Embarassing moments on stage

When I started this blog, I had planned on doing things in chronological order. New plan. I'm just going to write about what I feel like talking about. So in this entry is about the early 80's when I was in a rock band called Brat. Brat was originally called Shadowfax but after a few member changes and the fact that there was a popular Jazz band with albums out that already had the name, we changed it to Brat. Brat was a pretty good band. We were tight and had a pretty good following. We played local bars that seated about 50 to 100 people and had a lot of fun doing it. We all had dreams of being rock stars. We used to play this club called The Rainbow in MI 3 weeks straigt every other month. It was in the middle of nowhere but probably one of the rowdiest clubs around. It was probably one of my favorite places to play. They had this speacial drink called the rainbow where you could see 5 different layers of alcohol in the drink and it actually looked like a rainbow. Knocked your socks off. The owner of the club was a real nice guy but had his eccentricities. He used to invite us over to his house before a show and boast about his gravity boots. He'd have us hang upside down and then actually used a pointer to point out how certain muscles were tightening to other people standing there trying to contain their laughter. After seeing that, I declined to wear the boots. Back to the story. Apparently the owner really liked us tho. We got a call from one of the big clubs on the A-circuit in a nearby city and they wanted to book us on a recommendation from The Rainbow Inn. This club, The Silver Dollar, had recently been remodeled from a fire and the owner wanted us to do the grand opening. He was telling everyone that he discovered some new band of unknowns and we were going to blow people away. Mind you, we were just a cover band, but we were pretty good if I may toot my own horn. So we agreed to play his grand opening and the rest of the week. This club owner also had some eccentricities as he wanted us to come out hidden in cloaks with only blue lights on and tons of fog and then when introduced, shed the cloaks and rock the audience into oblivion. That never happened. Thank God. Anyway, opening night was here and we were the opening act for some big band out of Chicago, Passage or something like that. I don't remember for sure. This club was set up to seat alot of people, couldn't really tell you for sure but it was the biggest crowd I had ever played for. There were TV cameras there, the mayor was there, radio stations up the ying yang and yes I was nervous as heck. In fact, you could literally see my knees shaking. We had roadies, sound technicians, light crews, the works. This was pretty damn close to the big time for us. Well we finally made it to the stage and the first song, some Benetar tune, went pretty good. My nerves were starting to calm and I thought, things are going to be okay. The crowd loved us. Now I'm a pretty active bass player as in, I like to move and jump around alot. The second song had started and I had had loosened up a bit so I decided to start doing some of my fancy stage moves. At just the right time, coordinated with the music, I did one of my drop kicks. Normally this looks pretty cool. This time tho, I kicked the microphone in front of me square on, it flew off the stage and into the audience hitting some poor girl on the head.. Thankfully she was okay but I was pretty embarrassed. If that was all that happened that night, I would've probably been fine and this wouldn't have been remembered as an embarrassing moment. Unfortunately there's more. On the very next song, I was standing by one of the roadies changing bass guitars for a freshly tuned bass. He was still laughing...bastard. Anyway, I put on the new bass just in time as the next song was starting when I heard him yelling at me. I couldn't hear as we had already started the song and took off running to join the other band members at the middle of the stage for some choreographed moves we had for the song when I felt something tugging on me. Remember this is the 80's. I was wearing these bright yellow pants, in fact that's the only time they were ever worn, with the big open collar shirt and the ole bandana head band carefully positioned as not to interfere with my carefully ratted hair. I looked the Mtv rock star part. Well these bright yellow pants, with the white pin stripe down the side I may add, had somehow managed to catch a tuning peg of one of my spare bass guitars. So there I was, running toward the middle of the stage with what looked like to the audience I'm sure, some giant protrusion coming out of my arse. Remember, this was aired on tv, the 11:00 news. The bass player with the bass guitar coming out of his arse thankfully didn't make the 6 o'clock newscast the following day, but it was quite a while before people stopped reminding me of it.