This one was not my doing (thank God!!!), but my father-in-law. The whole family went to a session at a pub in Chicago a few months back. My in-laws are from there, and they love the music, so we go to as many as we can when my wife and I are in town.
Anyway, my FL who is almost 100% blind wanted to sit close so he could see what he could see. No worries, we did, and were having a great time. Unfortunately, the server brought our 4th or 5th round of beer, and my poor FL reached for his . . . but missed.
The mandolin player’s case AND mandolin were directly below the table.
The entire pint emptied nicely into the F holes. Needless to say, my FL felt like scheisse. What was even more jaw dropping was how cool the Mando player was about the whole thing. He didn’t even flinch - and once he realized my FL was blind he sat down at the table, talked with him about this and that for 20-30 minutes, and then bought US a round of beer (like we needed anymore)!!! Amazingly nice guy!!!
My most embarrassing session moment unil now happened just two weeks ago. I was asked to start off a set on the flute. I decided to play a Bmin reel set I used to practise for some weeks and thought I could play it perfectly well (it worked, at least at home!). So I played the first A part, repeated it, and then stopped. I had forgotten the B part. The guitarist played a few more measures, and then there was silence…
I had a similar experience last week. I played a jig that the others in the session didn’t know, so I figured the next jig in the set would be a popular one that everyone would join in on. The name came into my head as I was playing the first jig, but when it came time time start the second, i couldn’t remember how it began! I twiddled off a few miserable notes and stopped. Everyone knew what had happened and we all laughed about. I did feel pretty silly, though.
I haven’t had any personally embarrassing moments but I did witness a good friend have one. I was at a late night/early morning session at a summer school in Tasmania, Australia two years ago. The session was winding down, a fantastic flute player there named Brian Owens was just starting off into a piece he had written himself for a project he was working on. Everyone went really quiet as Brian played this beautiful piece, my friend ‘John’ oblivious to what was going on started twanging away at his mandolin, retuning it. We all sat silently getting more and more embarrassed as ‘John’ carried on. It got to the point where another friend of mine got up and walked over to where ‘John’ was and tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he would “Stop doing that!”. If the floor had opened up 6 feet wide my friend "John ’ would have dived in there! He was scarlet red in the face as everyone else sat and tried not to look towards him. We all have a good laugh about it now, but at the time it most certainly was not funny!
I do have a story to tell, not so much embarrassing, but very inconvenient. I played in a ‘Bush’ band in Australia and we were at a gig in Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. It was a very hot day (40 degrees centigrade) and by the time we started playing in the evening it was blowing a hot Northerly wind. There were 8 of us in the band and all our instrument stands had to be taped down to the stage which was like a boxing ring and about the same height off the ground.
Everything was going fine until halfway through a set where we had the crowd up and doing a set bush dance, and then the wind turned around in about thirty seconds and stormed in from the South. Well, pandemonium reigned for about two minutes until the wind settled down to a strong gust. Of course we had to stop playing as we were getting sand blasted by the wind, the crowd legged it for the marqees and when the wind eventually settled all the mic stands and instrument stands had blown over in the oposite direction to the way they were facing before. I had a brand new guitar that had a chunk taken out of the neck, the keyboard player expensive Yamaha blew over and would not work afterwards, and two of the band members lost their prized Akubra’s (hats).
We had to abandon the gig and move in to one of the big marqees were we played acoustic all night and had a great time with people in the crowd joining in and basically having a big session instead.
To top it all off, the next morning the big Gum trees were peppered with these bright blue and flouro green decorations. I figured out a little later that they were one man tents, you know the little ones that have a flexible rod inside them that you just toss out onto the ground and watch the tent spring into shape? Well, there is no need to peg them down (there is now!) with them being so small, so the tents that had nothing of any weight in them where picked up and flung into the trees by the sudden change in the wind direction.
Unforgettable!!
At a retreat I was at recently, during one of the sessions, we were playing some polkas that I didn’t know, so I was playing my cheap pakistani bodhran, and for some reason, polkas and my bodhran playing don’t mix well. I can do slip jigs fine, but polkas… anywho, somehow I started doing more of an ensemble drumming kind of beat that wasn’t sticking to the accents of 2/4 but more of a reel beat. A fiddle/bodhran playing friend of mine, who was also playing bodhran, leaned toward me and reminded me about the accents and such. I went back to the (boring to me) “1,2,1,2” beat, and was so embarrassed… Although, I’m sure this isn’t much of anything but I haven’t played in too many sessions quite yet. I’m sure I’ll have many worse things happen to me in sessions in the future.
Friel’s Kitchen Miltown Malbay: a long haired bearded little guy is chatting me up during Willy Clancy week - telling about a tour in the US, playing at a football stadium in Boston. “You play football ?” - “No accordeon”. It was Jackie Daly.
Hawkes ebonite Pratten flute - wonderful instrument, but not quite at 440. Tuning slide all the way in, it’s almost an Eb - almost mind you. Eagerly joining an Eb session in Ireland. Almost chased out the door after first tune. Almost.
Knocking over Cathy Jordan’s beer in Bunbeg - she was NOT amused.
The local piper letting me know: I think we have played enough jigs for the night …
this one was not at a session, but i think it qualifies - a great friend of mine and i were backstage after playing with the chieftains a couple of years ago, when Matt Molloy and my friend who shall go nameless were trading flutes back and forth while walking around… in the passing of flutes, somehow Matt’s flute was dropped and hit on end on the floor… bouncing back up to be caught… was not damaged but it freaked us all out there for a little while.
quite a long time ago, I was invited to play the encore with the Chieftains at the local concert. Foxhunters in G and A they leisurely suggested. The “A” almost sent me into convulsions right there and then .. but: yes, I said, I could do that … so the concert was on it’s way and I was pacing the backstage area .. nervously … very nervously .. because they seemed to play much sharper than my flute (no tuning slide) was able to handle. So I wandered as far away as possible, discovered a loading ramp and tried blowing that flute in tune .. thinking, warming it up would sharpen it and avoid desaster. I toot that thing until an angry stagemanager comes up and ssshh-es me ! I had just trumpeted my out of tune A into a sensitive, quiet piece of harpmusic (Derek Bell was still with them). I was ready to jump into the garbage heap nearby and disappear into oblivion forever … … And I never got to play the encore (which was most definitely a good thing) because the concert went on for so long that the venue pulled the plug on them (the Chieftains)..
That scenario sounds very familiar!! very sharp… I was told right before the show started that they were playing somewhere around A443… YIKES! I spent the first half of the show backstage trying to tune my pipes up to pitch… got 4 out of 7 reeds somewhere close…
Then to make it worse, when we were called out, I was placed right up front, and one of the Canadian brothers pulls up his mic for me… thought they would start and we would join in… but NO… Paddy calls out something like “off we go lads, take it…” and Kevin starts banging away on the bodhran, so we played alone (my friend and me) for the first pass through a 3 part reel… a bit disconcerting since my university president and dean were in the audience… but at least I did not drop Matt’s flute!!
