by Jon Niccum
—John Mayer
12th Planet
Credit: Supermaniak
American dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music known for its pulsating bass lines, periodic vocals and samples—and John Dadzie is one of its premier practitioners. Operating under the name 12th Planet (a reference to author Zecharia Sitchin’s theories involving ancient astronauts), the producer-DJ has achieved worldwide popularity for his vigorous, original live sets. His appearances at elite festivals such as Lollapalooza and Coachella have continued to bolster his reputation as a dubstep guru.
• • •
“My worst gig happened when it was my twenty-second birthday…at Adrenaline [in] Orange County. I was mid-mix, and I threw up on the decks and all on myself after taking one Patrón shot…At the time I wasn’t the biggest hard-alcohol drinker. I was a beer guy. My buddy was bringing me birthday shots. I thought it was going to be something that goes down smooth, and I just wasn’t expecting it. I just went like, ‘Bam!’ You know that feeling when the Patrón hits the bottom of your stomach? Then it was just like, ‘Ohhhhh…wuhhhh…’ All the equipment stopped [because] I threw up on the mixer and turntables. That’s a bad gig.”
—12th Planet
Chamberlin
Credit: Matthew Day
Like the vintage analog keyboard for which it’s named, Chamberlin is most comfortable providing atmosphere. The act commenced in 2010 as a partnership between singer-guitarists Mark Daly and Ethan West, who originally demoed tracks at a mountain cabin in their native Vermont. Chamberlin’s tunes draw comparisons to fellow indie-folk acts such as Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, imparting lyrics that lean toward “jealousy, despair and resentment.”
• • •
“We left from Vermont and had to drive thirty-three hours to get to Aspen, Colorado. We opened up for Grace Potter. It was fine, but we were all exhausted. We had to continue on to the next show, which was in Wyoming up in the Tetons at this ski area. We hadn’t slept in beds for four nights at that point.
“We played two shows at a festival, opening for Sharon Jones and Grace Potter. Then there was an after-party. We were running out of adrenaline but decided we’d play the after-party—it’s a bar, a ski area, a lot of people would be there. The exhaustion caught up with all of us at the same time. We started playing after they’d given us free margaritas—which is the worst combination for us. The band as a whole has problems with margaritas. I bet in our rider we put ‘no free margaritas’ after this show.
“Basically, we were all suffering from altitude sickness at that point, too. We drove up the mountains quickly, and we’d been drinking. This is when the shit hit the proverbial fan. At the after-party show, one unnamed member of our band couldn’t stand up from some combination of booze, altitude and sleep deprivation. He sat down and continued playing facing the wall. Eventually, he left the stage altogether.
“Then I got sick into a guitar case. There was nothing else around, and I had to throw up somewhere. A guitar case is actually a perfect receptacle.
“The other thing is that members of Grace Potter’s band and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings were all at this party, and we’re melting down onstage in front of them. After the certain member left the stage, we played a few Neil Young covers we didn’t know and were like, ‘We’re done.’
“We left the stage, and we were a combination of pissed off at each other and fucked up. Then the worst part of it was we had to leave for Vermont that night to get back. That’s a forty-hour drive. Somebody had stayed sober enough to get us out of there. After leaving the show, we stopped to get food somewhere in the middle of Wyoming. There were a couple of fast-food joints. Somebody was still recovering from the show and wandered off while we were at the gas station. We couldn’t find them. That was a whole other fiasco that prolonged the drama.
“But we made it back fine. Nobody died. We all are better friends for it.”
—Ethan West, Chamberlin
Nada Surf
Nada Surf is best known for its alt-rock hit “Popular.” Featuring spoken lyrics culled from a 1964 dating manual, the anthem had just the right mix of irony, angst and catchiness to become an MTV staple during 1996. But it initially painted the Brooklyn-based trio (guitarist-vocalist Matthew Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot) as something of a one-trick pony. Fortunately, Nada Surf followed up with the fine albums The Proximity Effect, Let Go and The Weight Is a Gift, which earned significant praise from both the mainstream and underground press.
• • •
“I’ve only played one show high. It was at Lehigh University. The first three songs were absolutely the worst thing I’ve ever done. Then the end of the show was one of the best shows ever—but at what price? Like we’re playing ‘Bacardi’ as the third song. The middle bit has this relatively complicated classical-sounding arpeggio. I got to that part and I didn’t even try and play it. I just stopped playing—‘Well, that’s much too complicated. I can’t do that right now. Maybe later, but not right now.’”
—Matthew Caws, Nada Surf
Peter Frampton
Credit: Richard Aaron
Few rock artists are as instantly associated with the medium of live performance as Peter Frampton. The guitarist’s 1976 Frampton Comes Alive became the biggest-selling live album of all time—one of the most unexpected success stories in pop-music history. The achievement came after the British musician had established himself through five albums in the early supergroup Humble Pie, followed by four modest solo records. With Alive, Frampton became a household name, garnering Rolling Stone’s Artist of the Year along with a slew of other honors. Despite these accolades, it wasn’t until 2007 that Frampton won a Grammy for his instrumental album Fingerprints.
