Mike Doughty, on a Live CD, starts off in the wrong key and starts a song over.
I have a bunch of old Aerosmith bootlegs, and they’ve made their share of mistakes onstage (shocker there, no doubt).
Interesting that he left that on the CD.
The composer Jean-Baptiste Lully actually died from an on-stage mistake. From Wikipedia:
In 1977 I saw Chicago in concert in Los Angeles. Peter Cetera picked up a 12 string guitar and launched into the opening of “Wishing You Were Here,” a song he wrote.
When the intro was done, Peter just stood there with a dumb look on his face. He then started laughing and exclaimed: “I forgot the damn words! I worte this song and I forgot the damn words!” The band joined in the general laughter, Peter grabbed a book (apparently containing lyrics) and started again. Flawlessly, I might add.
Especially not since IIRC Wotan usually has a staff as part of his wardrobe!
“My word, Hans, you’re walking much more erect today!”
The video of Van Morrison singing Send In The Clowns with Chet Baker has Morrison slurring his words while flubbing the lines “It’s turned into a farce / My fault, I fear.”
The rest of the rendition is magical though.
This is really common with Gilmour I think, I have several bootlegs where he flubs verses, sings lines out of order, etc. He also has many guitar solos that are very off key. While being perfectionists in the studio, Pink Floyd did a lot of improv and winging it live.
In one of those periodic “history of Rock & Roll” documentaries that air on PBS, VH1 or similar channels, there was some interesting footage of James Brown in concert from the early 1960s, with an R&B/rock ‘historian’ providing a voiceover narration. The historian pointed out that throughout Brown’s performances, his dramatic gestures weren’t just histrionics, they were cues to his band. For example, when he waved his right hand in the air, it was a signal for the bass player to take a solo. When he spun to the right, it meant he wanted the horn section to start blasting. When he leaned to the left, it was a signal to the drummer, etc., etc. At one point, a trumpet player very obviously plays a discordant note out of sync with the rest of the band. Brown continues dancing & singing, “ad-libbing” Ohhhh, I got you now brother!" Which was Brown letting the trumpet player know that he’d been caught and was in deep shit for fucking up during a performance!
Anyway, as far as major mishaps I have personally seen, the worst had to be from Natalie Merchant while she was still with 10,000 Maniacs. Right in the middle of a song (“Headstrong” IIRC), she starts mumbling the lyrics and looking intently on the folks in front of the stage - as if trying o read their lips. Finally, she turned to face the band and threw up their hands, and they abruptly stopped playing. Natalie then curtly stated “I can’t finish the song. I don’t remember the words.” and launched into the next song. Not even an “I’m sorry” to the audience. (She did however remember all the lyrics to “Every Day Is Like Sunday”, a song she didn’t write herself!)
And while it’s not really a ‘mishap’, I did also see a curious faux pas during a Moby concert. For most of the show, Moby was at a keyboard by himself, but he was ‘accompanied’ for a while by a girl on a bass guitar among a few other side musicians. My brother who was with me (and is a musician, so he notices things like this) leaned over and whispered to me “She’s not really playing that bass! Watch her fingers!” I did (we were close enough to the stage to see well) and saw that her fingers really weren’t moving in sync with the bass line that was coming out of the speakers. Later, my brother also pointed out that the bass wasn’t even plugged into an amp!
The nutjob newspaper editor that I worked for, mentioned here, knew that I’d played violin in a couple of youth orchestras and sung in a few classical choirs.
On the strength of this, he planned to appoint me as ‘Music Critic’, and his scheme send me to various concerts, arming me with the score. I was to follow the score along with the performance - then write articles based not on my impression of the performance, but on the premise of how many errors the soloists made.
:smack:
The fingers are a clear indicator of fakery, but the lack of a cord plugged into the bass isn’t. Les Claypool of Primus, for instance, often uses a wireless rig.
NAC Orchestra split up as Double Orchestra, Double Choir + Children’s Choir, Trevor Pinnock at the baton – St Matthew Passion. Orchestra 1 Oboe one, in the middle of his beautiful solo blows a reed. And I mean, BLOWS a reed.
Dreadful duck sound. Missing melody line.
Oboe one from Orchestra 2 miraculously plays musical chairs from the other end of the huge stage and glides on over while backstage people try to locate replacement reeds. WHY he didn’t have any on stage with him, no one ever found out.
