I can’t compete with the tantrums mentioned in the Grauniad below. But I did see a seriously annoyed (and very mediocre) Counting Crows lose it when they played at a general music festival where everyone knew and liked August and Everything After but none of their newer, pretty crappy stuff. So were silent when the band “asked them to sing along” to unknown mediocre songs released years after the band’s prime. Duritz became enraged, threw a hissy fit and then refused to play, to the boos and relief of the crowd.
I saw Axel Rose throw tantrum after trantrum at his second to last concert with Guns and Roses at the Nutter Center in Ohio. He sang great in between rants, but the ranting went on until like 3 or 4 in the morning.
I had Kevin O’Leary in my Lyft as a customer and he got upset that I took him to where is assistant (or he) dropped the pin on the app. Instead of at the front of Cobo Hall in Detroit it took him to the loading dock and he acted like a total dick when I went there. From what I understand he is pretty much an asshole to everyone, so I didn’t feel bad about telling him to fuck off. Wasn’t expecting a tip from him anyway. Lori Greiner was with him, she stayed well composed through the whole thing. The cheap ass prick could have afforded a limo.
Sort of. There was a TV reported who did mostly science reports on a Cleveland station in the 1970s. He was quite popular. He filmed at our facility one day and his “on air” and “off air” personality was night and day when it came to his crew of camera operators and sound man. He would do a take then yell, “Cut!” and spin around and just crucify one of them - “Listen, you fucking asshole, when I want a walk-in zoom shot I’ll tell you. God damn mother fucking camera guys…” He did this a number of times and I completely lost respect for him.
The Nutter Center? Sounds like an appropriate name to me!
Really, that’s why people went to G’nR concerts back in the day - not so much for the music, as for Axl’s hijinks, or lack of them if he decided not to show up.
During a Wonder Stuff show. Apparently Miles Hunt is a notorious diva. He went on some long rants between a couple of songs about some critic in the British press who had derided them in some manner for not being punk enough. Midway through the song right after his second rant at the mic, he apparently boiled over and just sat on the stage with his back to the crowd to sing the next couple of songs, motioning to the rest of the band to also just sit on the stage, which they did. They then left the stage for the show end. They came back for an encore though, as if nothing has happened, and played completely normally. He must have had a pep talk or ego stroking backstage.
Boring life, I suppose. Closest I have, but it was pretty funny, was Douglas Adams rolling his eyes and sighing during the audience question part of a talk when people would come to the mic wearing a bathrobe and carrying a towel.
Or maybe the time Alejandro Escovedo went on a rant about the venue because they were kicking him off the stage at 11:30pm for a midnight showing of some movie, “I love you Denver, but I’m never coming back to this shithole theater again” or whatever. The audience was pretty upset, too.
I grew up in Los Angeles and live in Santa Barbara and have seen many celebrities over the course of my life. They are almost always benign and going about their life. Occasionally they are wonderful and rarely dickheads.
The biggest dick by far was Christopher Lloyd. He lives in the Santa Barbara area and we are both regulars at a very good sushi place. We have both been going there since it opened and and I saw him many times and, of course, didn’t give two shits who he was. One day I went in and he was with someone at the end of the bar. The only seats open at the bar were the two next to him and there was also one table.
The staff tried to direct me and my date to the table but I asked to go to the bar. I’m a regular there so they did so with a weird hesitation that I didn’t understand. As soon as I sat down, Chris looked at me with complete disgust and then turned his back to me and spent the entire time with his side to the bar. I didn’t even nod my head at him because I was much more interested in my date. I have a few friends who are involved in the promotion business and they have since told me that he is a notorious asshole.
I got my revenge though, not that he remembered me. A couple of years later a friend of mine worked for a major sponsor of a film festival and needed a date for their kick off dinner just a couple of miles from the restaurant. The three tables in the front were me, the big money sponsors and off the top of my head Kirk Douglas and his wife, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta Jones, Annette Benning, Danny Devito, Rhea Pearlman, Rob Lowe and Dennis Miller. They forgot to include Chris with the other local celebs. He was all the way in the back furious, humiliated and stewing. I kept turning around and smiling at him but he had no clue why.
I guess it’s the opposite of a tantrum, but I also saw a Pixies concert where they did not acknowledge the crowd at any time in any way during their two hour performance. It felt kind of odd, like someone giving you the “silent treatment”, and to my surprise it made me like the band less. Despite the admitted banalities of the usual “Good evening, Sevastopol!”. Maybe the band were just stoned or had a serious disagreement; not my circus and not my monkeys.