• • •
“One of the worst things that’s happened to me was having someone in the band who just had a bad night and wasn’t playing the notes at all. This was ages ago. That was the most embarrassing thing for me—and embarrassing for him too. It was my show and it was nowhere near what it should be. I’m not going to say who it was, but it was no one who was with the band for a long time. It just blew my mind that someone could be that bad. And I came off the stage and I had welts on my face. I’d come out in hives I was so embarrassed. Musically, it’s got to be right for me.”
—Peter Frampton
Rubblebucket
Brooklyn’s Rubblebucket sports an overflowing bucketful of influences, with horn-laden dance material meeting indie-rock whimsy. The eight-piece act—which made its Bonnaroo debut in 2012, aided by surprise guest Foster the People—is piloted by vocalist-saxophonist Kalmia Traver and songwriter-trumpeter Alex Toth. Its revisionist version of “Michelle” recently made Paste magazine’s list “Best Beatles Covers of All Time.”
• • •
“We were playing a small ‘American festival’ in New Jersey. It was a campground festival with a mix of hippies and Bruce Springsteen–loving types. At the time, we had a couple of vegans in the band, including our guitar player. Backstage, they did not have any vegan food. But what they did have was ten different choices of flavored vodkas. So instead of eating food, our guitar player grabbed a plate of tortilla chips and tons of vodka. By the time we hit the stage, he was blackout drunk.
“The venue had three HD cameras and was doing a full-on filming with a superfancy soundboard recording of the gig. At first we thought the guitar player being drunk was pretty funny. But quickly into the gig we realized he just couldn’t play his parts. And that wasn’t funny. The guitar parts are crucial to polyrhythmic, superlocked, funky music. We didn’t have that on this night. There was one song where he started everything, and he couldn’t play the part at all.
“At one point he left the stage and disappeared. Then he’d periodically come back. If you watch the video, there’s a lot of footage of him sitting onstage smoking cigarettes.
“He had a m
icrophone as well, and he kept talking nonsense to the crowd—words that didn’t go together. I’ve never experienced any drunkenness that extreme before. It was pretty debaucherous.”
—Alex Toth, Rubblebucket
Borgore
Credit: Steven Pahel
After drumming for the death-metal band Shabira, Israeli musician Asaf Borger reinvented himself as Borgore. Now the love-him-or-hate-him provocation addict is at the forefront of the international dubstep scene, churning out aggressive beats that incorporate his piano and saxophone skills. Borgore’s videos have logged millions of views on YouTube, and his many EPs of original, often explicit material has led to his own subgenre, called gorestep.
• • •
“In Memphis, I got food poisoning [from pizza] five minutes before the show.
“The gig was actually good. The kids had fun. But it was just me thinking I was going to the hospital after the gig. I was supposed to play an hour and a half, but I only played an hour. A few minutes before the set I started puking. The tour manager just gave me a bucket. I filled the whole bucket. Every time I turned around to puke, my video guy turned all the lights on the stage super bright so no one could look at the stage.
“I was telling [the audience] that I was sick, but they weren’t fully aware that I was puking. But the stage was smelly. My dancers and my MC almost kicked the bucket. My video guy almost stepped into the bucket.
“I was delirious. I thought I was going to faint and lose control over my—how do you say in English? It’s the thing that controls all your [bodily] exits. Well, I thought I’d fall on the stage, bang my head, lose control of my exits and end up in the hospital. I was counting the minutes. Every song I played I knew it meant I was closer to the end.
“I’m not sure if it was because of the pizza, but I’m sure that after the show I had no pizza in my stomach anymore.”
—Borgore
Daughtry
Daughtry—although the name has yet to conjure the singular power of Hendrix, Clapton or Cobain, singer-guitarist Chris Daughtry is well on his way. The artist’s torrid growl and sweeping power ballads such as “Home” have made Daughtry and his band of the same moniker one of the top-selling rock acts of the past decade (his eponymous debut was Billboard’s number-one album of 2007). Not bad for a fourth-place finisher in the fifth season of American Idol.
• • •
“Unfortunately, it was near my hometown. It was Charlotte, North Carolina. I was so sick that I sounded like a barking dog the entire show. The crowd had to sing most of it. They were like a support group. Looking back, it was a show I probably should have canceled and come back through on the next tour. That was one I felt like crawling under a rock…The crowd was great, though. It would have been horrible if they would have been booing or throwing stuff. It’s certainly a debilitating feeling when you can’t use your main instrument.”
—Chris Daughtry
Anthrax
Credit: Andy Buchanan
New York’s Anthrax became part of the “big four”—flanking Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer—that ushered thrash metal from the underground to Platinum success during the 1980s. The band was among the first to intersect rap and metal with the seminal Public Enemy collaboration (and tour) Bring the Noise. Although the evolving lineup has incorporated several dozen members over the decades, guitarist Scott Ian and drummer Charlie Benante have appeared on every Anthrax album.
