Worst Concert Performance Ever

After reading a post by Melinda of Finding the Humor, she got me thinking about my childhood. Then I started thinking about when I was a teenager. And then, because Melinda and I share a common thread of liking old school hip hop (I found this out while commenting on a post of hers), I started thinking about some of the awesome concerts I went to when I was in my teens and early twenties. Like Digable Planets and Beastie Boys and Pharcyde, to name a few. And that then made me think of the worst concert performance I ever saw.

It was the summer of 1994, and I was 18. For my best friend's birthday, I bought her and I concert tickets to Reggae on the Island, a weekend festival in Ladysmith, BC (on Vancouver Island). I had gone the year before and had such a good time, that I really wanted to go again. So we packed up our camping gear, took many buses and the ferry over, and camped all weekend long. We had a blast, there were lots of great performances and we basically danced the whole time. But one of, if not the main reason we went, was because we both loved Maestro Fresh Wes. He was one of the headliners to perform and we were super excited. We loved him so much, we'd listen to his album, "Symphony in Effect", all the time. We even made up our own lyrics to one of the songs, "Just Swingin" (yes, we were silly teenage girls, doing silly teenage girl things, always).

Anyways, when Maestro came on, we were right up front, so we could see everything. And like I said, we were super excited. Until he started singing. He was doing "Let Your Backbone Slide", except he was lip-syncing! He had the exact song from the album playing and he was jumping and dancing around pretending he was singing it live, but it was so totally and utterly obvious that he wasn't. And then the lamest thing ever happened (even lamer than the lip-syncing, if you can believe it), he stopped singing (or pretending to sing) halfway through, and the song kept going for another thirty seconds. He stood there until someone turned it off and then he said something ridiculous like, sorry I have to go. And then him and his buddy hopped off stage and didn't even leave! They just stood around chatting to people in front of the stage for like ten minutes! So the crowd that payed good money to see him, got half a lip-synced song. Worst performance ever!

I got a little vindication for this a few years ago. My hubby has a good friend who is actually friends with Maestro (small world, I know) and they were hanging out with him, and a bunch of people, at Lucy Mae Brown (an old lounge/restaurant in Van), one night. To make a long story short, I guess he (my hubby's friend) said something to Maestro about that old concert. I don't know what was said, or what his response was, I just know that someone gave him a hard time about it for me. It's a small justice, but I'll take it.

I decided to dig up some old pics from that concert and scan them. The quality isn't that great, but, oh well. You can even see in the back ground that there is no one playing any instruments and there's no DJ or anything.

I don't know why he's carrying a towel around, it's not like he worked up a sweat performing half a song. Maybe he has an excessive sweating problem or something. Actually, maybe that's why he had to go.

And here's one of the crowd, just for fun. We really did have a great time though, regardless of the Maestro debacle. All the other performers were great, and we met lots of fun people on the trip too.

I'll leave you with a little question, what is the worst concert performance you've ever seen? I'd love to read some great stories.