Times you have made an ass out of yourself irl with music

not who was singing actually -- but who originally wrote/performed the song

At a high school dance, I "ironically" dropped my trousers when the Marky Mark song came on (...I'm semi-embarrassed to admit this, even now). The upshot was that my house keys fell out of my pocket, and were lost somewhere on the cafeteria floor -- I had to call my mom and ask her to leave the front door unlocked for me.

me, age 17, scruffy hardcore kid, finding out about my first hardcore show that I'm actually able to attend:

"oh cool, there's a show tonight with some hardcore band called JFA? Awesome, I just missed seeing Jody Foster's Army in Dallas"

"uh... JFA *is* Jody Foster's Army"

a few months later:

"so some guy named Sam Hain is playing? Who's he?"

"uh, the name of the band is Samhain, it's the singer from The Misfits"

me, age 23 or so, going up to Scrawl and their crew after a show and accosting some guy with a Pussy Galore T-shirt

"I LOVE THEM"

guy, pointing at my Tiny Lights band t-shirt: "we hate them, they screwed us over at a show"

A friend and I snuck back into a JSBX show, after getting kicked out for brown-bagging a beer (we were both under age) ... we were upstairs, in the 21 and over area, and Blues Explosion were playing "Fuck Shit Up" - we had gotten separated, both of us familiar with Now I got Worry, I was singing along, after having some whiskey (possibly my first time--I was fired up, feeling invincible) - the bouncer spotted me, and I leapt off of a 2nd floor balcony, landing on a small (old, abandoned) mixing booth/desk (jutting out of the wall) that overlooked the stage--continued cheering on JSBX "make it fucked up, etc." Then (being chased), I dangled over the side of it--dropping to the floor. Then in handcuffs, and off to jail.. put in a drunk tank, standing room only. This was during Fall of '96

dancing to standard wedding party tunes like it's the greatest dance party ever, every time :')

I'm sure I have several of my own, but two I've witnessed personally that immediately come to mind:

1. At the Hillside Music Festival in Guelph, Ontario about 15 years ago, I was introducing myself to Chris Murphy from Sloan when my friend, not realizing/recognizing who I was talking to, heard "Sloan" and said "oh they're playing? I used to really be into them back in the day!" I didn't catch Murphy's reaction, but that was mostly because I was looking away, mortified.

2. Also about 15 or so years back, Alice Cooper came into the store I used to work at. My boss, thinking he'd make himself look cool (?), addressed him with "Hey, Vince!" (his real name). Cooper just gave him a distinctly "are you fucking kidding me" look. This time, I was more amused than embarrassed.

I already told the story in another thread of how I misspelled Tom Waits’s last name in a letter, and my boss was PISSED.

I feel like “Mr Furnier” would have been okay

xpost

like, even “Vince” is not his actual name afaik

Went to a Mudhoney show in 1990 wearing a Mudhoney t-shirt I bought from the local punk rock record store. The guitarist saw me and told me it was a bootleg shirt and started interrogating me about where I got it.

At a club a woman came over and started talking to me because I had a Superchunk shirt on. We were talking about shows we’d seen but then I mispronounced “Polvo” and she corrected me and then there was awkward silence.

I worked at a bookstore and a group of customers were still browsing after we’d made all the closing announcements and locked the doors. The security guard was just standing back so I went over and in a probably annoyed tone told them we were closed. One of the group turned around and said, “Thank you so much!” It was Erykah Badu.

Wait how do u mispronounce polvo

Pronouncing the L. I think the correct way is like Poy-vo

http://seinfeld.wikia.com/wiki/Dolores?file=Mulva.jpg

:( stupid phone

I have listened to Polvo for 20 years, have seen them live twice, have spoken about them with other fans, and I have never once heard any pronunciation other than POLL-VOE

