The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Happy Pretzel Day!

QotD: What has been your worst concert experience?

Whether it was you on stage or in the audience, which was your least favorite concert experience.

For me, I haven't been to many shows that I disliked (or that stood out to be so terrible that I remember them). But when it comes to being on-stage, I have had two experiences that I groan at every time I think about them. The first was at a Songfight show at NYC's Goodbye Blue Monday. Glennny asked me to come up with his band and do the vocals on the Zinkline song "Submarines". We hadn't practiced it earlier but I felt I knew the song well enough to run with it. The performance goes pretty well until the last verse. In the recording, there's a little riff before the verse and I was waiting for it as my cue. And it seemed to never come. The band played on and I did my best to continue mugging to the crowd. Affter a while, I turned to Glennny and whispered "when are you gonna play the last verse?". He replied, "We're playing it now". That was incredibly awkward and embarassing.

The other band live experience for me was also doing Songfight, just a few years later. At the Firehouse Place show, I don't know what happened but I had a bout of stage fright like I had neveer had before. My hands were shaking, heart was racing. I went into my song "Cuts Like" and just could not get the rhythm right. And I just fell apart. By the time I got to my song "Woebegone" (which is all about self-doubt), I was a mess. Thankfully, my last two songs I did that night were alongside DJ Ranger Den and Noah McLaughlin (as Mr. Nakazawa's Book of Surprises). Not being alone on stage broke whatever bad feelings I was drowning in and those two songs were my favorites of the night.

I played some pretty unsatisfying shows back when I was in a grindcore band. Metal dudes can be dicks, and our last show our sound equipment was all messed up. I practically begged my bandmate to just cut the rest of the set, but he said "whatever let's just do it." It was excruciating. We played to a drum machine and the signal was only sounding at about half volume, so all you could hear was my guitar and his bass playing out of time with each other, no percussion, and I stopped doing vocals after the first song. The good part was that it was a grindcore show, so only about 4 people saw it.

Yeah sorry about that Niv. We really only needed one rehearsal to get on the same page. The rest of the band had never played it before other than a quick run through earlier that day. The audio isn't bad at all, there's only like 8 measures where you're trying to figure out when to sing.

Mine would be the FBF set in Seattle where Frankie started off with a capo on a fret different than we rehearsed. We did not do a good job adjusting. The set was pretty great until that number.

Worst concerts: Kiss, Muse, Cursive, Belle and Sebastian
All of which I went to as a fan and left no longer a fan.

glennny wrote: Worst concerts: Kiss, Muse, Cursive, Belle and Sebastian
All of which I went to as a fan and left no longer a fan.

I remain a fan of the Cure and REM - but they both sorely tested my patience the last time I saw them.

For some reason I had EXTREME stage fright at Song Fight Live Santa Cruz (High and Dry), to the point that I ended up being unable to play on someone's (Puce's?) set, since I was busy barfing in the bathroom.

Oh man, Niv's story reminds me of the time I tried doing the acoustic "Accelerator" and totally got lost. Sorry guys, that was my fault. Actually I think that was at the same show.
-bill

I think Niv actually asked two different questions here, so let's do this:

The worst show I've ever sat through as an audience member was a band called the Petticoat Junkies. They were the first of two opening acts for the Mountain Goats, and we were front and gosh-darned center for them. We couldn't leave, because then we'd lose our spot. They were clearly some small-time group that a local label pulled some strings to add to the ticket. They hailed from some rural area and didn't seem very comfortable playing to a crowd of urban liberal indie-rock fans. At one point, the singer introduced a song by saying, "This next song is about abortion, but don't worry, we're against it." The audience kind of murmured some disapproval, and he backtracked, saying "No, just kidding, we're for it!" And then he proceeded to sing a very anti-abortion song, which seemed to make the entire audience very uncomfortable.

My worst concert experience as a performer... well, here, watch (especially the last twenty seconds or so):