Author Topic: Spinal Tap Stories  (Read 318 times)

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Mac

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Spinal Tap Stories
« on: March 13, 2014, 09:11:23 am »
Spinal Tap Stories

Styx, Foreigner


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Chiprocks1

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Re: Spinal Tap Stories
« Reply #1 on: March 13, 2014, 10:23:22 am »
Is this a new segment? Are we gonna get more of these from other big name acts? If so, I'm 100% down for that.
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Michael Scott To Meredith: "You've slept with so many men, your starting to look like one. BOOM! Roasted! Go here.

Mac

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Re: Spinal Tap Stories
« Reply #2 on: March 13, 2014, 12:44:47 pm »
I believe so.
Believe in Yourself
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Mac

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Re: Spinal Tap Stories
« Reply #3 on: March 13, 2014, 12:50:22 pm »
Meat Loaf with a Side of Urine

Meat Loaf Spinal TapOur collection of real-life ‘Spinal Tap’ stories contains some pretty wild moments, but for sheer distinctiveness, few can match the tale of the night Meat Loaf traded ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ for a bottle of urine to the face.

Starship‘s Mickey Thomas shared his recollection of the infamous night as part of our celebration of ‘Spinal Tap’s’ 30th anniversary, flashing back to the time his band shared the bill with Meat at the 1988 Reading Festival. “It’s one of those three or four day festivals and we were on the fourth day, so it was one of those deals where the audience had been out there in the English countryside for four days and nights drinking ginger beer and building bonfires, getting high and doing whatever,” explained Thomas, laughing, “So by the fourth night, it’s almost like a bunch of druids! It gets to be a very primitive feeling thing.”

All that ginger beer has to go someplace, but during this particular festival, the audience ended up giving it back to the performers. Recalled Thomas, “Their form of expressing themselves by that time is to take the plastic liters of ginger beer that they’d been drinking, refill them with urine, stab a few holes in the bottle and then helicopter it over the stage. So the whole stage is filled with ginger beer bottles that have been filled with urine and then to make it even worse, when we get offstage, the dressing rooms had no running water. So I just kind of took off my shirt, threw it in the garbage can, took off my shoes, threw them in the garbage can, dumped out a stainless steel bowl of fruit that was in the dressing room, filled it up with bottled water and showered myself off as best I could until I got back to the hotel.”

A memorably disgusting gig, to be certain, but Thomas and his bandmates got off easy. “On that same night, after we played, Meat Loaf goes on and after about three songs, he gets hit with one of these plastic bottles, so he gets pissed off and he just shuts down his whole show and he leaves the stage,” he continued. “The promoters go out and they talk to the crowd and they go, ‘Do you want Meat Loaf to come back?’ and they say ‘Yeaaah!’ ‘You promise you’re going to throw no more bottles?’ and they say ‘Noooooo.’ So then they get the band back out and Meat Loaf walks back out onstage center stage and grabs a mic and before he can sing one note, a bottle hits him right in the nose and breaks his nose.”
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Mac

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Re: Spinal Tap Stories
« Reply #4 on: March 13, 2014, 12:55:50 pm »
Brian May Narrowly Avoids Hydraulic Death

During his years with Bad Company and Free, Rodgers has played for plenty of crowds, but his closest brush with stage disaster came during his time as frontman for Queen.
 Recalled Rodgers, “I remember touring with Queen, we used to do the song ‘Bad Company’ and we would have the piano under the stage, and it would be lifted through smoke on a hydraulic up to stage level. So when you’re down and ready to go, you’re standing by the piano and you’re looking up and all you can see are the laser lights and smoke and a bit of the audience there.”

It’s a disorienting way to take the stage, as well as one that’s fraught with a certain amount of peril. “They’d ask you to keep your elbows and arms in, because the hydraulic will snap them off if you’re not careful,” explained Rodgers. “So as it’s coming up, I start to play for atmosphere. I’m starting to play and all of a sudden I look up, and there’s a guitarist on the end of the piano as we were rising up.”

That guitarist, of course, was Queen’s own Brian May. “It’s Brian, who has fallen down and he’s kept his guitar up and kept it in tune and everything, because a guitarist will always fall in a manner that he doesn’t knock his guitar out of tune, no matter what he breaks, leg-wise or arm-wise, right? So there he was and they had to hit an emergency stop. Because we couldn’t go up — it would trim your knees off if you were hanging over the edge of it.”