Same oratorio, a few nights later, front row, children’s choir – treble, age 8, promptly passes out from having locked his knees, not having eaten enough, and the heat of the lights (the damned oratorio is 3+ hours long, we’d been in rehearsals every day for 3 weeks, and the kids were WIPED). We manage to get him off stage with the help of stage crew, some choirfolk and some musicians while the rest of the show goes on…
I’ve seen many serious catastrophes in my day 
Major mistakes of all sorts. From total show-stopping errors to technical problems. I’ve been in equity productions that narrowly avoided disaster because creative singers made up lyrics to their songs… invented lines to cue their cast-mates, or hell, I’ve even attended a concert where a pianist improvised a few bars of a Mozart piano concerto to get his butt back where it belonged… Tee hee.
I read an interview with Bruce Springsteen in which he admitted to once totally blanking on the opening lines to “Born to Run” during a concert. “Born to Run,” for chrissake! The people in the mosh pit were delighted to help him out.
Some great opera star (the name escapes me) wrote in his memoirs about singing in “Swan Lake,” and having the wood-and-canvas swan on which he was to ride out of the scene be pulled offstage too soon by the stagehands. He broke character and asked the audience, “What time does the next swan leave?”
Some friends who’ve often been in Shakespeare productions have joked to me that if you ever blank on your lines in those plays, just say, “We shall speak of this anon” and walk purposefully offstage. 
The Only Answer. 
Speaking of Mike Doughty, it wasn’t so much a major mistake, but it was very endearing just the same: when he came to Reno a little over a year ago, he was right in the middle of Shunned and Falsified when he quite violently broke a string. Whole audience audibly went “Awwww!” He handled it flawlessly, just sat down and made small talk, cracked jokes while re-stringing and tuning, then just broke right back out into the song in the exact spot he lost it. Huge applause.
All these posts, and nobody’s mentioned the 1974 Proms performance of Carmina Burana?
Thomas Allen was the baritone soloist, and he collapsed during a solo and had to be taken offstage. The show would have been ruined, had a young man in the audience, Patrick McCarthy, not approached the conductor André Previn, and said that not only was he a baritone, but he knew the piece very well as he was studying the piece for his degree. Amazinly, Previn agreed to let him perform, and the cantata was concluded (albeit not at the highest quality - I’ve heard a recording).
This one wasn’t the performer’s fault, but was a screw-up. I was at a 4th of July fair in a suburb near Cincinnati a couple years ago. The main attraction was Richard Marx. (No, that wasn’t the screw up.) Marx was the final act before the fireworks. So, Marx was singing his big number, “Don’t Mean Nothin’”, and he was building to the climax. The crowd was getting into it. Suddenly, the fair in the town down the road started its fireworks display. But they were close enough to us that everyone, including Marx, thought they were “our” fireworks. Marx stopped playing dead in his tracks. The band all looked around confused for a few seconds, looked to the sky, then picked up about where they left off and finished the song.
Richard Marx’s songs annoy me, but I felt bad for the guy.
Phil Lesh, bassist for the Grateful Dead, while singing “Box of Rain” for the first time in about a dozen years:
“What do you want me to do to remember the words? When it is clear that I’m…forgetting them.”
All sung to the tune of the song.
The Foo Fighters are known for playing covers they don’t actually know the music or lyrics to. Their television show performances of “Tiny Dancer” and “Stairway to Heaven” for two examples.
But the best is their attempt to play “Carry on my Wayward Son.” They had NO idea how the verses went, so they pulled some dude from the audience to help them out.
But the thing is, because the standards are higher, smaller slips are magnified into larger errors. It’s extremely hard to hit every factor (pitch, tone, colour, rhythm, volume, etc., etc., etc.) with such precision every single time. And the pieces are usually quite a bit longer than a rock song. So, yes, classical musicians to make mistakes. The lucky thing is that most members of the audience usually don’t know the piece well enough to notice.
There was a somewhat infamous public performance by Pavarotti late in his career in which his voice cracked at a conspicuous place in the piece. I’m unable to find a recording, but it was featured on an episode of 60 Minutes, and the narrator noted that the people in the cheap seats were cheering and the people in the expensive seats were jeering.
I recall a story of Pavarotti, a couple of years ago, performing in Australia, I think. His voice broke, and it was a huge deal. It made the papers. I was trying to look it up, but obviously, the first 500 returns in Google deal with his death.