• • •
“We were in Osaka, Japan. We often switch instruments in the first encore. I would play guitar. Scott [Ian] or Joey [Belladonna] would play drums. I remember in Japan they were throwing things onstage that night—just toys and whatever. During part of the song I went over to tell [guitarist] Danny Spitz about someone throwing a Batman thing to us. When I leaned in to whisper in his ear, he swung his head back really fast and cracked me in the nose. I saw stars. I had to go sit down for a minute because I thought I was gonna pass out. Turns out my nose was very definitely broken. It was bleeding everywhere. You heard this big reaction from the crowd, like, ‘Oooooh, nooooo. That’s so sad.’ But I was able to go back out and finish the last song before they took me to the hospital. Wasn’t the first time I broke my nose. But it was the first time in front of an audience.”
—Charlie Benante, Anthrax
Nobody has concocted a better brew of vintage country and punk-rock attitude than Nashville’s BR549. Started in 1993 by singer-guitarist Chuck Mead and drummer Shaw Wilson, the honky-tonk act spent years playing for tips as house band at the bar and clothing store Robert’s Western Wear. Performances on Late Show with David Letterman and Conan ensued, as did seven albums and three Grammy nominations. Recently, Mead bridged Nashville and Broadway as music director for the Tony Award–winning musical Million Dollar Quartet, a fictionalized account of the famous 1956 jam session involving Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. Mead also contributed new material to the show and produced the original cast album.
BR549’s Stomach-Turning Worst Show
By Chuck Mead
Credit: Jim Herrington
It was New Year’s Eve, and BR549 had a gig in Odessa, Texas, at this huge metal armory-type building. We had been off for Christmas and hadn’t seen one another for a couple of weeks after virtually spending nearly every waking hour together for months on the road.
As we were driven to the local radio station, everyone was in good spirits. It carried over to the radio performance—lots of snappy dialogue, good songs, happy DJs. We had already set up at the venue so we were free to join some of the sponsoring radio station people for a dinner at a local eatery. On the way over to the restaurant, I started feeling weird—a little ill, but I thought food would help. I remember it being an animated dinner with more snappy dialogue and some spicy catfish.
At some point the bandmate I was rooming with (we almost always shared rooms) had invited a couple of the hipper guys from the radio station to visit us at our hotel room and bring some “party favors.” He told them our room number and said, “We’ll see you all before the gig.”
So we went back to the hotel and on the way there, I started feeling really bad: splitting headache, double vision, et cetera. I just wanted to lie down until we had to leave for the gig at 9 p.m. I think we were supposed to start around 9:30 p.m. or 10 p.m., and the radio guys were going to come over and party and then we’d all go over to the gig. I thought surely I could get my shit together by then.
But as I lay there trying to recharge, I began feeling worse and worse. At that point I knew my body would eventually expel the sickness somehow.
Then it started.
First I tried to get the poison out by sitting on the toilet. It was definitely coming out in its most disgusting version. I got back to my bed thinking it might pass when suddenly there was a knock on our door. It was the radio guys. It was only 7:15 p.m. It seems they misunderstood. They thought we said to come over at 7:15, when really that was our room number. So now I’m lying there trying to keep it all together in a roomful of radio guys smoking, drinking, talking and laughing.
Then the puking followed.
Now I was alternately puking and shitting amid a cloud of smoke and cheap champagne, which was making things much worse.
I kept hearing distant voices. “Is he going to be all right?” “Wow, that really smells.”
This went on for what seemed like hours until one more visit to the bathroom clogged the toilet. Now the room was filled with smoke, and the toilet was bound up with puke and diarrhea. I think that’s when the radio guys left.
So I got my show-date suit on and lay there on the bed looking like a corpse at a wake until it was time to go. On the way over they put me on the window side of the van, of course, and immediately upon arrival at the gig, I was puking in a corner of the parking lot. I think it was at that point I told our tour manager that he should set up
a trash can behind my amp in case I needed it.
“Seriously?” he asked.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” I said as I spit a little bile onto the gravel.
We got in there, and the place was packed. It was New Year’s Eve, and everyone was in a fine mood and rowdy and ready to go. I remember being in some sort of trance standing onstage as they introduced us. I just wanted to “maintain.” My head was splitting, and my stomach distressed. I was delirious and playing on 100 percent autopilot.
About forty minutes into the show, we kicked off “Crazy Arms,” a song on which I sang lead. Halfway through the first verse I knew I was going to hurl. All I had to do was hold it in until the fiddle break. We got to the chorus and I glanced over to see our fiddle player plucking on his instrument, looking at the monitor guy and shrugging because there was no sound.
Since I’m the only other lead instrument in our band, if there’s no fiddle to take the break, I have to do a guitar ride. But I was about to puke. I was picturing me splashing vomit all over the two-steppers at the front of the stage and then getting my ass kicked by some big Texan because I peppered his wife with chunks of spicy catfish on New Year’s Eve.