As happens so often at these moments, it was members of the crew who saved the day. “The roadies had to jump down into the pit on top of the piano, pull him up, pop him back up on stage and then we continued,” continued Rodgers. “But I’m thinking, ‘What should I do? Should I keep playing?’ I decided to keep playing. But he was a trooper, I have to say. He didn’t miss a beat or anything. It wasn’t funny at the time — it was scary, actually.”


Believe in Yourself
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Mac

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Re: Spinal Tap Stories
« Reply #5 on: March 14, 2014, 09:40:26 am »
Heart’s ‘Two Buckets’ Tale

How can two mop buckets come in handy for a rock musician on tour? Ann Wilson of Heart recently shared a real-life ‘Spinal Tap’ tale that shows how handy these common household items can be when things get really bad.
Wilson shared her rather stomach-churning story as part of our ongoing series of rock star memories in honor of the classic mockumentary’s 30th anniversary. As you might have guessed already, you may not want to read this one until your lunch break is over:

“So many things have gone wrong over the years. You know how when you’re out on the road and you’re traveling with a group and you’re out among the public, as they say, the “great unwashed” and there’s all this sickness going around and stuff? If one person in the whole touring group gets sick, it spreads like wildfire throughout the tour group.

“So our poor guitar player [Craig Bartock] got this really bad flu [recently], which was the total flu — it was everything. He made the decision to go ahead and go onstage, but he asked that if he gave the signal that he had to run offstage, we should do something like do an acoustic song or tell jokes or whatever. They put two buckets for him backstage out of sight and he had to run offstage like two or three times. Then he would bravely just come back out and it would be okay again and then he’d get green and he’d have to leave again. Poor guy. That was just awful.

“You know, people get sick all of the time and I’m the only one that has the luxury that when I get really sick, we can’t play the show, because as a singer, I refuse to go up there and not give people my best.”
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Mac

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Re: Spinal Tap Stories
« Reply #6 on: March 14, 2014, 09:42:16 am »
Jethro Tull Can’t Escape Rabbit Costumes

One of the most famous moments in ‘Spinal Tap’ finds bassist Derek Smalls trapped in a pod on stage, fighting to get out as his bandmates performed ‘Rock and Roll Creation’ without him. For Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, that hit close to home — very close.

Only this time, the snafu involved rabbit suits during an early-’70s tour in support of ‘A Passion Play,’ rather than strange on-stage cocoons.

Anderson relayed his story as part of our ongoing series of rock star memories in honor of the classic mockumentary’s 30th anniversary. Turns out, even high-brow proggers like Anderson have had their share of ‘Tap’-style disasters.

There’s also a weird coincidence associated with Tull and the same Smalls character. But, more on that in a moment. First, about rabbit suits…

“We started a U.S. tour in 1973 in Buffalo, N.Y., where we began the show – without proper rehearsals – by appearing on stage in giant white rabbit costumes,” Anderson remembers. “Each rabbit suit had a zip in the back so after a bit of wild dancing to the taped intro music, we lined up across the stage one in front of the other where the plan was that each rabbit would unzip the rabbit in front, the musician occupants would burst out of the rabbit suits playing their instruments and the live show would begin.”

Derek Smalls could have told you what happened next.

“The zips jammed on two of the rabbit suits – so the band line-up was somewhat depleted as the road crew wrestled with the suits and ended up cutting the musicians free with box knives.”

Actually, it’s fitting that something from the film would echo in real life for Anderson, because he has made at least two concrete connections between Jethro Tull and Spinal Tap.

“It should also be remembered – as ‘coincidences’ go – that the name ‘Derek Small’ appears on both the ‘Thick as a Brick’ and ‘Passion Play’ album covers, some 10 years before the ‘Tap’ movie,” Anderson says. “Ah, well – get your inspiration where you can find it.”

Anderson has previously said that one of the movie’s advisors was a label representative who toured with Jethro Tull, as well. Meanwhile, a new reissue of ‘A Passion Play’ is planned for 2014.
Believe in Yourself
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Chiprocks1

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Re: Spinal Tap Stories
« Reply #7 on: March 14, 2014, 10:40:22 am »
Great stuff. Makes me want to pop in Spinal Tap right now. This could be the new thread to go to.
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Michael Scott To Meredith: "You've slept with so many men, your starting to look like one. BOOM! Roasted! Go here.

 

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