So a woman holds up a sign at a Keith Urban concert that says it is her boyfriends birthday and that said boyfriend plays guitar. So Urban invites him on stage.
Pretty damned cool.
Slee
It’s getting discussed on guitar boards. Apparently Urban is known for pulling folks out for some fanservice strumming and got a live one. Cool. Guy can really play and respects a Tele so you gotta love that.
Reminds me of a couple of clips I’ve seen where Kristin Chenoweth does her customary audience-member pull up and gets a person who can sing. Always fun.
Quite a memorable birthday. 
Very cool! Thanks for sharing.
By the way, I think that what is cool is that Urban kinda gets the sense that the guy can play, so just to keep things moving, hands him his guitar while beckoning for one from a roadie (kinda surprised they didn’t have one ready to go immediately, simply as a broken-string backup).
The civilian takes Urban’s Tele and is warming up on it. Keith had rolled off the Volume because that’s what you do when you are moving an electric don’t want all that clothes-rubbing noise to happen. As the guy plays, Keith reaches down and turns it up. The civilian is like “oh, I can go now?” and starts playing the opening riff and Urban can tell the guy can play so waves off the roadie coming out with the acoustic guitar Keith was going to use.
For the first minute, Keith is monitoring the guy closely - does he know the song’s changes and cues? The guy totally does, so Keith keeps making eye contact with his crew to keep them off. Finally, Keith embraces that he can just sing this one and let’s the guy go.
In far less high-visibility settings, I have been that civilian. I was at a big charity event for my town and all the country-club types were there. A drummer friend had assembled the band and they were playing American Songbook. Really well done, but no one was dancing. At the end of the evening, I asked if I could sit in for a song and my friend said yes. The guitarist handed me his guitar and asked “do you know chords, like C and G?” and I just kinda went “I’m fine” then told the band to hit E A D A when I cued them and to stop playing when I said so. I launched into That’s What I Like About You and navigated them through it. The dance floor filled up immediately and everybody went nuts with pent up energy. Fun time.
That totally fucking rocked!
That dude was nailing it! Aye, WordMan it was fun watching Keith Urban watch the guy and realize oh shit! this guy can play and knows the song! When he nailed the solo I gave him a big thumbs up!
There are more videos of it out there including this one:
I believe Keith said he killed it and that it was badass. I agree. Pretty amazing. We know what his 15 minutes are.
That’s the version I saw. The rest of the band looked like they were taking a break while (they thought) some random guy was going to strum a chord or two. When they heard the actual song going down, they picked right up.
The guy nailed it, IMHO.
I had two sorta similar things, though much smaller venues of course.
The first, way back, was in Florida. My band had just moved down there because our drummer moved down (note, I was 17 at the time and still in high school). Anyway, we got down there and were practicing a bunch but hadn’t played any shows because we were still getting the songs worked out.
A guitar store was having a guitar solo contest sponsored by the local radio station. My singer and drummer had the brilliant idea that, if I went down and played in it, it would be a good thing for the band. So they signed me up. I wasn’t all that pleased, I never really liked stand alone guitar solos but I did it anyway, their reasoning was fairly sound and there was to be a lot of models on hand to introduce the guitar players. The models put the idea over the top.
So I show up at the contest wearing neon Chucks, board shorts, a ripped up tee-shirt and a baseball cap on backwards. Everyone else is all metalled out, black leather pants, the works.
The dj guy starts calling names and people start their solos. I was about 3/4s of the way through the list of players, there were about 20 or so. They call my name and I walk up on stage, escorted by a rather hot brunette in a bikini. I look up and everyone is walking away to grab a beer or whatever because no one knew who I was. There were probably 1,000 or so people there, it was packed.
The solo was to be between 3 and 4 minutes, iirc. So I got up there and started jamming, got a riff going and noodled around it. The little light telling me I was out of time started flashing so I did a really fast run and ended it with the Woody Woodpecker theme.
When I stopped there was silence. Absolute silence. I was like ‘Wow, that didn’t go over well’. Then some guy yelled out ‘Who the fuck is that?’. A guy I had just met named Parrish yelled ‘That’s cannabis, man!’*. And then people started going nuts.
I ended up winning. I got a guitar that was a piece of crap and traded it for a compressor. I also ended up dating the bikini model for a couple months.
The second time, I went to a show and found out a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in a while was in the band. He noticed me and during a break we talked for a bit. In the next set he called me up. The problem was he didn’t have an extra amp. So we played ‘(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)’ with me handling the fretboard and him picking. It worked surprisingly well.
Slee
*Parrish said he was looking for pot. I said something like ‘Hunting the elusive cannabis, huh?’ Parrish said "What the hell is cannabis?'. So I explained the name. Parrish decided that should be my nickname. Luckily it didn’t stick.
My, that sounds like it checked all the right boxes on the guitar badass checklist! I was just happy to get all those tuxedo’ butts moving.