Strange Stage Moments

Robin Henkel: “I remember that I [fell] asleep onstage one time. Before a show with Big Rig Deluxe, I’d eaten a huge Mexican meal and was sitting in this comfy chair playing steel guitar. It was almost like trying to stay awake while driving. After dozing off, the steel bar, which weighs about a pound, fell out of my hand and hit the wood stage with a loud clunk. That’s when I woke up right in the middle of a tune the band was playing and had no idea how long I’d been out.”

Josh Pann of Circa Now: “One time, this really drunk guy started dry-humping my monitor. He nearly unplugged it so I couldn’t even sing. I looked to my bandmates for help, and they were laughing just as hard. The song finished without vocals.”

Brooklyn: “I was watching a drummer friend of mine play at Humphrey’s Backstage Lounge. He’d told the band he was playing with that I’m a singer-songwriter, and near the end of their set they introduced me to the crowd as an up-and-coming singer. Well, the crowd started cheering to get ‘Brooklyn on stage.’ [The band] pulled me on stage to sing whatever it was they were playing at the time. I don’t know what they were thinking I was going to do, but it was a song I’d never heard…and it was in Spanish, so even if I had known the melody…I wasn’t going to sing the correct lyrics. It must’ve sounded like a bunch of muffled humming. It was more than a little humiliating.”

Amy Castner of Compass Rose: “I had a seagull crap into the f-hole of my violin while I was playing at a party on Sunset Cliffs a couple of years ago.”

Amber Shaffer of Secret Apollo: “At the Ken Club, our drummer sat down on his drum stool and his phone fell out of his pocket. It managed to fall through the six-inch gap between the back wall and where the stage begins and slipped another two and a half feet to the actual floor under the stage. The sound guy brought a flashlight over, and we saw the phone resting on a floor covered with a foot of garbage: old beer cans, set lists, sticky stuff I don’t want to know about, and certainly its share of bugs and unidentifiable objects. And who was the only one with arms skinny and long enough to fit in that six-inch gap? It was bad enough having to lay face down on the Ken Club stage, but then to have to blindly stick my hand in that mess and dig around for a phone-like shape? Steve’s still paying me back for that one.”

Lee Harding of Echo Revolution: “A [male] classmate came to our show once. He never said two words to me in class, so I was jazzed he had come out. At some point in the set, he was two feet in front of me while I was singing at the mike and started licking himself and dancing totally homoerotic. Yeah.”

Tizoc of Agua Dulce: “We were on stage playing during a bikini contest when a very large [contestant] collapsed onto the conga player’s drums. We kept playing.”

Marie Haddad: “A guy came up to me during a show and told me that he was a psychic and that he wanted to do a reading for me during a break in my set. I was, of course, intrigued, and so at the break we sat down for a little bit and I listened to his reading. He predicted that I would be getting a new pair of boots for the rain! Darn it if he wasn’t spot on with that one.”