While stumbling around drunk on campus on the Saturday of the spring weekend of my sophomore year of college, I saw a flyer for a free Hans Joachim Roedelius that had literally just started in the music building. I wasn't super familiar with his music at this point in my life, but knew his name from a couple of Cluster albums I had downloaded off soulseek so I quickly made my way to my dorm room to take a gravity bong rip, convince my roommate to come along, and to grab a couple extra beers for the show. When we arrive at the music building, it isn't exactly apparent where the show is taking place (we are maybe 10-15 minutes past the listed start time by now) as there are no signs, noise, or people pointing the way. I notice a door that looks like it goes into the auditorium where I think it would make sense for it to take place and I loudly throw the door open and bellow "Is this the right door?" to my roommate behind me while I bulldoze into a room where it turns out Roedelius is playing super chill and very quiet slow piano music in front of a projected image of the rainforest. I'm greeted by a chorus of sushes and every eye in the room turning around to disapprovingly look at me as I try to sneak into the empty row in the back without making a larger ass of myself. After a couple minutes of uneventful sitting in the back, I get the great idea that I should crack open one of the beers I brought to keep the party going. The can opening creates a deafening echo throughout the whole hall, which gets accompanied by a considerable amount of laughs from some of the audience so I guess the juxtaposition between my party animal antics and the super peaceful and quiet musical performance was at least amusing to some. Either way, it is honestly one of my favorite show memories of all-time and it goes to show what will happen when you book even the most unlikely musical artists during the biggest party weekend of the year on a college campus.

thats outstanding

party + nathan fielder

Noice.

This is basically unrelated to the topic at hand except that it potentially made SOMEONE look like an ass but that story and mentions of Polvo (which I think, frankly, is pronounced just the way you'd think it was pronounced) reminded me of it so here goes: one time in college, I was walking down the main drag and suddenly I started noticing flyers for a Helium show had been plastered everywhere. No way! Super exciting! This would've been like '97 I guess? None of my friends at the time were hip to them so I was talking them up and getting people to listen to tracks, really trying to drum up excitement in the lead-up to the show. So then it's like maybe a day or two before they're supposed to play and I'm walking back down that main drag and suddenly I started noticing that the flyers plastered everywhere now had the band's name hastily scribbled out with 'OXYGEN' scrawled above.

Lol. They should’ve gone with Argon.

I was onstage playing geetar for a one night cover band in 1999 and we were doing "Jump in the Fire" by Metallica, which me and the bass player had learned while the vocalist was in California.

Before we go to play the song,my friend starts panicking and saying he doesn't know the words, and I dismissively told him that he did, just do it.

He walks out on stage and screams "YEA" over and over for the entire song. On the video you see me laughing so hard I start fucking up the riff, and see 4 people (of like 20) get up and leave

Also i met Jon Schaffer from Iced Earth and asked him dumb questions and he clearly thought i was a tool.

I remember one of the Kaiser Chiefs embarrassed me when I requested Suede at their indie club, Pigs in Leeds. This was probably a year before they made it big. He just gave me this disgusted look and said, "Ugh, we don't play them here". It really did make me feel foolish and how I was I supposed to react to that? Of course, now I look back and just feel embarrassed that I was at the Kasier Chiefs indie club called Pigs in the first place.

I started working in a record shop here in Saint Paul last year. I am constantly making a fool of myself when I'm asked about an artist I don't know that well. Just the other day I got a confused look from someone when I suggested Peggy Lee might be in folk. The main issue is that we have a huge metal section and lots of people who come in specially for that. I really don't know anything about metal. We have an old fashioned system where we have to write down the titles of what we sell. Almost daily, someone will come up to the counter with an album that either does not reveal the artist's name or if it does, it's written in some weird text that is impossible to read. I always feel so self conscious when I either have to ask who it is or just pretend to scribble something down that is kind of close to what I can make out. I really should just study all those Der Weg Einer Freiheit album covers closely so I know them off by heart!

I hung out with Destruction Unit a couple of years ago when Don Bolles from the Germs was playing w/ them. he was really cool but several hours in I take it upon myself to say to him HEY DO YOU LIKE THE DESCENDENTS on the basis that he's mentioned in the lyrics to one of their songs. he's like, am I? uh sure they're OK, much later I realise I was thinking of Darby Crash

c. late 90s I was at an indie club night and asked the DJ to play Sonic Youth while he was playing something by Ciccone Youth (which I hadn't heard at that time). tbh I used to hassle that poor DJ all the time round then because I disliked most of the then-popular indie music i.e. tail-end of Britpop they would play so I was always trying to get them to play "old" indie rock/noise rock/punk, which they would occasionally oblige but they must've got so sick of me.

tbh almost any incidence of asking a DJ in a club to play something falls under the "made an ass out of yourself" heading

