Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Triggered by tales of very very bad gigs
Ian Anderson in action with Jethro Tull. Picture: Fred Tanneau, Getty Images
I reacted very badly to a ‘worst ever gig’ article in a newspaper recently. Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull, began his with a mention of being onstage at Shea Stadium.
“Onstage! At Shea Stadium!” I exploded, “That CANNOT, by definition, be a bad gig!” I had thrown the paper out the window before I’d finished the sentence.
History will record that up to about 2006 that was a perfectly acceptable response. So too was burning the paper or ripping it to pieces. Acceptable and very satisfying. Sadly, since that date and the beginning of the smartphone era, it’s not the laugh it was.
The eldest was very amused. “I found your phone in the garden, Da, it’s in bits.” She is becoming a wonderful child. She checked my upgrade status with my provider (not promising) before I could say “daddy needs a rest” and read me the rest of the article from her iPad.
“Someone threw a pot of piss over him,” she told me.
“Aha,” I exclaimed, “Maybe it was a bad gig after all.” I relaxed a little and after we’d googled second-hand phones she read on.
It had been the Shea Stadium bit that triggered me. Anyone who has played to one man and his dog cannot conceive of a gig at a Stadium made famous by The Beatles as a ‘bad gig’. But if someone threw that over him, and indeed also a used sanitary product, well, okay, fair enough.
Famous bands, it seemed, did have tales to tell. Thankfully, many recall that music industry bugbear, the empty room. Facing an empty room, after all the turmoil you have gone through to get to that stage, is soul crushing. It’s like being stood up but still having to go on the date, alone, dressed up and carrying flowers.
But really bad gigs have other little petty humiliations heaped upon even these tortures. I attended a gig by two friends in New York some years back. They’d been billing these shows under “Take America by Storm” headlines in the Irish press.
It was a lunchtime show, unusual enough, and the promoters had added an ‘All You Can Eat’ buffet just to help attendance. But they’d set this up directly in front of our performing duo. The image of rotund American’s piling their plates high within inches of the singers best efforts will live with me forever.
“Do you know Danny Boy?” they’d ask through a mouthful of coleslaw and sausage. “No,” the singer would reply drolly, “do you?” But I suspect, through tales told to me over quiet pints by survivors of the showband era, that those lads have the best stories. That was a tough time. You could tour Ireland in a van ‘til you dropped or, you could try and get some gigs in Vegas and who knew what might happen.
To get there people would even mortgage their homes. The risk was great, but if the gigs worked, if a residency followed, two shows a day with perhaps the chance that Elvis or Frank Sinatra might drop by, well...
For one singer, though, the house re-mortgaged so that he could bring his own band, trouble came after just two shows. “Fire your band and use the house band,” the promoter said, “and let's add some strippers, this is Vegas after all.”
The singer railed: “We’re Irish,” he said as if that explained everything. “No problem,” said the promoter, “we’ll use red heads.”
He carried on for a week, the girls getting more reaction than he or the house band, while his own band and a little later his house floated away forever. A bad gig but not the worst I’ve heard.
The worst was a showband member who, whilst in Vegas, quit the band, and his life in Ireland, to run away with and briefly marry a showgirl. A year later his band mates traced him to his new ‘gig.’ He was now playing drums in a jazz three piece at a lunch time poker school. Now that, Mr Anderson, is, what I call, a very, very bad gig.
