show I ever played was at a local county fair in rural Iowa. They had the bands playing in a smelly old hog barn with actual hogs rooting around. Nobody showed up, so it was just us and the porkers. It was intense. Actually, now that I think of it, it might’ve been the best show I’ve ever played.”

  —Adam Young, Owl City

  Fishbone

  Credit: Jeff Farsai

  Assembled in the late 1970s at a Los Angeles middle school when mandatory busing brought
inner-city kids to predominately white schools in the San Fernando Valley, Fishbone scored a record deal with Columbia before all the members were out of high school. The ensemble dispensed some of the most accomplished music of the pre-grunge era, mixing ska, metal, rap, funk, reggae, punk and soul into a boisterous jumble as entertaining as it was ambitious. Still together decades later—powered by two of the founding members, Angelo Moore (vocals and saxophone) and Norwood Fisher (bass)—the group recently made front-page headlines when the house band on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon played its song “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” to accompany the appearance of former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.

  • • •

  “There was a gig in our career before we were Fishbone, but we were the same six members. This is the gig that got us to change our name to Fishbone because we were called Megatron—which we can all agree was a bad name. We had just gotten new management and he booked us at this club called the Music Machine in West LA. He put us on this bill that was all heavy-metal bands. The booker at the club thought—based on our name—that this would fit. Maybe he thought we were Megadeth? We were doing what we do, and we did not fit with any of the bands. It was a horrible show. There were probably like eight people in the audience, and my grandmother was one of them…[Another bad show] was with the original six guys early in our career. We had changed our name to Fishbone, and our manager got us a show to open a Trak Auto Parts store in Compton [California], playing the parking lot of a shopping center. No one booed us. No one threw anything at us. But we got the strangest looks. It was the wrong band in the wrong part of town doing the wrong music. For once we actually bothered people more than we brought joy into their hearts.”

  —Norwood Fisher, Fishbone

  Kansas

  Debuting as White Clover in 1970, the ensemble from Topeka, Kansas, kicked around for a few years before solidifying a lineup and changing its name to one that matched the members’ license plates. Eventually, music mogul Don Kirshner became interested in the group’s not-very-radio-friendly mix of progressive rock and rural emotion. Decades of basically the same lineup and sales of thirty million records followed. The band’s hits “Carry On Wayward Son,” “Dust in the Wind” and “Point of Know Return” continue to be staples of classic-rock airplay.