Really? I’d thought that was made up by Abbie.
The only one that comes to mind at the moment is watching a “live” performance on TV by Stevie Nicks. It was after FM’s heyday and I think it was sort of a comeback tour for her. She was doing a bit during a song in which she was going to release a live white dove. With a grand gesture she releases the dove but it doesn’t fly away. It remains firmly attached to her hand. She shakes her hand a little and…no dice, bird ain’t going anywhere. She might have had a little fun with the situation but no, she looked blitzed out of her mind and totally perplexed. This was along time ago and I don’t recall what happened after that but I remember being highly amused.
I remember reading an interview with Paul Stanley of KISS in Hit Parader or some similar 80s head-banger magazine* where the topic came up of the band’s preference for (IIRC) Marshall amps and criticism of same for a lack of high-frequency response. Paul’s reply was, as I recall, “We’re not writin’ jingles here, you know.”
Not quite rock & roll, but I saw B.B. King perform here in Charlotte 15 or so years ago, and after about 2 verses of his first song, someone brought him out a chair, and he finished the song sitting down. When he was done, he did the “glad to be here, thanks for coming out” bit, then said, “Now I know what y’all are all thinking. ‘B.B. done got too old and fat to stand up while he sings.’” And after a beat, he said, “And you right.” Everybody in the place laughed.
- I was 13, gimme a break.
This one’s pretty well known: the Beatles might never have happened (an exaggeration, but who knows?), if producer George Martin didn’t have a particular sense of humor. Just after the lads auditioned for EMI, Martin give them sone helpful critiques, then generously asked them if there were something they didn’t like (about their performance).
“I don’t like your tie,” said a very young George Harrison.
Silence. The future of the world hung in the balance.
Then Martin laughed. It was all good fun from then on.
(To be fair, Harrison might have been aware that Martin produced offbeat comedy albums…but still, an amusing little story).
Rochester once had the Dome Arena. It was round. It was underused. Some genius had the idea of holding rock concerts there.
Anyone, with two seconds thought, could have figured out what happens to sound in a round arena. I did. I wandered around until I found a spot in back where the bouncing sound waves cohered into something similar to music. While I was back there, Steve Stills stopped his band and shouted, “This place has the worst fucking acoustics of any place I’ve ever played.”
The crowd cheered.
I worked security for a lot of concerts when I was in college in the 70’s. One that stood out was a gig by 38 Special. I was back stage before the concert, and as the band was preparing to take the stage, front man Donnie Van Zant realized his guitar was locked in a storage room, and the person with the key was nowhere to be found. I grabbed a butter knife from the buffet table, and was able to jimmy the lock and open the door. The band was happy and the show went on.
OK, maybe not hilarious, but I did get to be the hero.
My favorite anecdote is that 40 years after I reviewed a concert by Todd Rundgren and Utopia, (I got backstage, but never got a chance to actually interview him) Todd Rundgren was a guest lecturer in my future daughter-in-law’s class.
Way back in the early 1990s I lived in Tallahassee, Florida. I worked gigs at the Civic Center regularly; we had rock concerts, LOTS of country shows and we were a regular stop for off-Broadway tours.
One day I show up for load-in and ask who the act is; I’m told it’s that new “hat” guy Garth Brooks. Oh, okay, I say. I had heard of him and even prolly played some his stuff when I worked at the country radio station, but I’m not a country music fan so my knowledge was very limited.
A typical load-in back then would be 40-60 people working from 8am until prolly 4pm or so, then we’d drop down to show crew until the load-out. That was a lot of people to get together midweek in Tallahassee back then, so there was a larger pool of people than just 60 to be sure the calls would be filled. That meant that you worked with different people all the time, even tho the core group was mostly the same.
Well, on this gig there were a bunch of new people. I do lighting, so I go off with the lighting folks. We start lining up the truss (it was all pre-loaded truss with PAR cans back then, pretty much), running the cables, etc. One of the new guys has come with us to do lighting. He’s maybe late 20s, early 30s, kinda husky. He’s got on a pair of sweatpants, a fanny pack (it was thing back then; don’t judge), a t-shirt and a baseball hat. I introduce myself: “Hey man, I’m Bo.” “Hey; Garth. Nice to meet you.”
Now, this is Tallahassee. I have friends named Garth. And Bubba. And Winston. So it’s just “right on; nice to meet you” and work continues. This guy is right there with us, and he seems to know what he’s doing: cool.