A little band I was in recorded a single with Bob Weston at Southern Studios, he was over a the behest of Idlewild, with whom he was recording some demos over at Abbey Rd and we managed to persuade him to stay an extra day and record/mix two tracks for us. He was nice, but obviously a bit burned from a weeks recording, he spied a copy of Mojo magazine in my rucksack, and remarked upon it, I said something like 'yeah, there's a really good article on the Grateful Dead' and he just kinda looked at me and said 'why would I give a shit about the Grateful Dead?' it was a little awkward, dunno why I thought he might.

xp perhaps, think that depends on the night really. not done thing if it's a dance club yeah, but that club had indie/60s/70s/80s nights where requests were encouraged (or at least tolerated)

I also have a Stockhausen story, funnily enough. After a concert of his at the Festival Hall I went up to him and told him how much I'd enjoyed his performance of Hymnen at the same venue years earlier. He said he'd never played Hymnen at the RFH and that the concert I was thinking of was actually at the Barbican. I still think I was right and that it was the RFH, but I wasn't going to argue the toss with Stockhausen over it.

Then there was the time I went to a La Monte Young concert (which this time definitely was at the Barbican) at which there was a Q&A session at the end. I stuck up my hand and asked him why he was refusing to release the Theatre of Eternal Music stuff and wouldn't even give copies to Cale and Conrad. He replied that it was "my music". I still think the old bore was in the wrong but there was a certain amount of nervous tittering when I asked the question and a fair amount of applause at his reply.

that second one is more "badass" than embarrassing on your part

The JSBX story upthread just triggered a memory of minor jackassery. I was super late to CDs, very stubbornly sticking it out with cassettes as long as humanly possible, but I finally relented in '96, and Now I Got Worry was one of the first CDs I bought (if not the first). This would've been just after my freshman year of college and I was staying with my grandparents at the time. So I bought the album early in the day and bummed around doing whatever for the rest of the day and then got back to their place sometime after they'd gone to bed and was excited to hear this new album! Because I was new to the format, I didn't have my own CD player yet, so I threw it into the stereo in their living room, which they mostly only used with the TV and (because they were older) usually kept turned way up. Which didn't occur to me. If you're familiar with the first track on the album, you can probably imagine what happened when I hit play.

another dj story. i was quite pissed at the wedding of a colleague and the music was boring mainstream or something like that. so i asked the dy if he would play "panic" by the smiths. of course he didn't. in the end i tried to punch him but as i was too drunk my fist fortunately missed his head. that war really embarrassing and i am still surprised that my colleague never hold my bad behavior against me.

that was really embarrassing

At last year's office Christmas party, I requested Disco Tits by Tove Lo, which completely cleared the dance floor. The DJ mixed it out halfway through.

Great Roedelius story

I was at a house party once for a couple who had just announced their engagement. Someone (not me) had the bright idea of sticking on Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", which given the occasion wasn't the most appropriate choice of track.

Alex — at least you didn’t try to literally hang him!

I'm fairly certain I've related this one elsewhere on the board: I went out with friends for karaoke this one time and was so utterly dumbfounded and excited to see Liz Phair's 'Fuck and Run' in the book that only in the midst of singing did I begin to realize the particular context in which I was singing those particular lyrics. And lo, a straight dude's ass did indeed get tweaked in the gay bar on that fine night.

Around the time 'Rated R' came out I did a phone interview with Josh Homme and asked him if he ever thought he'd seen enough of Nick Oliveri's penis and he immediately hung up on me without saying a word.

once while doing karaoke I thought "Danger Zone" was going to be the Gwen Stefani song (which rules) and not the Kenny Loggins song from Top Gun (to be fair I don't give a shit about either Kenny Loggins or Top Gun)

standing in line outside the lounge ax, drunk after dead-end work, super furry animals opening for olivia tremor control. two other kids are stoked about SFA and i badger them about how much better OTC are. SFA proceed to blow OTC off the stage

that Roedelius story is the best

reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the kids are chanting "BAR-TON FINK!! BAR-TON FINK!!"

My friend bought a copy of Same As It Ever Was by House of Pain and I said "oh I know that group!" and started singing "Once in a Lifetime"

Aw, for a second there thought the friend had thought he'd bought a Talking Heads record.

lol my favorite Talking Heads album is "Serve Your Ass Like McEnroe"

I thought "Steppin Out" was a Billy Joel song for years

xp nope, that's what I thought it was, I guess

this thread taught me how to pronounce NEU, yikes...

Frood