It occurs to me that I’ve been to the symphony a fair number of times, and heard concert pianists perform, and so forth, and never to my knowledge heard anyone seriously screw up, hit a wrong note, come in at the wrong time, etc. Does this ever happen? It seems like it must, but you never hear about it. Anecdotes, links to evidence, WAGs, all welcome.
I’ve certainly heard cracked notes and the like more times than I can count, even at the professional level. It rarely makes the front page of the next day’s paper or anything like that - it happens, and the show continues.
Back in the early '90’s I saw the Canadian Brass performing with the Fort Worth Symphony. They were doing an arrangement of The Saints’ Hallelujah (originally written just for brass quintet, but reworked to include orchestral accompaniment) - things got “off” somewhere in the middle, and that’s the closest I’ve ever heard to a piece completely falling apart at the professional level. They did manage to haul it back together, though.
For that matter, in the same show they did a ten-part brass arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon, with five brass players from the orchestra. For whatever reason, the tempo they chose was extremely fast (blistering, I thought): Questions of taste aside, it proved too rapid for the two trumpet players from the orchestra, who gacked up their melodic runs in the middle of the piece something awful.
Memorable show, I guess. :dubious: I think I prefer hearing CB when it’s just them…
On the Kennedy Honors show for Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder missed a cue (or wasn’t cued) and after some chaos. They stopped and began again. I’ve been to a good handful of concerts where the conductor stopped the ensemble and began again.
At the Barenaked Ladies show in LA in November, Ed Robertson sang the wrong verse of “Maybe Katie”. He sang the second part of his part first, and when his second part came around, he sang the first part. The others laughed, but they (literally) didn’t miss a beat and kept on playing. Ed made fun of himself after the song.
I’ve sung in many concerts where the soloiosts (orchestral and singers) have stuffed up. They’re human beings. They make mistakes.
Yup. Wrong notes in guitar solos, transposed verses, missed vocal cues, botched harmonies, soft endings - you go to enough concerts and you see just about every kind of mistake imaginable. I have specific memories of seeing the Allman Brothers do each of the things I just mentioned, and they’re really good!
I’d expect a little better in classical music, where technical accuracy is more important than it usually is in rock - but people still have bad days, and not everybody is equally great.
I saw Crosby, Stills & Nash at the Waikiki Shell - they really blew the harmonies on “Wooden Ships” - so badly they stopped the song, said “we can do better than that” and started over.
I saw Susan Tedeschi last fall and she totally couldn’t remember how a particular song started – they played the whole intro again while the bass player whispered to her.
ETA: Hi Marley! 
Had a music teacher who told a story about doing a performance of Handel’s Messiah. At the very end of the Hallelujah Chorus, just before the final “Amen,” there’s a very significant dramatic rest. During this performance, though, the tympanist was a beat off and crashed down on the kettle drums right in the middle of it! OOPS!
In less “serious” music, I saw the Pixies a few years ago. In the middle of “Debaser,” things just suddenly stopped and Kim Deal said to Black Francis, “wait… we were supposed to do the bit where we all stop and you keep singing.” He was like, “huh? Oh, okay.” This is followed by a few awkward seconds, and then then just start the song over again. Then a few songs later, they went and did it yet again!
Too bad there’s not an “Ask the Professional Conductor” thread. You would hear 10,000 stories of mistakes.
A few years ago – well, maybe twenty years or so 
– I was at a concert by the Soviet State Symphony Orchestra (or, er, whatever the name was, but it was something like that). At the beginning of one quiet piece, one of the harpists came in very, very prominently … playing the start of the wrong piece. She dropped out after about two seconds and the orchestra simply continued.
I saw U2 completely fall apart in the first verse of “Staring at the Sun” in front of tens of thousands of people at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis. Bono stopped the song and they started over and did it right the second time.
More recently and much less dramatically (but much funnier) I saw the Police fuck up in New Orleans. They were playing “Truth Hits Everybody” and Andy Summers thought the song was over when it wasn’t. He hit a big power chord and Sting and Stewart Copeland kept right on playing. It just so happened that he was on the big screen over the stage at the time, and everybody saw his head jerk around and a look of horror come over his face. He managed to play it off as a weird fill, and a whole lot of people in the audience probably didn’t even notice, but the band had a good laugh after the song was over.
When Clapton did his MTV ‘unplugged’ concert, the band starts playing ‘Alberta’, and he stop them, saying “Hang on, hang on…” and then they start again. I’m not sure what the screwup is.
There’s an old saying that goes, “An amateur musician practices until he or she gets it right. A professional practices until he or she can’t get it wrong.” There’s a lot of truth in that. Professional level practicing means doing it over, and over, and over until the song is just second nature. That minimizes mistakes, but doesn’t eliminate them.
Good pros hide their mistakes by playing through them. If you screw up, you don’t stop playing - you just keep on going. Most people never notice.
IIRC he forgot to take off the slide he was using for the previous song, Walkin’ Blues.
A jokje from my neighbor who played in the Oregon Symphony: What the difference between cattle and the symphony? Cattle have the horns in the front and the asshole at the rear.
Then there are stories about times when the conductor was at fault, such as when Arturo Toscanini, during a live broadcast, mentally slipped up, causing the NBC Symphony Orchestra to go into a halt.
It ended up being his last live work.
John Lennon regularly forgot the words to his own songs during shows. Watch the concert footage on the Anthology. For example, at the first Shea Stadium concert, he forgot a whole verse of Help. They also all admitted to making goofs, then shaking their heads or something and allowing the audience to “cover a multitude of mistakes.” They never stopped the shows or acknowledged them, and I doubt anybody at the concerts noticed, but it’s pretty obvious with the footage.
Paul McCartney also indicated that he often forgot the second verse of Yesterday, and he basically done away with it entirely for the movie/soundtrack of Give My Regards to Broadstreet.
The first time I saw Wilco in Nov 2004 (maybe '05, but I’m pretty sure it was '04) they did a cover of Don’t Fear the Reaper and messed up the bridge. Jeff Tweedy stopped everybody and said “No, we’ve practiced this too many times. We’re going to get it right.” Then they started over from the top of the bridge and played it right. Also, if you watch the documentary of his solo tour last winter, Sunken Treasure, he completely muffed the words of Shot in the Arm and had to start over again, with a self-depreciating comment about how he’s only played the song a million times. Actually, he did that in another one of his solo shows, at the Vic Theater, but I think he stopped because he was in the wrong key.
At Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 he says to the audience during his performance of “Like a Rolling Stone”
Personally, I don’t think it was a goof, I think he just cut that verse, but it’s still a fun moment in a fun concert, and my favorite version of that song.
He probably just didn’t see it.
It happens all the time - the question is whether the audience notices.
the one that came immediately to mind to me was **Kurt Cobain ** at the end of the song **The Man Who Sold the World **on the Unplugged CD. He has to play a simple lead at the end and completely wolfs it - he is a half-step too low and just tries to sell it and make it work then shifts his finger up to the right spot at a logical point. Sounds awful but he makes it seem somewhat legit…
More often than not, with improv’d leads, the challenge is to take a botch and figure out how to make it work. Jeez, Jimmy Page is the King of Slop. He always screws up and sells it so well I am just amazed. I wish I could fake my way through stuff half as well as him…