This is a pretty short and sweet story. So the 4-piece band was jammed into this little tiny corner in the bar on the lower level of this pretty snazzy restaurant/bar, and we're doing our thing, which was a classic r&b and soul kinda thing. Anyhow, (I was the keyboard player) I'm sitting there playing, cuz I sit down to play because "that's what real keyboard players do", and this "butterface" mature woman proceeds to stand near me and leer. I'm fully aware, but try to focus on the task at hand. She continues to slowly creep closer and closer. I continue to focus on the black and whites. Next thing ya know she sits on my tiny keyboard bench next to me and starts rubbing my inner thigh, or should I say "giving herself organ lessons". Right there while I'm playing. Now I'm a happily married guy at the time, and sort of in shock. As she's doing it she's glaring over at her(presumably) husband at the other end of the bar, who is watching her trying to play the organ, all the while with this creepy grin on his face. Anyhow, I finally break away from the song, which suffered greatly due to my 10 seconds or so of not playing, and pushed her off of me and asked her to please not do that again. Ridiculous.

We were a 4 piece, sometimes 5 piece “wedding” band, in the late '80s around Sacramento. I was playing bass at the time. We'd do high school dances, parties, outdoor festivals, and a bar gig here and there. This particular gig was a retirement party. We had to do it as a 4 piece, as our main guitarist traveled for his job and couldn't play the gig. Day of the gig comes around, we're getting loaded up, and discover our monitors are locked in the absent guitarists' apartment. Oops. Then our other guitarist gets his hand slammed in a car door. Double oops. Our singer says he knows a guy who can fill in, an old pro friend of his, but it'll probably cut our songlist by half. Okay, it's just a retirement party. Won't play for that long anyway, right? Little did we know...
We get to the venue, this clubhouse-type place with a multipurpose room at one end. Pretty big room with vaulted ceilings, dance floor, and a fireplace. No stage. Our “guest” guitarist is waiting for us. He's already drunk. We'd barely met the guy, and he's already bitching about the absent stage. We start to set up against the wall on the dance floor, and he notices we don't have monitors. He starts bitching again. We told him we'd just put the mains behind us, as it was a low volume gig anyway. He seemed okay with that, thou he kept grumbling.
We played a so-so first set, complete with party-goers backing into mic stands and knocking over music stands. Without monitors, it's difficult to separate the stage area from the dance area. We'd just started our 2nd set when a patron stepped up to our “guest” guitarist, wanting to ask about a song. The patron knocked over the guitarist's beer that was sitting on top of his amp, and it pours INTO his amp. The guitarist immediately righted the spilled beer bottle, but the damage was done. He twisted knobs and pushed buttons, but the amp was dead. We suggested running thru the PA, as the mains were behind us. Nope. The guitarist was enraged. He packed up his stuff, loudly cussing and cursing at band and patrons alike, yelling he'd never been so insulted or treated so badly as he stomped out. We were absolutely speechless. We were looking at our singer, asking him “thought you said he was a pro...?” Singer was equally bewildered. Never saw this side of his guitarist friend before. Needless to say, we didn't get paid. Our contact cited a MAJOR breech of contract, and we really couldn't argue...
Myself, the drummer, and the singer have stayed in touch, and we just laugh about that night over 20 years ago now. We've all agreed on one thing: we should have canceled that gig after our 2nd guitarist injured his hand. Murphy's Law was definitely in full control that night.

I was playing drums in a three piece country band in a slimy hooker/truck driver bar in Superior, Wisconsin in the early 80s. It was a fun standing gig of 4 nights a week. They pay was good and the people watching was great. The band mates were great to work with. One night we were kicking into the intro of Johnny B. Good when some guy who had been a decent local singer at one time before his mental health went away came flying out of the crowd onto the stage and grabbed the Mic. The lead guitar player, a large powerful guy, strummed a chord and in perfect rhythm, grabbed the back of the guy's shirt with his pick hand, flung him so he went sliding across the dance floor face down, and kept on playing without interruption. People who had their backs turned didn't even notice a gap in the playing. The unfortunate individual got up, ran out the front door about as fast as he could and came back an apologetic and sober individual, but not until a year and a half later.

