There was a performance by the Jackson 5 (IIRC) where Micheal accidentally caught his hair on fire when he got too close to some pyrotechnics.
That’s gotta rank pretty high up there on that list
Also, if you listen to the CD “Ruin Johnny’s Bar Mitzfah” by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, there’s a couple parts where they seem to screw up and get into arguments with eachother (but I still can’t tell if they really screwed up, or if the whole thing was for comedic effect, since the band also bills itself as “The greatest cover band ever, with dozens of fans, all over the world.” That said, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are hardly on the level of many of the folks listed here
If you listen to any of the recorded versions of later Beatles concerts- like Shea Stadium, which I think you can hear on the Anthology discs, or maybe just the DVD- they sing completely out of tune.
Apparently, this being the days before earpieces and such, they simply couldn’t hear each other or themselves over the constant screaming of fans. So, vocally, they slowly drifted apart during performances.
Actually, on the version that was transmitted on MTV, McCartney flubbed it again; he sang “Run the risk of knowing that our love may not last long.” The version on the Unplugged CD contains the correct lyrics.
(This nitpick brought to you by the League of Obsessive Beatlemaniacs, Illinois chapter.)
He doesn’t actually make a mistake; he just stops to remove the kazoo (!) from around his neck from the previous song. (A previous poster was mistaken in that Clapton doesn’t play slide on “Alberta.”)
As for musicians I’ve actually seen, it seems kind of unfair to point this out given the state he’s in, but Brian Wilson made a few howlers when I saw him perform Pet Sounds, the most egregious being when he simply forgot to start singing on “Caroline No.” Eventually his guitarist sang the first line for him; Brian jumped as if he’d been stuck with a pin, then carried on the rest of the song.
Beth Orton made all kinds of mistakes when I saw her in concert after “Trailer Park” came out. I didn’t realize she is, or at least was, a poor musician technically; she’s the first professional musician I saw in concert who made me think, “I can play better than her.” And I ain’t all that good, see.
Wynton would know. I heard him do the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New York Philharmonic a few years back. It was, um, not the best version of the Haydn I’ve ever heard, let me put it that way. (Oddly enough, he did the worst on the easy parts, but got all the hard ones; guess we know which measures he really worked on.)
He did so poorly on it that he went back and played the worst section over again as an encore. Didn’t hit it that time either.
Mistakes are part of the life. Some days are better than others; some times, it just don’t work right. You do the best you can in the moment and you let the moment go . . . so you can potentially screw up the next moment. Mostly it’s all written on the water anyway; the good and the bad all go into the ether and that’s the end of it.
Though there’s not so much to be said for recordings either. William Vacchiano played trumpet in the New York Philharmonic for 38 years and tells this story: After he retired, people wanted to show their respect for him and they’d invite him over to dinner and drag out their Philharmonic recordings after dinner. Mr. Vacchiano says he couldn’t stand it; “All I ever hear is the flaws.” It was torture for him. He stopped accepting dinner invites. I thought he was oversensitive . . . until I heard some of my own work. He’s right; the flaws jump out at you, or at least they do to me, anyway. Sometimes the work does not transfer well; what I hear in my headphones and out the monitor is not always final product. How something can sound so good in the recording studio and so radically different once it’s in the box . . . well, that’s another thread, I guess.
Correcting myself. The previous poster had it half-right. Clapton stops not to put his slide on, but to take it off. They went from “Running on Faith” (slide) to “Alberta” (no slide) to “San Francisco Bay Blues” (kazoo).
I’ve done that. Not the throwing up part, though I have been close before preforming I was recording a guitar solo a long time ago and I didn’t like being in the room so I was playing in the control booth. The engineer started playing back the solo I was working on. I started noodling along with the solo, just screwing around. Turns out that the engineer was erasing a track, had I been in the live room I wouldn’t have heard him start the play back. Anyway, the noodling got put on tape and ended up better than what I had written for the solo. So I learned what I had just played and then triple tracked it. Turned out great.
In the same session I was working on another solo. It was a pretty fast song. I nailed a solo on the first take, which is kinda odd for me. To write a solo most of the time I just hit record and improvise then go back and pull out what I like. Lather, rinse, repeat and after a bit I’ll have a solo. Anyway, this time the first take was just about as perfect as I’ll ever get. The problem was that I was doubling or trippling all the solos and I couldn’t play this solo again. It had a REALLY fast run at the end that ended with a big bend and I just couldn’t get it right. In the end we ended up triple tracking the solo and fading two tracks out right before the last run It worked fairly well but I never could pull off that run cleanly.
