by Jon Niccum
—Chely Wright
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis is the most acclaimed trumpet player in the world. Not only has the musician earned nine Grammys spanning jazz to classical, he is one of the few to ever earn a Pulitzer Prize for Music (for “Blood on the Fields,” his oratorio about slavery). The New Orleans native (and son of jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis) released his first album in 1981. Since then he’s recorded dozens of projects and collaborated with icons from Eric Clapton to Kathleen Battle and Willie Nelson.
• • •
“I try to forget them. I don’t really know. I’ve got some I could nominate for it though. We did a Louis Armstrong show once at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It was the Hot Five and Hot Seven. That was a rough one. Nothing about it sounded good. It was painful. Painful. Nothing blew up or anything—just our egos. Sometimes that type of [explosion] is the most painful of all…But you get past the bad gigs quickly. I always wanted to be a musician. And sometimes not everything goes where you think it should. My father told me, ‘Do it because you love to do it. Don’t put a lot of ulterior motives on it.’”
—Wynton Marsalis
The Lost Brothers
Irish musicians Mark McCausland and Oisin Leech first bumped into each other at a library in Liverpool, England. Jamming while between stints in other bands, they recorded three acclaimed albums as the acoustic duo The Lost Brothers and managed to get all of them released stateside in 2012. Extensive tours with Glen Hansard of Once fame have brought the pair a wider audience eager to bask in their lush poetry and stark arrangements.
• • •
“We remember a gig in Liverpool at a place called the Zanzibar Club in 2010. This turned out to be the worst gig but also the best gig. It was the worst because the promoter—a good friend of ours—went to a lot of trouble to put up posters but nobody came. He lost a lot of money. Nobody was there, and we both had the flu, so we were sweating onstage. There were these blue neon lights; we looked like candles melting.
“On the other hand, our favorite band came—a Liverpool band called The Coral. They were the only people in the audience. We couldn’t believe it. We were such huge fans of their music. We were nervous and heartbroken because nobody else showed, but yet our heroes were watching us. The good side of it is they came up after the show and said they enjoyed it. We’ve since become friends with them.
“But every gig is a gift. We never take any of them for granted. You do have to cherish the good ones.”
—Oisin Leech, The Lost Brothers
Drivin’ ’N’ Cryin’
Credit: Carlton Freeman
Atlanta retro-rock act Drivin’ ’N’ Cryin’ built a fervid regional fan base thanks to a potent live reputation. During the alt-rock boom, the ensemble expanded to a national audience through its Southern-tinged single “Fly Me Courageous.” The quartet is still going strong, with original members Kevin Kinney (guitar and vocals) and Tim Nielsen (bass) anchoring the lineup.
• • •
“We played this club in Macon, Georgia, called the Hummingbird. It’s this dive downtown on Cherry Street. It’s always a great party. Always packed.
“We were staying at the La Quinta on I-75. It’s a couple exits toward Atlanta. We parked our trailer and went to bed that night. Luckily, our guitar tech drove back to Atlanta after the show and brought Kevin’s guitars in his car—his famous red Mosrite guitar for one.
“I woke up and left with my buddy in his car. But we got a call from our soundman thirty minutes down the road, and he’s like, ‘Where’s the trailer?’
“We’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’
“Somebody had cut the chain and lifted the loaded, full trailer off our van and stole it. The trailer was gone. Mac [Carter], our former guitar player, immediately put it on Facebook that we’d been robbed, and within a couple minutes we got a call from a pawn shop in Atlanta and found two of his amplifiers.
“We wound up getting the trailer back thirty days later. It had a couple items in there. There was a bunch of smashed-up stuff. Some drums without cases. Some pedals. They were broken—looked like they’d been sitting out in the rain. The cops found it. The [thieves] dumped it in a parking lot.
“I lost a really sentimental bass that had been on the road with me for years. I lost a mandolin. But you think of the other stuff that we lost, like all the T-shirts and CDs. What are they going to do with those? Will we see a bunch of bums walking around in Drivin’ ’N’ Cryin’ shirts?
“We had a gig a couple days after the trailer was stolen, and we ended up borrowing the opening band’s gear. The musical community really reached out to us. Drive-By Truckers lent us amps and guitars. We had insurance, which helped out a little bit. There’s this thing through the Grammys called Music Cares. They helped us out. Fans were reaching out. One fan let me borrow his mandolin for a couple months. People were touched by our misfortune and really helped us out. So the experience was bittersweet.”
—Tim Nielsen, Drivin’ ’N’ Cryin’
Led Zeppelin
The biggest hard-rock band of all time? Sure. The best? Probably. British icons Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and the departed John “Bonzo” Bonham did not in fact go down “like a lead balloon” as The Who’s Keith Moon famously predicted. Instead the act sold several hundred million records and ultimately defined the 1970s, in terms of both diverse musical output and legendary excesses.
• • •
“The worst show in any band? I can’t remember it specifically, but it invariably had something to do with the amount of people onstage getting close to the amount of people in the audience. That is also worst when you’re standing there. I don’t think it was Zeppelin, but I was with some band and I remember standing onstage in the theater counting the audience—‘Three. Four. Five.’ That is just soul destroying. But then you can treat it as a paid rehearsal, so maybe it’s not so bad after all.”
