And on the unplugged version of “Alberta”, he flubs the opening, stops and says, “Wait, hold on a minute!” Everyone laughs, and they start again.
The White Stripes did a song on Conan O’Brien’s show - Jack walked over to Conan’s desk during the song, threw his guitar on the desk,and started playing it like a lap steel guitar. When he picked it up and started walking back while playing, the cord caught on something and the guitar unplugged itself. Without missing a beat, Jack threw it on the floor and went straight into an a capella version of “John the Revelator”, and Meg stayed right with him. It was very impressive.
I saw Joni Mitchell at the Concerts on the Common, maybe 20 years ago or so (an outside informal venue but with seating). It was the end of a beautiful summer day, and a lot of folks were walking around during the concert. Mitchell was singing “Coyote”, and fluffed the words several verses in. It’s a popular enough song that most people caught it, and I think some folks started laughing. She stormed off stage, and after a few minutes someone came out and said that all the folks walking around were distracting her, and she wasn’t coming back out until everyone was seated. She eventually deigned to show herself, and no one dared leave their seats.
In REM’s “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight,” you can hear Michael Stipe laughing after singing the line “a candy bar, a falling star, or a reading of Doctor Seuss.” Apparently he had flubbed this line so many times that when he finally got it right, he couldn’t help but laughing, which made it onto the album.
If I remember rightly, he forgot to put his slide on, so wouldn’t have been able to play half the song. That was a fantastic show.
Sticking with Clapton (sort of), during one of his 24 Nights at the Albert Hall shows, he was about to launch into a solo when his e-string snapped. Andy Fairweather-Lowe picked up the slack as someone tried to get Clapton a new guitar… and promptly broke the same string. Clapton wasn’t nearly ready, so he just carried on playing through the rest of the solo and the song without one string and with the rest probably slightly out of tune, but if you’d just been listening instead of watching, you wouldn’t have known a thing about it.
At a Richard Thompson show I was at a couple years ago, while playing a solo acoustic version of one song, he had just finished up a rather impressive guitar solo and started singing the next verse, the audience erupted in applause, and suddenly he stopped singing and continued playing. At first I thought it was because of the applause and that he was launching into an “encore” solo, but then I noticed that he was sort of rolling his eyes and moving his lips, and I realized that he was trying to remember the next line of the song! (He got it right the second time around.)
A few years ago (2000?) Elton John and Billy Joel performed “Piano Man” on the Tonight Show, the two of them alternating verses. When Sir Elton was supposed to sing the last verse (It’s a pretty good crowd for a Saturday, the manager gives me a smile…), he started singing the first verse instead, caught himself halfway through, and then sang the second half of the verse correctly.
When I saw the Who live in 2002, Roger Daltrey started singing the middle verse of “Another Tricky Day” a second time at the end of the song. Afterwards, he explained that he hadn’t performed that song in 20 years.
Another Who one - the song Tattoo ends with the “words” “Rooty too tootle, rooty-tootle tatootle” and so forth. Pete Townshend has written that when he was recording the demo for the song, he forgot the lyrics he had written and improvised.
My all time favourite stuff up was by John Farnham. Although he is probably only well known to Aussies (ask Helen Clark) he is a truly great pop singer - possibly a pop Sinatra. He does one song that he plays on piano. He did a corporate gig, walked on stage, played the opening bars on piano and couldn’t remember the first worrd of the lyrics. The song was Help.
My sister reports that during a record recording, she flubbed a series of notes on a solo part that sounded so good that it was kept on the final record. She said she hoped no one ever wanted to see her play that particular series again because she couldn’t repeat it if she tried.
She also left the stage during a big performance (opening for Ricky Scaggs, Merle Haggard, the Judds and Hank Williams Junior at he Tacoma Dome) to throw up (!), but everyone thought she was just switching instruments.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a critically-acclaimed musician in concert (and why would I want to?)*, but I’ve heard a couple in-concert mistakes myself. That doesn’t stop me from repeating here that the opening to the album version of “Heartbreaker” by Led Zep still sounds like a mistake to me, despite people’s insistence that they did it on purpose.
I vaguely remember that thread…something about you perceiving an extra note, right? It’s odd, because if you removed that note, it would sound like a mistake to me. It wasn’t a matter of Led Zep saying “Ooo, how clever if we sneak in an extra note.” That first note isn’t part of the riff. It’s a lead-in. The riff starts on the second note. (I remember you wanting to remove the fourth note. That would totally be wrong as you would’ve completely changed the riffs–it’s that first note you want to remove. And the riff is exactly the same as it is everywhere else in the song, it just starts on the note before the first beat.)
I once saw U2 fall totally apart trying to play “Staring at the Sun” in front of a football stadium (The Liberty Bowl) full of people. They laughed it off and started again. That’s the proper response. If you fuck up, just keep going.
I saw Yes in 2003. They had to restart And You And I due to crackling sounds coming from Steve Howe’s amp. When they went to restart, they were so far into the song that they tried to start after the intro rather than have Steve do it all again, but they all started in different places on the restart. It was embarassing but funny.
I thought Deep Purple had a running gag going in the 1980s whereby they deliberately fucked up the start of Smoke on the Water. I saw them in 1984 but I don’t remember whether they did this or not at that show.
I also remember Jimmy Webb at a solo show kind of mis-hitting quite a few chords. I love how both his piano playing and his singing are both quite imperfect.
Personally, I am hanging out to hear an error or two as it makes me think that maybe they’re human after all. It just beggars belief that you could play a 2-hour show with no bum notes.
What?! No mention of Ashly Simpson. OK, OK, maybe she’s not exactly “critically acclaimed” but surely her screw up was bad enough to overcome her lack of credentials.
On Simon and Garfunkle’s Bye, Bye Love you can hear them singing slightly different lyrics on the ending. In fact I heard Juice Newton make a similar mistake the other night on that Hit Me Again show. In each case they were repeating a line or two from the body of the song for the ending but confused which line they were supposed to be repeating.
Friday night I was at a performance of the Metropolitan Winds, an amateur group in Dallas, which is led by professional(and acclaimed) conductor Randol Bass at the Myerson Symphony Center. During the performance Maestro Bass got a little carried away and his baton flew out of his hand into the third row between the clarinets and the trumpets. He recovered well and simply conducted by hand for the rest of the piece.
The Emcee had to fight down a fit of giggles as did most of us in the first few rows(Moxmaiden and I were in the third row center orchestra) but most of the audience probably didn’t notice.
