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Can you share your known cases of gig moments that went wrong?

Roger Waters - Portugal 2006 (at around 4:18):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaQwBMJrSi4

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

Sure. I inexplicably completely forget all the words to Low Rider once at a gig. But it didn't stop me. I just made them up as I went. I was embarrassed, but didn't need to be. No one was listening anyway.

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Everytime we picked a booger we'd flip it on this one winduh. Every night we'd contribute, 2, 3, 4 boogers. We had to use a putty knife, man, to get them damn things off the winduh. There was some goober ones that weren't even hard...

When the drummer for a band I played in got married, he hired another band to play at the reception, but we got up and played a set of our own stuff, using their PA, amps, and drums, but our own guitars. Our drummer found that the other drummer's set had a cymbal that was getting in his way, so he unfastened it and threw it onto a pile of blankets, all while he kept playing. Unfortunately, the power strip the guitar amps were plugged into was under the blankets, and the weight of the cymbal unplugged the power strip and all the amps cut off. He didn't even notice and kept playing his drums and singing but the large crowd on the dance floor was yelling "We can't hear you. Turn it up!" while we scrambled around trying to figure out what had happened. A guitar player friend of ours figured out what the problem was, jumped on stage, plugged us back in, and saved the day. Standing around on stage for half a minute with people yelling at you to play louder while you're trying to figure out what's wrong can make you feel like an idiot.

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Hey, pass me the dog food.

My most embarrassing stage moment was when I was in a school play based on the Odyssey (regional project when all schools in the region were appointed a section of the epic). I had the lowest amount of stage time, and worse: a dancing part. My main section was a dream sequence, where Odysseus first dreamt of lotus eaters, and then of his crew eating meat from cows while he forbade it, and getting punished by the gods, losing his crew as a result. I was both lotus eater and crew member, meaning 2 bits in a short time. Unfortunately one girl was behind me and she was pissy, hurrying me on all the time while I really needed to get out of my lotus eater costume (which had very high cylindrical masks, and a long brown tree suit with sleeves that were longer than the hands). I couldn't get out of that monstrous attire in time for the second bit. Fortuately, my sister, who played the dream-Odysseus, saved my skin by saying "Late again?"

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Okay, MGG, for the completely thick, please explain exactly what the problem was on that RW video.

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The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

Not sure what happens but he definitely looks like something went wrong.

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You can clearly see he was miming: when he takes his mouth off the mic, the pre-recorded voice goes on singing, and you can hear him adding his live [what is the word in English when you loose your voice, for example, after singing too much or screaming too much?] voice, mixed way too loud with the pre-recorded track. This problem kept going for the rest of the concert, you can check it more clearly here:

Roger Waters - Have a cigar (Faking The Vocals):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5-z9PslZQ

Roger Waters - Fletcher Memorial Home (With prerecorded vocals)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiojDdR3YCM

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

I'd hardly call it faking if he has to sing more than one line, he'd have no choice. Even if nothing went wrong you'd have to know that tricks were being employed. So that's my point, knowing there's a recorded voice and him then having to continue singing live, it's not totally clear what the actual problem is.

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The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

OK, I got your point, but after the screaming part, you clearly see that there is a main vocal pre-recorded track, and that becomes obvious on the two other tracks I pointed. Apart from the arguable demerits of lip-synching, I will cut Roger some slack for all the good services he has provided Rock 'n' Roll and because of the fact of his relatively advanced age while still touring, which in a way is honourable...

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

I know that backing tracks and even full blown lip syncing is commen and even expected these days, but the first big exposure occured with ELO in I believe the late 70's, possibly early 80's. When the concert promoter realized they used backing tracks he did not want to pay them their full fee for performing since they had used recorded music. Maybe someone can dig this story out of the archieves, it was considered a huge breach at the time...hell I saw some bands that sure could have used some recorded music to save the show, Boston comes to mind...horred one of the few shows I ever walked out on.

Plook, I was actually at the ELO concert in 1978 at the Pontiac Silverdome that started the controversy. Someone in ELO 's road crew accidentally left a tape behind which was found by a Silverdome worker. Somehow the tape made its way to the media, who reported that it contained backing tracks, and that ELO had been lip syncing. People thought the whole show had been a fake until one of the local radio stations played the tape on the air several years later. What it actually contained was tracks of ELO's string section only, overdubbed many times. The band only had 3 or 4 string instruments on stage and felt that they sounded 'thin' in concert and they wanted the full sound of a large orchestra, so they recorded each one several times and the rest of the band played along to it.

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Hey, pass me the dog food.

The Roger Waters lipsyncing business was reported in The Word magazine not so long ago - very little of his "vocal perfromance" is live nowadays.

Roger, if this isn't an unambiguous sign that "you'd better start looking for another job", what is?!

Please Cyst, don't tell that to talented people. Tell that to Spears.

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There's a Dave Gilmour quote about Roger's singing on "The Wall", which would indicate that, according to him, Roger was never the best singer. I tend to agree with him:
"Superbear, the studio we were most at, was quite high in the mountains and it's rather notorious for being difficult to sing there, and Roger had a little difficulty singing in tune. He always did - ha-ha."
(From Mojo, December 1999.

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The more I learn, the less I know.

Well, here it is Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir David Gilmour in his very own Mattie told Mattie moment (The Wall 2011 in London):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTAM-pzkefc

At 4:39 it was suppose to go: I turned to look, but it was gone, I cannot put my finger on it now, the child is grown the dream is gone... [maybe the single most lyrical and beautiful verses in the whole wall thing...]

Memorable moment, nevertheless...

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

Yep, folks, no more embarrassing moments for this one. RIP

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

Lowell George kept leaving the stage which I thought was cool to dispel the notion that he was the frontman of the band, that this was a collaborative effort (tho' he was the frontman to me, still is). Then I discovered he was going off stage to puke in a bucket. Dead 8 or 9 months later.

Wish I cd find a recording of this because it must be excruciating, but when Bjork and the Sugarcubes opened up for some big act (can't remember name) at Madison Square Garden in NYC, she totally flipped out on the crowd, screeching at them in some incomprehensible fashion for a lengthy period of time. My friend (who is no stranger to flipped out behaviour) described it as SCARY.

Crazy Bitch

Wimin singers. Should stay at home cookin n' stuff.

She would have been burnt at the stake back in more sensible times.

One time, in the early 90's, I saw The Grateful Dead with Steve Miller opening the show, I think it was in KC. Later, they invited him back onstage to jam together. Whilst they were doing this, the sound cut out for a few minutes, but they kept playing. I was keeping track in my head where they were in the song, and when the sound came back on...
They hadn't missed a beat. I wouldn't call it too embarrassing, as the crowd whooped and hollared when it came back on.
Fantastic show, btw...

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Shitty blog./Shitty youtube.

Around 2:02 into the clip, Cobain throws himself off the stage, and here is what happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB6szA9Uu-A

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein