A Guitar And Gear Support Forum

Got reminded of a Glen Campbell story this morning,
Glen was playing a gig & a drunk approached the stage and requested Glen do:
that song about "Its Snowing"
Glen was puzzled, and replied "I don't know any song about its snowing."
The drunk replied "Of course you do, you had a big hit on it!"
"Its snowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk"

Anyone ever get any requests from drunks?

Had a drunk tell me at 1 of my very first gigs I was playing exactly like hendrix. EXACTLY LIKE.
Only a few gigs later had a sharp dressed older man ask if he could jump in and play sax. Just so happened to have it with him. ?!? We didnt know what the etiquette was or if this was normal or what. We let him up for some reason. We certainly weren't great back than and were mostly held together w duct tape. He was decent but I think about as inexperienced as us onstage. So sort of blind leading the blind. Not great.
Sometimes mrs nomad watches and drunks want to dance w her. It's why she always wants to bring a group when she goes.

nomadh wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2020 10:36 am Had a drunk tell me at 1 of my very first gigs I was playing exactly like hendrix. EXACTLY LIKE.

Chet Atkins talked about being on the deck of a cruise ship, idly playing his guitar, and some old guy complimented him on being pretty good, although, to be fair, he was "no Chet Atkins".

No drunker than I am at the time they are asking so they make perfect sense.

I like it when women get drunk and dance on the tables.

I do not miss those drunks.

We were playing a club in Asheville one night and took a break after the first set some random hammered dude comes squirreling up to the stage and said man you guys are good but did you by any chance see No Strings Attached at the festival grounds last weekend? He went on to say what a killer band they were and that he knew those guys really well. I just told him yea our entire got to go and we all were at that show. Then asked him if he wanted one of our flyers he said yes and then he got this really weird look on his face and walked away without saying another word. I figured it must have been our picture underneath our bands name which was No Strings Attached.

My playing was so bad that to make any decent effort on stage, I was usually the one drunk and requesting the audience to stop throwing ashtrays.

Sometimes I do like a bit of booze to loosen up and flow a bit. A few times I was very frustrated with my band and my sons friends bought me an adios mofo and it put me waaaaay over the top. For a few shows they kept wanting to do that. I finally asked "do I play better" they said "oh no your timing goes to hell. But you are soooooo much more entertaining" I've learned to incorporate more of loosy drunk me into the sober pro me. It was a good learning situ for me

nomadh wrote: ↑Thu Jun 18, 2020 9:41 am Sometimes I do like a bit of booze to loosen up and flow a bit. A few times I was very frustrated with my band and my sons friends bought me an adios mofo and it put me waaaaay over the top. For a few shows they kept wanting to do that. I finally asked "do I play better" they said "oh no your timing goes to hell. But you are soooooo much more entertaining" I've learned to incorporate more of loosy drunk me into the sober pro me. It was a good learning situ for me

One of my college roommates needed to do a small project for a statistics class and came up with the following experiment. There were four of us in the apartment and we had started playing darts as a fun weekend activity and had all gotten pretty good at it. We all also happened to drink, in moderation. The project was that we would first warm up, and then track our dart scores as we drank a standardized amount through the evening, with the expectation that things would be OK for a bit, and then start dropping pretty quickly. What was a surprise was that there was an initial increase in scores for all parties, after maybe one or two drinks. After that things trended as you would expect.

All the time. And they usually try talking to you in the middle of the song. I use in ear monitors so I can't hear what they're saying even in between songs. And taking an ear out is annoying because I have to play with only one ear in until I have a little break in a song to pop it back in correctly.

95% of the time, we don't know the request. Requests work better for my friends that do acoustic solo, duo, trio gigs where they just pop up the chord charts and go. That's not how our band rolls.

Every now and then, we have a request in between sets and we try to make something happen, especially if it's a private party.

"Mustang Sally!!!" "Play One You Know!!!!" "My uncle's cous"ew's sister's boyfriend, plays with Hank Williams Jr., Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, Doobie Bros., Stevie Ray, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard." "I partied with Jimi Hendrix in 1982 the night before he died." "I have a1958 Les Paul I bought for $12 at a pawn shop." "If you'll play something by Keith Urban I will show you my t!ts."

There's a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, so far conspicuous by it's absence here......

Had a drunk charge the stage yelling that we were “Commies” after playing the Beatles’ Back in the USSR. Initial encounter was with our bass player who’s an Army Ranger. Big mistake.

I think Todd Snider's great and if you ain't heard this drunk chick at a gig story it's worth the listen.


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redman wrote: ↑Thu Jun 18, 2020 11:16 pm I think Todd Snider's great and if you ain't heard this drunk chick at a gig story it's worth the listen.

He wasn't on my radar, but after an hour watching him on UTube, he very much is. Thanks!

Todd Snider rocks!!! B double E double R , Beerrun!

fortunately these guys did not make any requests...

These drunks are universal I think they must go to school somewhere to learn the drunk heckler trade. Here's some more stuff that happened more than once. Our frontman leans over and says play Free Bird I say "Hell NO" then he says shut up look down and play it so I looked down and under his foot is a $100 bill some drunk fool just tipped us to hear Free Bird. I live in the Southern Appalachian Mountains so when we were playing locally we always had some drunk wanting to hear Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, Molly Hatchet or something similar. We were playing a small club in Bryson City, NC a small town tucked away in the mountains. The club, Across The Tracks was built out of an old remolded Quonset Hut warehouse and it was always packed with combination of River Rats from the Nantahala Outdoor Center and college kids from Western Carolina University both were just a few miles away and this place really got wild on the weekends lots of girls flashing the band, lots of boyfriends getting mad and wanting to fight the band. Anyway some drunk chick comes up to the stage and requested Simple Man or some such song with a $50 bill incentive. So we cranked up the song she starts walking away from the stage got beside the pool tables and disappeared passed out in the floor before the first set was over.
Thanks for starting this thread over the years I've saw a ton of funny stuff happen from drunks in clubs.
This is a picture of our band in that club 15 0r 20 years ago. I'm the first one on the left and I could still walk back then.

Great, now I'll have "Free Bird" stuck in my head for the rest of the day, or about as long as it takes to run through the song.

My favorite drunk request story:

On our very first gig we got the the bar early, did our setup and and sound check. The bar had only a few bar flies who had been there all day camped on what I'm sure were their regular bar stools... After we were done, one of them drunkenly walks up and says that was the best version of "Come Together" he's ever heard and will stick around for our gig later because he wanted to hear it again.

Flash forward to hours later when we're half way through our first set... in between songs he starts yelling for us to play Come Together again. It's on the set list as the first song of set 2 so we just played our first set out. During the set break he comes up all ticked off saying he has to leave and we're assholes for not playing it for him to hear then he storms out. No biggie, we finish, get paid by the bar manager and leave.

The next time we play there we have a great time, finish up and go to collect and the guy who pays us is THAT GUY.. He was the owner of the bar. He turned out to be very cool and gave us a $150 bonus because he drew a much bigger crowd than before and apparently had no recollection of the previous gig's shenanigans. Alas, he ended up selling the place a few months later and the bar converted to a hip hop format.

Roscoe wrote: ↑Fri Jun 19, 2020 10:46 am My favorite drunk request story:

On our very first gig we got the the bar early, did our setup and and sound check. The bar had only a few bar flies who had been there all day camped on what I'm sure were their regular bar stools... After we were done, one of them drunkenly walks up and says that was the best version of "Come Together" he's ever heard and will stick around for our gig later because he wanted to hear it again.

Flash forward to hours later when we're half way through our first set... in between songs he starts yelling for us to play Come Together again. It's on the set list as the first song of set 2 so we just played our first set out. During the set break he comes up all ticked off saying he has to leave and we're assholes for not playing it for him to hear then he storms out. No biggie, we finish, get paid by the bar manager and leave.

The next time we play there we have a great time, finish up and go to collect and the guy who pays us is THAT GUY.. He was the owner of the bar. He turned out to be very cool and gave us a $150 bonus because he drew a much bigger crowd than before and apparently had no recollection of the previous gig's shenanigans. Alas, he ended up selling the place a few months later and the bar converted to a hip hop format.

Haha! It's been my experience that sometimes the most obnoxious drunk at the gig is the club owner... You need to know who the owner/manager is by sight, so you don't tell them to fuck off when they make a nuisance of themselves.

Personally, I don't like requests. Or I should say; I don't like the attitude that a lot of people have about requests. The ones who feel entitled to hear their favorite song, and get all pissy if you tell them you don't know it. They think that being a musician means you know every song that's ever been written, or that a band can just launch into a song they never played before if you just sing the chorus to them. People who are clueless about genre, and can't understand why an original jam band doesn't know any George Michael songs, or why a classic rock cover band has no Taylor Swift in their repertoire. If I wanted this kind of aggravation, I would have joined a wedding band!

I remember one time, this drunk Karen came up to me during my band's set break and asked if we'd play some top-40 radio song (I don't remember what it was) and I told her we didn't know it. Then she requested some other awful pop song, and I told we didn't know that either... "Really??" she said. "How could you NOT know that song??! You know it, it goes like..." as she started to drunkedly sing the song to me. I assured her that I had heard the song, but we had never learned it or rehearsed it. "Well what about THIS song?? You HAVE to know this song!" she said, totally committed to getting us to play something. "Nope, don't know that one either..."

"Jeezus! I thought you guys were MUSICIANS!" she finally exclaimed, as she stormed off in a drunken huff.

When I did the solo, acoustic gigs I would sometimes end my self-introduction with: "...and if you have any requests, just keep them to yourself and we'll get along just fine!". I don't remember who originally said that, but I'm glad he did.

Not sure if they were drunk or not, but anybody who requests "Proud Mary" and "Louie, Louie" is probably impaired in some way …

So I used to play with this 8-piece Brazilian jazz/rock group, and occasionally we'd get wedding gigs—at one of them a guy kept pestering us to play "Louie, Louie". Finally the band leader says, "Okay, let's do it, just to shut him up."'
"okay, what key?"
"Just pick your favorite …"
Since there were two drummers, we did a wild rendition in 6 different simultaneous keys, and you know what? they loved it!!!
On another gig with the same band, the request was "Proud Mary" …
"I can sing it," says the leader. He then proceeded to sing the whole thing in Norwegian, his second language and you know what? they loved it!!!

There are some nice drinking songs. David Allan Coe did "Drink My Wife Away", it makes me laugh.

Open G wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2020 11:06 am There are some nice drinking songs. David Allan Coe did "Drink My Wife Away", it makes me laugh.

That has to be the greatest country song title in history!