At lunch, I notice that he sits with the touring guys, which was unusual. Locals don’t really do that, at least not often. And I hadn’t really seen him buddying up with the Lighting Director or anyone all morning; he was right alongside me working. /shrug. Whatever.
After lunch, the rig is flashed and flown. The upstage truss flies first and one of us gets ready to climb the rope ladder to focus. Usually I did that, but for some reason today it was someone else’s gig, so I was off stage left just watching things happen. As the downstage truss goes up, the lighting director is on stage calling the upstage truss focus. He finishes just as the downstage truss reaches trim and walks over to us and says “alright Garth; I’m ready for you” and this new guy walks over to the cable pick (where the lighting cables come from the truss to the ground where the dimmer racks are) and climbs hand-over-hand up the cable pick, 40 feet, and focuses all the lights.
As he’s climbing I turn to the LD and I ask “waitaminnit… is that Garth Brooks?” The LD chuckles and says “yep.”
“What the fuck? Why is he focusing his own lights? And building the rig? I worked all day with him!”
The LD moves to start calling focus and tells me “he does this every show; he likes doing it.”
“Every show? Seriously?”
“Yeah; he likes doing it. He thinks it’s fun.”
“Well, it is, sure, but what the fuck? How long has he been doing this?”
“As long as we’ve been doing these big shows; before this we only played little clubs.”
They had met at a Holiday Inn in Tulsa, IIRC, in the early '80s and had hit it off and been working together ever since.
The next time I saw them the LD remembered me but Garth didn’t work with us. I asked him why and he said his insurance company had gotten wind of what he was doing and had shut it down. But I’ll always remember the feeling I had when I realized I had just spent the day working with the main attraction. I don’t care much one way or the other about his music, except that I’m glad other people like it a lot. And I wouldn’t care that much except for the fact that I know first hand that Garth Brooks totally fucking rocks. Absolutely one of the coolest “major stars” I’ve ever interacted with, and my career is approaching it’s 40th year.
ETA: Okay, not exactly “hilarious” but hey, waddaya want for free? 
Not hilarious, but it amuses me.
The Stones were recording Exile. The time of day they began rehearsing was, initially, early evening. But the boys kept sleeping in longer and longer and the start time gradually became later and later because, you know, they’re rock n rollers.
So, midnight…later in the week, 2am…etc.
It finally dawned on them that they were starting their workday at 8:00am.
In other words, working regular hours.
mmm
I didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t know (still don’t know) who he is/was.
I’ll revise my post to say “he’s lucky he survived the night,” rather than “he’s lucky he’s still alive.”
My point still stands.
Dosing someone with a combination of 'ludes and alcohol?
Yeah, that’s hilarious.
There is beaucoup substantiation on the interwebs. Granted, in those days, I “saw” a lot of things that maybe I didn’t really see… but I did see that one!
That’s a great story about Garth Brooks.
One of my favorites was an early interview with Them Crooked Vultures (JPJ, Dave Grohl and Josh Homme)
The interviewer asked them if there’s been a lot of ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’, but Josh heard ‘six’ instead of ‘sex’ and said ‘six drugs? there’s been more than that’.
The mention of Garth reminds me of another one. I think it was Garth, but it doesn’t really matter. So he’s playing a concert. He’s near the edge of the stage, where the floor is a grate type thing instead of wood. He looks down at sees a woman just screaming. He’s feeding off her energy and how much she’s enjoying it. After a few seconds he realizes she’s not screaming because she likes him so much, he standing on one of her boobs and pushing it into the grate. She was screaming in pain.
Another not really hilarious story…
In the mid 90s I was delivering pizza for a living. One night, towards closing, I got an 8-pie delivery to the event center where Soundgarden was headlining that night. I was aware that there was a band named Soundgarden, but I wasn’t into them.
I arrived at the event center and followed some guy backstage to whatever room they wanted the pizza. Carrying three pizza bags, I basically couldn’t see in front of me, so I was just blindly following the guy. We went around a corner, and suddenly someone else grabbed my arm. I looked over, and it was a rather large security person. So then I peeked around the front of my load. Some guy had been in the middle of signing the back of a young woman’s shirt, right in front of me, and both of them were staring at me with a “WTF?!” look. Apparently, I came quite close to running them down.