When I saw Royal Trux at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, there wasn’t quite a tantrum, exactly, but the atmosphere was…strained. Both of the lead performers were obviously real pissed off about something. While they went through their latest album, Jennifer kept smoking Camel Filters in this dramatic enraged manner, lighting up one after another, sucking them down in three or four drags, and then STOMPING them out under her boot. Neil for his part just stood in one spot toward the back and stared at the floor with a grim furious expression on his face while flawlessly playing lead. They showed professionalism doing the set, but didn’t acknowledge the audience at all, or play an encore. I still love their music.
I saw a shoegaze band, Sky Cries Mary, in the mid-90s in San Francisco. The crowd was a mix of people stoned on pot and tripping on acid or shrooms, and everyone was gently swaying or maybe doing that slow twirly hippy dance if they were feeling really energetic. And some people were just lying down, enjoying the music and lights, and taking it all in.
The band all had the same vibe – except the lead singer, who evidently decided to buck the trend and go with a few lines of speed instead. So he’s pacing the stage frantically, twitching, waving his arms around, and yelling at us throughout, “Get up!! Dance, you motherfuckers! Get moving, you lazy bastards!” He kept getting more and more irate at the mellow crowd through the show, and the crowd just smiled at him and kept grooving.
I once saw a pretty scuzzy looking Val Kilmer yelling at a production assistant about how “I’m not going to act with a fucking parrot,” followed by a lot of pretty caustic personal insults. I later figured out he was playing porn actor John Holmes in the film Wonderland (about the Laurel Canyon murders), so maybe he was just staying in character, but still.
I took a film production survey class at USC many years ago; most of the people in the class were PAs or aspiring directors working whatever gigs they could get in film and television. I heard a stories about tantrums and other diva behavior but not as much as you’d expect and often not the people you would most expect.
I’ve seen a lot of other celebrities around Los Angeles and farther up the coast, most of whom don’t look particularly impressive in real life, but generally they’re just going about their business and trying to avoid the paparazzi. Being hounded by obsessive fans and professional gadflies every time you go out in public has to wear on your last nerve pretty frequently even if you are a complete extrovert who loves attention.
I’m sure it is annoying to be perpetually interrupted. However, there is a difference, obviously, between bothering someone who is eating and a musician doing a paid concert performance.
This doesn’t really qualify as a tantrum, I suppose.
Ry Cooder made an appearance at my college when I was a student. During his set he was playing a complicated guitar solo when a phone began ringing backstage. After a half-dozen or so rings, he yelled out “Somebody answer the phone!”, while not missing a note.
I saw Motörhead at the Frankfurt Festhalle around 1990. I think they had seats sometimes in the venue but not for that. The audience was one big mosh pit. There was absolutely no lights on the audience so I’m sure they couldn’t see anything from the stage. The music was very loud. The crowd was going nuts but only during the songs. In between songs it got pretty quiet. Everyone was just catching their breath. It was obvious that Lemmy was getting frustrated. Since he really couldn’t see into the audience it must have seemed like the crowd was dead. After several attempts to get the crowd to react he said “What the hell is wrong with you? Did Hitler turn you all into morons?” We thought it was funny and the crowd didn’t seem to mind.
When I was in college, I did few turns as an usher for various concerts, one being Harry Chapin. As I recall, his personal cause was world hunger and after his shows, he sold stuff to support the cause. No prob there.
Except he seemed to forget that he was at a college where students didn’t typically have a lot of extra cash. So after the show, kids were lined up to get autographs on their ticket stubs or whatever, but not buying his t-shirts and expensive program books, and he got all pissy about it. Maybe he was tired or having a bad day, but my opinion of him fell that day.
This reminds me of my encounter with Rodney Dangerfield in college, he put on a show in downtown Columbus around the time of Caddyshack and Rapping Rodney, and he was at the height of his game at the time. Well the college crowd thought it was fun to heckle him and interrupt him all night, way past the point of being “disrespectful funny” and Rodney had enough. Come time for the encore Rodney told the crowd that being disrespectful was his shtick and Fuck You for taking it too far! He then told them you are not going to get an encore of me doing Rapping Rodney tonight and Fuck You again Columbus, I’m not ever coming back to this hick town.
I was of course disappointed and mad at the people in the crowd for being assholes.
No, but a retired colleague saw DeForest Kelley at the Chicago Comicon back in the mid nineties. He was walking past his station with an entourage of 4 people, and he was enraged about something. He was also rail thin. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1997, but one wonders if he already had the disease at that time, which was only a couple of years prior to his diagnosis.