—John Paul Jones
Few rock stars have ever courted controversy like Ted Nugent—and he likes it that way. The Motor City Madman began as the living embodiment of extreme showmanship during the stadium-rock era, playing thousands of concerts behind hits such as “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Stranglehold.” A lifelong commitment to substance abuse–free hedonism coupled with his pro-right-wing stances have ensured that he’s lingered as a popular, quotable figure. Whether releasing more than thirty albums, hosting reality TV programs, or publishing books on bow hunting, the talented guitarist and songwriter shows no signs of slowing down. He shared this succinct story about why “it’s all good.”
Indescribably Not of This Earth
By Ted Nugent
Credit: Jenny Risher
The beauty of my career, and life, is that I figured out a long, long time ago to eliminate mediocrity and lameness in everything I do. Most important, the elimination of people unwilling to put their heart and soul into being the absolute best that they can be. Hence, by the time I was in my early twenties, I learned to surround myself with American dreamers of excellence and superior dedication, thereby reducing and even eliminating failure and negligence from the equation. Know that my worst concert has been nothing short of brilliant and astonishing. Our best concerts are indescribably not of this earth. We refuse to accept failure and stupid mistakes. Ever. We throttle on, the way it’s supposed to be. We kick major ass, so we never get our asses kicked. It is a beautiful thing.
Afterword
The Author’s Own Worst Gig: Bloody Wichita
Jon Niccum
During the heyday of alternative rock in the 1990s, I took a quick road trip with my Kansas City–based band Easterday. We were booked at a new club called the Aviator in Wichita, Kansas. The name of the venue was derived from being decorated like an airplane hangar—not surprising in a town nicknamed the “Air Capital of the World.”
Despite the whopping siz
e of the fledgling club, we counted a grand total of eighteen people when we took the stage. But a booking was a booking, and we still needed to play whether anyone was paying attention or not.
About midway through the first set, my fretless bass stopped working. I used active electronics in my bass pickups, which meant they were powered by a battery that activated once a cable was plugged into the input jack. It needed a battery replacement about as often as an industrial smoke detector—which was not very often, and quite rare that it would happen during a performance.
Rather than stop the show, and thus prolong the lame gig, I suggested we play a song called “Autumn” that featured a two-minute guitar and voice intro. Because I had spent years teaching guitar and bass lessons, I had perfected routine maintenance on student instruments in blindingly swift fashion. If I could change a string in less than two minutes, I figured I could swap out a battery in about the same stretch.
I plopped down on the corner floor of the stage to execute the procedure. Even though I felt something sharp when I landed, the clock was running so I pressed on. The battery was changed with seconds to spare, and I took my spot at stage right, alongside singer-guitarists Scott and Elaine. About a minute later, I noticed Elaine staring at my butt. This was not a common occurrence.
She pulled back from the microphone and began pointing at the back of my jeans. They were soaked in blood. Apparently, I sat on a broken beer bottle that littered the dark stage—and it had punctured an artery.
“We’ll take a quick break,” Scott announced over the microphone.
I was ushered into the men’s bathroom and started stuffing handfuls of paper towels into my pants to halt the flow. At this point I began to notice my rear was really throbbing. The bleeding continued even as I kept replacing soiled wads of paper towels. A mirror offered a mesmerizing view of the amount of red decorating my blue jeans.
I can’t remember much more about the show, other than we muscled through the grueling gig and loaded out. We had driven two different vehicles to Wichita, and on the four-hour ride back to KC (an overnight hotel stay was deemed too expensive), I sat in the front passenger seat of Scott’s car.
When Scott eventually dropped me by home, we noticed that my blood had soaked all the way through the towels positioned for me to sit upon. Maybe the incessant bleeding had made me loopy, but I could’ve sworn the permanent stains on his car seat spread out into the pattern of airplane wings.
Acknowledgments
Assembly of The Worst Gig has now stretched over three decades, and it could not have been accomplished without the encouragement and support of many folks:
Matt Bechtold, my website partner, who took a time-consuming leap of faith with this project.
Monika Verma and the good people at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.
Jenna Skwarek, Shana Drehs, Deirdre Burgess and everyone at Sourcebooks.
Wendy Molyneux, Jeff Drake, Bjorn Skaptason, Steve Revare, Geoff Harkness, Liz Alderman, Sarah Dickman, Chris Santella, Grant Fitch, Karl Gehring, Laura Kirk, Jai Nitz and Alex Grecian, for lending me their professional advice.
Peter Frampton, for giving me my first Worst Gig story.
My awesome, creative mom, Janet Niccum Miller.
And, finally, Ann and Lola for all their love and energy.
About the Author
Credit: Grant Fitch
Jon Niccum began working as an entertainment journalist in 1993. He is a writer and critic for the Kansas City Star. He is the former entertainment editor at the Lawrence Journal-World daily newspaper and music and film editor at The Pitch, Kansas City’s leading alternative weekly.
He’s been a contributor to Esquire.com, Details, Village Voice, Rotten Tomatoes, Miami Herald, Phoenix New Times and CMJ New Music Monthly.
Niccum has won several dozen national awards for his writing, including multiple honors from the Suburban Newspapers of America, American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors and National Federation of Press Women, and he was a finalist for a National Music Journalism Award.
Additionally, he has penned the official record-label bios for dozens of artists, including Evanescence, Jeff Beck, Leon Redbone and Joe Satriani.
Prior to a career in journalism, he was a professional guitarist and bassist, performing in bands such as The Budinskis, Easterday and Groovehead. He continues to record with his ongoing cult band Bobby and the Chuxx.
He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.