The Show Must Go On....

Picture if you will....

There we are getting set up on stage a t a local bar, preparing for our set as part of a Battle Of The Bands. Things are going well. We are introduced and the guitars kick in. Energy levels are high. We are rocking out and sounding great. We are starting the set with a big time hard rock version of "Play That Funky Music". In place of the rather subdued "Hey" that starts the original song, I start with a huge Heavy Metal scream. This is always a crowd pleaser and I do it well so why not? I take a deep breath and let her rip. I'm sounding good. I'm wailing like a banshee and the crowd is eating it up. It then becomes apparent that my breath was not deep enough. It starts as a sharp pain behind my eyes, then I feel very dizzy. I stumble to one side and bounce off a guitar player. This sends me to the other side where I get tangled up in a mic cord and hit the other guitar player. Then things start to go dark and...I fall face first over the monitor and off the stage. I land hard on my face with the mic under my chest. No time to get my hands out to break the fall, just, thud. It hurt like hell. I thought maybe I was dead but slowly things began to come back into focus. The band continued playing. Until it became obvious I was not getting up. The next thing I remember is everything stopping and being rolled over onto my back on the dancefloor. The entire bar has gathered around me. People are screaming. Most seem to think I've had a heart attack or something. As my wits begin to return I quietly ask to be let up. After what seemed like forever the crowd begins to spread out and I'm back on my feet. I return to the stage and we start again. Deeper breath this time and all goes well. We play a killer set and end up winning the battle that night. The only thing anyone is talking about after our set is my fall.

This was the start of a very hellish week for me. This happened on a Wednesday night and we were booked at another bar for the remainder of the week. Three night gigs are rare but they generally pay well. We get to the bar on Thursday night and everyone is talking about my unplanned stage dive. Word travels fast through small town Manitoba. The adrenaline rush from Wednesday has worn off and I'm now in pain. A whole lot of pain. I have a very deep and ugly bruise across my thingh where I hit the monitor on my way to the floor. I have another on my chest in the shape of a microphone. I can barely walk but...the show must go on. We get through our first night without incident. I'm not my usual high energy, rocking all over the stage self but that's OK, I'm injured. We retire back to our rooms and have a few drinks and laughs, mostly at my expense. Friday night and we're ready to hit the stage again. The intro to "Taking Care Of Business" is going swimmingly. I step up to the mic and...croak. Ok lets try this again. I wait a little while the band extends the intro and step back to the mic and...I think someone has replaced my voice box with one of those kids toys that sounds like a dying cow when you turn it over. My voice is gone. It's not just sounding a little hoarse or rough around the edges, it's gone. I leave the stage and run to my room. I'm a bit of an emotional guy and this has never happened to me before. My girlfriend tracks me down and I'm a mess. She goes back out and tells the guys in the band the situation. It is decided that the show must go on. I end up sitting in the restaurant scrawling out song lyrics on the backs of placemats and taping them to our bass players mic stand so that he can sing for this show. He's a hell of a bass player but...not much of a singer. I'm cringing through most of the set while listening to him. Things are not looking good. It turns out that there are members of a couple other bands in attendance that night and they graciously help us out by turning the evening into an impromptu jam session. Again we retire back to the hotel room at the end of the night for more laughs at my expense. Next morning and my voice has not returned. We wait it out for the afternoon just to see if I'll get any better. I try to avoid smoking and talking in an effort to get my voice back. No luck. We talk to the bar manager and it is decided that we will not play this night. In the 17 years that I have been a local rock star, this was the only time the show did not go on. I was devastated. I felt terrible. The guys were very good about the whole situation and I was not kicked out of the band or anything. I stopped feeling bad about the whole thing when it became apparent that I was going to be the butt of all jokes for a long, long time. To this day, almost 7 years later and even though I am in a completely different band, I am still reminded with alarming regularity about my fall from the stage. It seems like thousands of people were there and remember me diving head first into the dancefloor. I'm pretty sure there were maybe only one hundred or so but as the legend grows and becomes more exaggerated, so do the numbers in attendance that night. Who knows maybe I'll be famous some day and the venue will change to some huge stadium, in front of 10's of 1000's of fans. Maybe I will have died and miraculously recovered because...The Show Must Go On.