Halloween is a great time to tell scary stories, so here are some tales of nightmarish gigs.
Welcome to Mudfest
According to an unofficial gig history page for Blue Öyster Cult, the “venue turned to mud, so BÖC pulled out,” which is a pretty accurate description of what happened. It was almost 20 years ago, but I remember it clearly. The show was supposed to take place on a farm in upstate New York. When my crew and I arrived for load-in, bad weather was threatening and the ground was already saturated from rain on the previous days. Much worse was the fact that the “promoter” (who was a very nice guy but had no business promoting a concert) had literally just finished constructing the stage — but the stage had no roof! My crew started unpacking our truck, and when it began raining we put the gear back into the truck. I explained to the promoter that given the weather conditions, there was no way I could put the gear and/or band on a stage that had no roof. “Front of house” was sort of set up, but the racks and stacks had yet to be deployed.
The promoter was frantically fabricating a roof over the stage using two-bys and a tarp. While he worked on that, I tried to get some work done at front of house — which, as I recall, also lacked a roof.
At the time, we were still using analog consoles and outboard gear such as compressors, gates, and effects processors. I remember trying to program a Yamaha SPX990 but it wouldn’t hold my programs, which I thought was really odd. At some point I realized that I had my feet firmly in a puddle of water and my hands on the mixing console — not exactly a great recipe for safety. As I contemplated my chances of being electrocuted, it dawned on me that there might be issues with the AC power. Sure enough I measured the voltage at an anemic 90 VAC, which explained why the gear was freaking out.
As the day progressed, the rain and wind became worse, and the tarp/roof was ineffective so our gear stayed in the truck. Four o’clock turned into five, then eight and then 10 p.m., while the rain continued. It was around 11 p.m. or so that the mission was officially scrubbed and we left the site. As we neared our hotel, the rain stopped and the sky began to clear. One of the promoter’s buddies was at the hotel entrance and got in our faces about why we weren’t playing the show. After all, the rain had stopped and we could easily go back to the venue, set up and be ready to play within, say, 15 minutes or so (“yeah, right” in my best Brooklyn accent). There were some tense moments while I tried to explain to him that — if we began setting everything up right now — we might be able to start playing around 2 a.m., and that simply wasn’t going to happen, especially in light of the fact that we had a lobby call sometime around 4 a.m. He finally backed down and, needless to say, I was happy to be out of that town a few hours later.
Deranged Console
This happened recently when we were playing opening night at a small theater. The crew was good but understaffed so the systems tech had his hands full. One of the things I’ve noticed while doing gigs in the post-Covid reboot is that there’s a lot of gear that’s been sitting in warehouses unused for 18 months, hasn’t been maintained, and is cranky from lack of use. The FOH console had a control surface with 24 input faders plus eight output faders in the center section. During line check I found that the third bank of input faders wasn’t responding. I could use a mouse to grab faders on-screen one at a time and make adjustments, but that wouldn’t cut it during the show because the defective fader bank corresponded to channels 17 through 24, where my vocal channels live. The systems tech and I scratched our heads, looked through menus to see if we accidentally defeated something, rebooted the desk, etc., all to no avail.
The workaround was creating a custom fader layout where the first two fader banks (faders one through 16) controlled all of my inputs in layers. Layer #1 controlled channels 1 through 16 and layer #2 controlled channels 17 through 32. It was clumsy, but not all that different from shows I’ve done on smaller work surfaces. This probably qualifies more as a “bad dream” than a “nightmare.”
This One Wasn’t Mine…
I wasn’t actually working this one but watched in awe. A friend of mine was working as a guitar tech for a popular metal band. Their front of house engineer was entertaining an attractive, very drunk young lady who was hanging with him at FOH during the show. The mixing console was an analog desk, and so it was passing audio. You can guess where this is going… the young lady spilled a beer onto the console, and after some very loud and scary noises came through the P.A. system, the console fizzled to silence. What to do? They stopped the show for a few minutes, patched the main L/R outputs from the monitor desk into the P.A. drive rack, and mixed FOH from the monitor console. My friend’s gig for the rest of the night was standing in the audience giving hand signals to the engineer about what channels to make louder or lower in the house mix.
This One Has a Happy Ending
We were on one of those rock cruises where there are 50 bands and multiple venues such as a club, a theater and a “main stage” on the deck of the ship. Some acts play all of these venues and some acts only play the larger or smaller of the venues.
One particular night we were scheduled to play the main stage on the deck but there was a lot of wind. How much wind? Enough wind that a heavy-duty cymbal stand took off on its own, flew across the stage and almost took the head off of one of my crew guys. Seriously. It clearly was not going to be safe for the band to perform on the deck stage.
We thought about moving the show to another location, but the other venues were already booked. The only available space was a sort of bar/dinner theater where some of the bands had been doing Q&A for fans during the day. There was certainly no way to fit our backline and a full P.A. into this tiny venue, but there was a very small stage and a P.A. with a couple of monitors. We floated the idea of doing an “unplugged” show, and the promoter loved it. We rounded up some acoustic guitars, a bass amp and assorted percussion toys, and set it up while announcements were made that the show would be moved to the indoor venue. By the time I arrived at the showroom, fans were already lining up to get in. We did a quick sound check, opened the room, and off we went. It went over like gangbusters and was the talk of the ship the next day.
It’s rare, but every once in a while, a bad dream has a happy ending.
Steve “Woody” La Cerra is the tour manager and front of house engineer for Blue Öyster Cult.
