I was recently working a stage at a local festival in Vegas. There were many other performers, some on small stages and some just walking around.
While out on a food run, I ran into a large crowd watching a performance and stopped to take a look.
It was a Native American puppeteer dressed in cowboy-style clothing, operating a marionette designed to look Native American and dressed in traditional costume, complete with a big feather headdress. And the guy was making the marionette dance to Uptown Funk! I couldn’t stop laughing.
I posted this story on the LAB Basement forum and asked others for their stories of strange gigs and weird things they’ve seen at shows. Here are some of the responses, with a very light copy edit and trim for space.
Woody: A show at City Gardens in Trenton, NJ where someone in the crowd passed a live lobster in a bucket up to the stage.
Ivan: At one GWAR show there was a “lady” named Esmeralda, who put on a “close to X-rated” show that had me and my crew laughing so hard we could almost not do our job. Man, I wish I had a video camera back then…
Jim: I had a First Nations puppeteer invite all of the children in the audience on stage to play with his puppets while he took a break. Upon returning to the stage he informed the audience that he had made all his puppets out of road kill. The looks on the parents’ faces as they rushed to collect their children was something that I’ll never forget!
Jamin: This was at a small town festival that we used to do:
Scott: While doing a show in Iraq for the troops at an indoor stage, we had some of the Hooters calendar girls dancing and “jiggling,” and one of the girls jumped up to the mic and said: “Yes, some of us do have fake ones,” and she proceeded to toss out “silicon samples” to the guys.
Mark: A live, white Bengal tiger… on a leash! 450 pounds of muscle like steel, claws, and teeth like razors. I know this first-hand, as the owner paraded him around the theater. The tiger barely brushed my leg as he went by, almost knocking me over. If that animal decided to go for someone’s throat, there would be no stopping it.
Joseph: Mayhem, Norwegian Black Metal, Roskilde Festival 2001. GWAR is one thing, it’s theatre, fun. These guys are mad. The singer had barbed wire wrapped around his forearms and mic stand and continually raked it across his arms legs and torso so that he bled from start to finish.
They had two freshly slaughtered pigs heads on 1-meter steel spikes downstage left and right. At one point, when the pit was sufficiently frantic, the singer flung the two “offerings” down into the crowd, and I watched as the frenzied punters literally shredded the “trophies” into a bloody mess, covering themselves in the frothy red effusion. Good clean fun.
Steve: The performance was a musical setting of “Wind in the Willows” by Mark Isaccs at The Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia. A fundraiser for the Hush Foundation, I was recording the show for later broadcast on 3MBS FM. Percussionist Peter Neville had the fish tank along with his other kit.
At rehearsal, we found that it was to add “splashy ambience” at certain points of the performance. It was pretty obvious that some sound reinforcement was needed for this instrument. The house PA operator was there to drive a radio mic for announcements and for the narrative. The question was, “How do you mic up a fish tank?”
Not wishing to get my microphones wet, I set up a shotgun mic (Rode NTG3) about 2 meters away and 2 meters high, aimed directly into the tank. This did the job beautifully for my recording, and a split to the live sound desk allowed subtle reinforcement to the otherwise un-miked ensemble.
Mike: A naked blue dwarf. (Editor: Those curious can see the photo accompanying this one here.)
Doug: A band with a correct stage plot and input list, all of which had been advanced correctly.
Steve: That happened to me once too!
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