Uncomfortable Concert Moments

A very pissed Linda Thompson performing with Fairport Convention at their 1981 annual reunion fest. at Broughton Castle.   Her marriage to Richard was breaking up and it was excrutiating to behold.  The band tried to ignore her...

Saw City Boy open for Nektar in '78 or '79 (after Roye Abrighton had left), and boy did they blow. My pals and I were chafing at the bit for them to be over and relinquish the stage to who we really came to see, but their set seemed endless. And those stage antics were right out of some boys school production. At one point, their lead singer was taking exaggerated steps across the stage with his thumbs hooked into his suspenders while we were all dying a thousand deaths. Intolerable, it was. I heard once that Peter Hammill had something to do with them, but I couldn't see why. Just awful.

Another concert in Cleveland that I just recalled. The only time I ever saw Roy Harper, back in the '80s, he was playing at a small club on the city's west side.
About two songs into the show some drugged up chick walked onto stage and began talking over the show; security was nowhere to be found and Harper was fit to be tied.
Finally fans made enough noise that somebody got the ditz off the stage, but then a few moments later Harper suffered a horrid nosebleed and the show ended early. Roy's nose wouldn't stop bleeding, and they wheeled him off on a gurney to a nearby hospital.
As they took him from the building, fans were yelling at him because he hadn't autographed their CDs. It was awful. He never returned to Ohio as far as I know. Who can blame him?

Elton John at the Cricket Wireless/SleepTrain/Coors Amphitheater (or whatever the hell they're calling it these days) near San Diego about 7 years ago...opens with Funeral for a friend...gets about 3 minutes into it...stops playing and excuses himself to leave the stage to evacuate his bowels (he admitted it!). He returned about 10 minutes later and started the concert again.

Seen dozens of uncomfortable concerts, most of them due to uncomfortable seats or highly f**ked up sonic issues (sometimes the hall/arena, sometimes the PA going to high), and generally it's not just for moments, but for the duration of the event.

But I guess the thread title mean embarrassing moments.

Plenty of those as well, but some of the examples written by you all are unbeatable.

Maybe some other day.

CPicard wrote: Uncomfortable Concert Moments, part 2: At an improvised music concert, two avant-garde dancers which made a remarkably vivid impersonation of mentally disabled people... It really, really made me uneasy, not because they were doing something obscene or scandalous, but because they were doing something very realistic, like from a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

How did the rest of the audience react? Because the way you described it made it sound hilarious, when it clearly isn't!

Now that Wakeman is being mentioned, I remember seeing on a DVD that, besides the concert, he made speeches, and in one of them he told how he was drunk for one of his concerts. I guess I'll put a Youtube page I found before writing my very rusty memory of the anecdote (didn't really see it again right now to re-tell it, but it will be much funnier for anyone to watch it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxoTiXx3w2U

Now I don't remember the thing correctly, but he was drunk since before the concert, and he got the idea of spicing things up a bit and changing the beginning track. So he went to the brass ensamble and told them to begin with some song, and then he went to another part of the band and told them to begin with a different song, and I think he went with three different songs. Once the concert began, everyone was with something different, and since it was three parts, each part saw that the other was playing something else and assumed they were wrong and tried to switch to the right song, but at that time another part of the band had already switched, and they went so for a while. There was something of a pipe organ on that stage that came from the floor, and Wakeman thought of using it, but something went wrong and he came bleeding or something. And what's even weirder, next day he was handed a review of the concert, and the reviewer gave it a great one, saying that he usually didn't like Wakeman's music, but the show was an eye opener, that he began with a pastiche of whatever that was brilliant, and the final scene with the blood... however, assuming it was all intentional for the show.

AZF wrote: CPicard wrote: Uncomfortable Concert Moments, part 2: At an improvised music concert, two avant-garde dancers which made a remarkably vivid impersonation of mentally disabled people... It really, really made me uneasy, not because they were doing something obscene or scandalous, but because they were doing something very realistic, like from a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. How did the rest of the audience react? Because the way you described it made it sound hilarious, when it clearly isn't!

Well, most of the audience was made of musicians which knew the two dancers: they looked like they were to used to that kind of performance and were not disturbed.
I, too, had already seen these two dancers, but their previous performances were less creepy.

Skip wrote: I think for me the problem is most shows are just so crowded. You always struggle to see band in question unless you are right at the front. But hey still not complaining. Recently Saw "The Skints" In a small venue in Southampton and it was just fantastic about 200 people in total. Larger shows defiantly get crowded.

It was about the same number of folks for an Ultravox show I went to at San Diego State Univ. back in the '80s. It was uncomfortable that so few people showed to watch this band at, I feel, the height of its productivity.

Saw Robert Fripp at UC San Diego in 1983 (when I was an undergrad); just him doing 2+ hours of Frippertronics (really amazing stuff at the time, I thought). He would play for several minutes at a clip and then wax poetically as only he can in between musical offerings. About 1 hour in, one of his narrative interludes was about an emotional break-up he recently had with a girlfriend; it really broke him up and he began to cry. I was only in my early 20's then (less mature and understanding than I am now), but it was a bit uncomfortable for me to see this "guitar god" show an entirely human side of himself to everyone. He was able to regain his composure and continue the awesome show for more than an hour more...