I was working in the Midwest as a sound guy for a local bar band. We were playing at a bar that had a switch installed onstage so the band could turn the jukebox off and on before and after each set. The band was just about ready to kick into the first song of the night when I realized that although the room was quiet, it was because the jukebox was between songs and that nobody on stage had hit the switch.
I didn't want the next song on the jukebox to start just as the band began, so I jumped up from behind the board to sprint across the dance floor and hit the switch. I ran across the bar and jumped into the air to leap up onto the stage, but the lighting guy didn't see me and blacked out the room just as my feet left the floor.
So now I'm flying through the air, but I'm also temporarily blinded by the sudden darkness. I gave it my best guess, but I misjudged where the front of the stage was, and instead of landing with my feet onstage, I fell about a foot short and crashed down with both shins on the front edge of the stage and then landed in a heap on the dance floor.
The lighting guy (and everyone else in the bar) heard the crash and immediately turned the lights back on, to reveal me lying on the floor, holding my shins and cringing in pain.
The lead singer is leaning over the downstage monitors, whispering, "Dude – are you okay?" And I'm in too much pain to talk yet, but gesturing wildly to the band so the crowd will have something ELSE to watch as I try to crawl back to the board.
Later that night, during the second set, the lead singer decided to leave the stage through a door he discovered on the back wall and stepped into the darkness to discover the room was sunken but had no stairs down, and fell onto an upside-down pedestal table, but that's another story…