This was in the early 80's, and I was playing bass. As a 4 piece group we were working a lot in South Central Alaska. At this particular club things seemed to be going well. We had played a couple sets on this Monday night, and it was predictably slow.

At the end of maybe the third set, me, the drummer, and the guitar player were a little slow getting off stage. I was changing batteries in one of my pedals, and the guitar player was doing something with his pedal board. I think the drummer was adjusting his control console for our cheesy light show, which he triggered while we played. As I'm finishing up my battery-changing chore, I notice what appears to be a highly intoxicated woman staggering towards my side of the stage.

I pretend to be involved in my pedal and wave her over to the guitar player who was on my left. I glanced over to see him glaring back at me with the look of death. She stumbled her way over to him, knocking over the singers mic stand in the process. He pretended to find a problem in his little Casio-style keyboard he had set in front of him, and waved the woman back to the drummer. She walked in front of the drums, behind me, as I was set up to the drummer's right.

I continued to concentrate on my pedals, when I heard a curious splashing sound behind me. The woman was throwing up on the drummer's floor toms, crash, and ride cymbals. He, having pretty much set himself up in a corner, was trying to get away over his hi-hat. He kind of succeeded. He knocked over the hi-hat and a little crash cymbal, with the crash cymbal almost hitting the guitar player. A bar maid and bouncer, both laughing so hard they could barely speak straight, came up with a couple towels to clean up the drums and stage while the drummer went to the boys room to try to clean himself up. The drunk woman was escorted somewhere.

We were a little late starting our next set, and our singer then announced that any further requests be made only after the band has left the stage. We played that club for another three weeks without further incident. Like we needed more excitement...

Related:
Emetic Crescendo I

Here's one I get a chuckle out of every time I tell it or even think of it...
A few yrs. back while playing a Bar gig in Northern AZ, it was a pickup gig
with a local young Blues guitar player singer, I was playing bass & a friend on the drums.... This was your normal local Biker kinda Pub, never had any problems
& this night was the same, Kind of a slow Sat. night, We played the typical
Blues/Classic rock thing ~ SRV, Clapton, Skynyrd thang... Well this bar had a Internet Juke box & during a break the Skynyrd Tune "Simple Man" came on,
I was walking off stage when this BIG Bald Biker grabbed me & said "can I sing this song !" I turned on my Mic & let him have a go at it...
30 seconds later while I'm grabbing a beer at the bar, I turn to see him
on the dance floor sprawled out in a dramatic Elvis move on one knee singing his heart out... Totally off key and out of time - But He was having his "Moment"
Needless to say the crowd was less than impressed & the silence was stunning !

Come a few days later I was at the local Chevron gassing up & I noticed the
Bald head giant in front of me in line & when he turned around, I said
"Hey what's up Simple Man" with a grin, He put his head down &
mumbled ~ I'm so embarrassed....

We were a three piece modern hard rock band. We played a popular bar in North Houston a couple of years ago. This was an important show. My guitarist at the time was a pragmatic alcoholic. This night he thought it would be cool, opening up a for a really popular band, to drink some fine cold beverages before we took the stage. It was already a nipply night in a chilly bar and by the time we went on, his hands were frozen from drinking 5 ice cold ones. It took about 4 songs for his hands to defrost, and one of our most difficult songs was in those first four, it was a complete train wreck. His guitar went out of tune as well from miss hitting his strings so hard during that song. We were recording the show.

Moral of the story...
Don't drink freezing cold beers right before your show.

I was in a rock band that played mostly blues and classic rock covers. We had a regular Wednesday gig at a local "pub" in Charleston, SC. We had a small drink tab for the band, but fortunately it was $5 pitcher night, we had a $100/person guarantee and it was always packed with people who were always having fun, so I loved that gig. However, some amusing things happened on those nights.

The first happened when we had a substitute drummer who was really good and had a nice kit Our singer/harmonica player had at least one too many $5 pitcher, which we noticed after the set break (three hour sets with one break) when we were forced to play an entire song without him before he realized what was happening. He made it through the second set, until he kicked one leg out during the climax of our last song. He teetered on one leg for a few seconds, and then - in slow motion - began to fall backwards, right into our substitute drummer's really nice drum kit.

