Like many other sound guys who still play in bands, when I play out, I get to be both performer and soundman. It can get pretty interesting. In the late '90s my five-piece classic rock group was hired to play the Rodeo Club, a popular nightclub on Lake Martin in east Alabama. When we arrived at the club, I saw some large speakers by the stage and deduced that the club had its own sound system (No, I had not advanced the gig…). Though we carry our own system, using the house gear meant not having to unload and set ours up, which was fine with us. But after talking with the venue manager we found out that it only looked like there was a house system: though there had once been a house P.A., parts were missing and nothing was connected. So we loaded in and set up our three-way system around these spare P.A. parts. About 10 minutes before showtime, we finished the soundcheck, and our rig sounded very good. However, once we started playing, something sounded very wrong with our P.A. Long story short, both HF horns, a power amplifier and one sub-woofer were all blown. That's right, sometime during that 10-minute break, about half of our P.A. had mysteriously fried! I checked and confirmed that everything was connected correctly and to this day have no real idea what happened. I guess an electrical spike of some sort had caused the damage, though the breaker on our distro hadn't flipped. Strange. I've gigged regularly as both a player and sound tech since the early '70s, and that was easily the worst equipment failure I've ever experienced.
The audience was ready to party and we had to improvise. We connected the horns from the old house P.A. and they sounded great–frankly, they sounded better than ours. We found some power amplifiers backstage and used one of them to replace our fried one. Eventually we used the house subs too, as the one we had that still worked could not keep up with the rest of the system.
We only started about 45 minutes late, and by the end of the set the hybrid P.A. sounded great, better than our original rig. The audience was happy, and the club owners were happy. They didn't mind us using their equipment, and hired us several more times after that. We lost money on that gig since we had to replace some gear, but we never had that problem there again.