So I finished the delivery and left, thinking that guy I almost ran over must have been in one of the bands that played that night. When I got back to the restaurant, I told the story to a coworker, who asked me to describe the person I almost mowed down. “Sounds like Chris Cornell,” he said. Later he brought in an album or magazine or something with the band’s picture to show me, and I was able to confirm it was him.
I saw Deep Purple at Merriweather Post Pavilion on their Perfect Strangers tour. During the climax of the show, they played Smoke on the Water. You would think that such an easy song, played by pros, would be impossible to mess up but no.
At one point, a giant oversized beach ball, knocked around by the crowd, came flying on stage and nailed the bass player such that he almost fell over and he flubbed the main riff. Granted, it was only one time out of 800 or so repetitions. I doubt many of the headbanging crowd even noticed.
I remember thinking “did that really just happen?”
Story told before.
The lyrics of Amaral’s Mis Amigos include this bit:
Carlos me contó
Que a su hermana, Isabel
La echaron del trabajo sin saber por qué
No le dieron ni las gracias porque estaba sin contrato
Aquella misma tarde fuimos a celebrarlo
Ya no tendrás que soportar
Al imbécil de tu jefe ni un minuto más
Carlos told me
that his sister Isabel
was fired who knows why
they didn’t even say thank you, after all she had no contract (=she worked under the table)
that same afternoon we went out to celebrate
you will not have to put up
with that asshole boss a single minute more
My brother’s boss (majority shareholder in a family-owned business) took extended medical leave. She was replaced by another cousin: like every single one of the other cousins, this guy viewed any administrative work as “a fucking waste”, apparently believing that people pay you and get paid miraculously (the Holy Ghost is actually the Holy Accountant, or maybe the Holy Treasurer). In his fourth day at this job he told my brother “if you weren’t the worker’s rep I’d fire you”, to which bro replied “if that’s the only reason you have for not firing me, I can send the official letter leaving that position today and you can fire me tomorrow.” “OK. Do it.” So bro did and Idiot Cousin did. This being Spain and Bro actually having a contract the firing wasn’t inmediate: 30 days’ notice.
So: Monday, new boss. Thursday, letter. Friday, fired. Saturday, concert by Amaral which got underway after some geographical confusion (the public laughed but was OK with it, we’re used to people not knowing where we are). When they sang Mis Amigos, over 1/3 of the arena turned to point at my brother and cheer for him; he stood up, saluted, bowed, did victory signs… the lights guy was quick enough on the take to point a couple of beams in his direction. We knew bro was well-known in the area but that was an interesting moment 
A story told by David Lee Roth, which I saw on one of those “Behind the Music”-type shows …
Roth was partying hard one night, and woke up the next morning in his bed, covered in scratches and bits of branches and leaves. He called one of the roadies (I think) and said “I feel terrible. What did I do last night?”
The roadie says, “Don’t you remember? You got wasted and bet everyone you could fly. You jumped out the hotel window.” (Fortunately, they were on the first or second floor.)
Roth says, “What?! Why didn’t you stop me?”
The roadie says, “Stop you? Hell, I bet everyone $100 you could do it!”
Back when I worked for LiveNation in the late 00s The Eagles came through town, in 2008 I think. Before the show I went out onto 6th Street outside Verizon Center and saw Timothy Schmidt leaning up against the wall outside of a restaurant. He was just standing there, watching people walk by. I might be speculating here but he seemed to be waiting for someone to run up and go, “Hey! You’re that guy!” but nobody did. He stood out there for almost an hour, and absolutely nobody recognized him. I sort of felt sorry for him.
Well of course nobody is gonna pay attention to Timothy Schmidt; they’re all looking for Timothy B. Schmidt.
I know someone who claims to have been in a bar when an unknown singer told a very well known singer/songwriter that he had just written a recorded a song that would be perfect for him. The well known guy said “Buy me a beer and I’ll listen to it.” The unknown guy did so.
It’s an old adage that you know it’s a good song if the first time you hear it you’re singing b y the last chorus. Well, the whole bar joined in on the last chorus. The songwriter turns to the singer and asks all excited “What you think?” Mr. Famous says “Buy me another beer and I’ll record it.”
The unknown singer was Steve Goodman, the famous guy was Arlo Guthrie, and the song was City of New Orleans.