The second was when a well-dressed older gentleman asked if we could play "In a Gadda Da Vida." I apologized and told him that we didn't know that song, until he told me that there was a $40 tip for us if we played it. Well, I only knew the main riff, which I quickly taught to the rest of the band and we played that for about five minutes, after which he handed us what he THOUGHT were two $20 bills, but one of them was actually a $100.

My favorite was when these two (not particularly attractive) ladies were standing directly in front of me. One of them leans onto the stage a little bit looking at my bass. I was primarily a jazz guy, but I'd seen videos of rock concerts and I knew how this was supposed to work. I put my bass closer to her and she plucks the strings while I fret the notes. Awesome rock star moment and everyone has a good time. Except she licks the strings. Right were I pluck them. Right where the discoloration from all of my finger gunk from all the other gigs I've played with these strings is. Then she looks up at me like I'm supposed to have found that really sexy. The sound guy ended up taking her home later that night, and thanking me for getting her all excited for him. Any time, ace. Any time.

It was the sixties. We were a very well established rock band and had a gig at a resort on the lake that was hosting a convention of insurance agents. One of our band members had a friend whose parents had a lake cottage on the lake and we were invited to spend the day at the cottage for boating and swimming.

We thought we had plenty of time to party a bit before the gig that evening. At the cottage party there were a ton of people and about ten cases of Thunderbird wine. Everybody had their own bottle and it went down so easy in the hot sun. After we each had three or four bottles each we headed over to the resort.

The equipment was set up that morning so when we got there all we had to do was play. You can imagine our level of inebriation by the time we got to the gig. The announcer said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, may we present to you, 'The Fabulous Chantels'" The curtain opened and the drummer was crouched over his snare drum half asleep and our lead guitarist was rocking back and forth from toe to heel about falling down. Our singer walked toward the mic stand and tripped.

The curtain immediately closed again, and we were done for the night. I'll never forget that gig, or what I can remember of it.

The drummer of our top forty band wasn't the best-looking guy, or the most charming. What he did possess was persistence. If he had to go to every good-looking girl in the bar, he would probably leave with one, including, once, the winner of the wet t-shirt contest.

One night the other band members & I were aghast that he had seemed to settle on a person that was probably female, but any hint of attractiveness seemed to end there. It looked like she fell out of the ugly tree & hit every branch on the way down. I fully expected to turn into a sack of stone as I gazed upon her.

Later the next day, we inquired as to his sudden lack of visual acuity. His only explanation was that it was dark in the bar, and by the time he got her into the light, it was too late!

The moral? If you're going to take off your glasses selectively, remember to ask your friends to do the same.

Back in the late 80's a local radio station in Oklahoma City was having their birthday bash. It was an all day concert with several big name bands at the local amphitheater. Our band was given backstage passes because we had done some shows for them earlier in the year.

Directly behind the stage were tables of catered food, lots of promoters, and the radio personalities. The 'headliner' performers were in another area that we were not allowed into. However, off by itself about 20 yards back, was the beer truck. It was a panel truck with several taps mounted on its sides and back. It was full of enough ice cold beer to keep all the dj's, promoters, rock stars, and their entourages hydrated well into the night.

We had managed to sneak a few of our friends back stage. Since we could not go back and meet any of our rock star heroes, we gathered around the beer truck and began to do what we did best. We had already ended "free beer for the band" at several bars in town. We were like locusts.

It was about halfway through the first band before anyone else wandered over to the beer truck. By then the first tap was nothing but air. By the end of the first band about half the taps were already dry. People would say "Hey these spickets aren't working," and we replied with "yesh we notished that too. Try theezh over...over here."

During the long break before the second band a couple more of the taps were also "broken." By now several of the promoters were aware of the situation. They had climbed into the back of the panel truck to try to remedy the faulty tap situation, never imagining that the precious froth was almost gone.

We could hear the panic in their voices as they yelled at each other inside the back of the panel truck. I'm sure the thought of thirsty rock stars along with their entourages coming off stage to faulty beer taps had to be daunting.

About 10 minutes into the second band the last tap coughed and sputtered its last remnants of golden liquid. At the same time the promoters were starting to realize what had happened and began to look around suspiciously. That's when we casually, albeit drunkenly, slipped through the back stage gate and disappeared into the crowd.. as best as I can remember.