I’m sure I’ve posted about this gig before - Steel Pulse at The Roundhouse in London, 1978. I was there to see Steel Pulse; my friend G was there to see Wreckless Eric, number 2 on the bill. (Incidentally, #4 was John Cooper Clarke, #3 was The Police - yes, those Police).
Wreckless Eric was notorious - the story goes that he was spectacularly talented, but pissed it all up the wall for his “golden” years, and then his chance was gone. He was awful. I remember turning to G and saying,
Me: “Can we just go to the bar now?”
G: “But I want to hear Whole Wide World first.”
Me: “They just played it.”
We went to the bar. You have to be pretty bad for your biggest song to be unrecognizable.
Sullen, feebly aggressive and of apparently indetermintae (sic) age, maybe he should try ten minutes on the wagon…Everybody drinks, but most people can do other things too. Eric’s set amazed in that he managed to play at all, and much credit has to go to his sax player who drowned everything else by blowing with extreme verve and determination… Last year’s drunk, I fear.
Very true, as it turns out. I didn’t go to see Eric, so I didn’t feel like I’d missed out on much. But Pulse were fine, JCC was always fun, and I get to tell you that I saw The Police before they were famous (and they were pretty good too).
That’s a shame. I mainly know Wreckless Eric from a late-70s live album from Stiff Records where he does “Reconnez Cherie” and “Semaphore Signals”, and they’re quite good.
Pretty cool that he ended up living/recording with Amy Rigby, though.
Having posted that - and discovered that he is still alive and working - I was curious as to whether he managed to dry out. The “About me” section of his website contains some alarming stuff:
1983 - mostly lost to drunkenness, black-outs and desperation with a few surprising moments of creativity and home demo-ing on the TEAC
Saw Van Halen shortly after they released their first album. Michael Anthony came on stage with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Between Anthony and Eddie, the bottle was empty by the end of the third song. Out came another bottle. It seemed the emptier that bottle got, the better Eddie played and the worst Anthony played. By the encore Eddie was absolutely putting on a clinic for arena and Anthony was sitting on a drum riser too messed up to do anything. Found out later drinking on stage was Eddie’s way of dealing with extreme shyness.
I saw George Clinton and P Funk, and they were quite lit with illegal smiles, it was a fantastic show and performance.
I saw Sonic Youth many times. Once they were all fall down staggering drunk, yet somehow managed to be “in the zone” and put on a great drunken jam show.
I also saw Juliana Hatfield and The Lemonheads way back in 1991 or so, Juliana played bass for them the whole show, it was fantastic. Everything seemed completely sober at the time, a shame to hear Dando has struggled so badly.
I was always kind of sad that I only saw the Replacements on their final tour in 1991. The show was solid, but I’d heard so much about their drunken antics that I felt a bit like I’d missed a great era.
I’ve never seen a show with a wasted frontperson, but I have seen someone totally out of it in other ways. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen was The Streets with Lady Sovereign opening. Total bacchanalia, with Skinner literally pouring booze over the first layer of the crowd. And Louise was amazing. I saw Lady Sov headlining her own concert maybe a year later, after she’d spent many months supporting Gwen Stefani on her arena tour. It had been in the press how she’d been burned out by the scale and work of the huge rock star tour, and it showed on stage. She was sullen, mumbling and clearly unhappy, and basicaly did the whole concert on miserable autopilot. I had a lot of sympathy for her, she was obviously overwhelmed by life that year. I did see her one more time, when she was on the road for her second album, and she was back in fine form.
This reminded me, when I saw The Tubes in 1981, it was a complete madhouse, particularly when Fee Waybill became Quay Lewd. I hadn’t actually known anything about their tour shows when I saw them, and it was wild and wonderful.
I recall a concert where he left the stage and couldn’t be enticed back until all of the beach balls being tossed around by the audience had been rounded up and deflated.
Wow. Have you ever written anything about the show and maybe uploaded them online? I’d love to read every detail. My favorite band. I also run a Doors/Jim Morrison Archive Database and with your permission, I’d love to publish it there with other fans who attended the shows to get the maximum sample size.
no, Doug Stanhope (the repeated material was more of a problem)… but especially a headliner at the Melbourne Comedy Festival (Canadian comic) in 2012. This 17-yr old amateur was the best one I saw out of the dozen I did see.
I’ve seen so many, I could probably be forgetting some (I’m a bit wasted right now).
A couple of shows at Winterland in 1974:The Kinks, Ray Davies had obviously had a drink or 5. Uriah Heep, David Bryon was partying with with folks in the front rows. We’d pass up a joint, he’d take a toke and pass it back.
Jody Porter (lead guitarist for Fountains of Wayne) seemed pretty stoned the times I saw them.
I’ll assemble what memories I can dredge up and pm them to you soon. 50+ years after the fact there aren’t that many, and these days my mind is infested with vivid memories that sometimes proven to be manufactured.
When I saw Royal Trux in the 90s, Neil and Jennifer might’ve been on something, or not, but there was definitely some kind of “off” energy going on that fucked up their performance. Jennifer was plainly furious about something; she spat out her lyrics like hairballs and kept lighting cigarettes, that she’d suck down in three or four big chest-filling drags, then throw down the butt and stomp it underfoot. Neil wasn’t looking much better, he kept his eyes on the wall behind the audience or the floor in front of him while grimly grinding out the guitar parts of their most recent release. He had a glum expression on his face that didn’t change even when he was singing. Trux rushed through the whole album and then both of them positively stalked offstage, to middlin applause and a few scattered boos, without thanks or encores. The lights came up abruptly, the rest of the band swept offstage, and it was over. That was a morbidly entertaining, if disappointing, show.
Every now and then I still idly wonder what Royal Trux were so pissed off about that night at the Great American Music Hall.
Just saw the solo Evan Dando (opening for the Psychedelic Furs), it was somewhat sad. Through his entire set the audience, just kept talking away, he could not engage them. He dropped out of It’s A Shame About Ray, in the middle of the song, then moved away from the microphone and sang for a while without the mic and with his guitar unplugged also. I went home after the show and listen to those great Lemonhead’s songs and reconfirmed those songs were and are great power-pop masterpieces!
I saw Doug Stanhope live last month, and being drunk is definitely an essential part of the act. He had three cocktails onstage with him, and at one point an audience member set a Jager double on the end of the stage in reference to a bit about how he hates Jager. Stanhope told him to fuck off, then picked it up and drank the whole thing in one go.
