@ Executioner213:
Jesus man, your stories could be a sitcom. or at least a youtube series!
I was thinking more like a comic strip.
I've got more!
Here's kinda an old story for me...
When I was in high school, I helped put on this Battle Of The Bands. There was this band who were, all in all, superior to the rest on the bill (except a guitar/keyboard duo, who won). These guys were pretty alright, doing their best to copy Dream Theater in their own way. Their singer was a total fuckbag though. He was the 'cute' guy that all the chicks hung out with because he was a singer, but he was rather terrible at it AND he had no common sense.
- He gets up onstage with a notebook, because he doesn't know his own lyrics.
- He is standing over his monitor with a waterbottle, looking like he's about to dump it the whole time.
- He keeps wrapping his mic cable around the monitor, and then starts looking around behind him like he wants more cable.
So I go up to the front and say "hey dude...you are wrapping your cable around the monitor". He just looks at me like "huh??"...more with the look that says "how dare you draw my attention while I'm rocking out, people are paying attention to me". A minute goes by and I yell up at him again "you are wrapping you cable around the monitor". By now he's starting to try to walk off with his mic and it starts dragging the monitor because he is too much of a waterhead to realize he's hung up on it. So then he looks at me like "oh.." and unravels it. That band got 2nd place at the BotB, but some of that might have been from their singer being a basehead the whole time.
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My singer is always *that guy* who cups the mic, which is why I threw that in my last post...though the particular example given was a client from another band. Thinking of my band is what reminded me of it though. He always says, on his mic during soundcheck to the FOH guy, "Yeah, I like to cup my shit...that gonna be ok?". Soundguy always says yes, simply out of knowing there isn't anything he's gonna be able to do about it. I tell him he needs to get away from doing that...if fuckers like Glen Benton and David Vincent (among so many others) can belt shit out that heavy without the use of their hands to cup a mic, then there is no excuse why he can't.
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We played one gig where we were opening for a band where the drummer had 2 kicks...our drummer used 1. The venue owner/soundman had set 2 mics onstage for the kicks. The whole time we were setting up, and while we were playing, we were getting this obscene low-end feedback that wouldn't quit. We kept asking the dude what the fuck and he kept saying it was our gear. Finally, when we were done playing and tearing down, I saw this mic sitting on the riser. I tapped it - low-end feedback stopped for a sec, then started again. I asked him if that was the mic for the other kick and he said it was. I asked him if it was sitting there on the drum riser un-muted the whole time and he was like "no way". I picked it up and started tapping on it, popping the PA every time I did and said "you sure?".
He wasn't about to admit it was his fault, but he was shown that it was.
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I played in this shitty rock band that opened up for The Headpins (old Canadian classic rock band with a chick singer, used to be somewhat popular like 30 years ago). They had sent a rider to the people putting it on asking for a monitor board separate from the FOH. The promoter hired a local sound guy...the kind of guy who brags about having "4 garages full of pa equipment" and "is a licensed Audix dealer" and "plays drums for Dennis Quaid's band". Day of show: he shows up with a single FOH board...like a 24 channel Peavey board with 4 monitor mixes on it. The Headpins brought their own monitor tech. He comes in and says "so...wheres the monitor board?". The dude says "oh, I'm just going to run monitors off the front of house submixes". This is at about 4 hrs before the show is supposed to start.
T-minus 3 hours...the rig still isn't finished being set up, and the local guy is still trying to get monitors working right. He clearly doesn't have his shit together.
T-minus 2 hours....still trying to get shit figured out. The Headpins monitor tech goes up to him and asks him whats going on. He says he's just trying to "PFL the monitors", etc. The monitor tech says "why don't you go ahead and go sit down over there and stay out of my way" (totally in the Mr. Lumberg tone of voice from Office Space). He unhooks everything and starts over from scratch, redoing everything. He does this in 45 minutes: the local guy had been setting this up all day.
The local guy is also notorious for fucking up a ton of band's live sound. The monitor tech had that system sounding better than it ever had. After the show, the local dude says "yeah, him and I make a great team" and "we did a good job together". What a fuckin idiot.
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Same shitty rock band:
We hosted a 'jam night' where local banana-heads could get up with us and play. This one dude shows up with his guitar, which is a dinosaur piece of shit. He gets up onstage and wants to play and sing "Born To Be Wild" (I'll never forget what song it was, because of this incident!). He gets up, I let him plug into my shitty SS halfstack so I didn't have to play it. He goes to start singing and is getting shocked. Apparently, his shit guitar had been poorly grounded....however, unlike most folks, he toughed it out and let himself get shocked the whole song. Afterwards, he got down...I got back up and just happened to look up at the mic he was using. There was a big-ass chunk of his bottom lip that had burned off and was stuck to the mic like a piece of bacon. It had even like cauterized his lip, too. Fuckin unreal.
ok...we can go back on topic now.
There should be a death penalty for such things.
