Kevin Gilbert, Pasadena, CA:
I played with this band called Giraffe and there were a lot of sequences playing, intricate things that would go on from the keyboard section that were run from a sequencer. The drummer played to a click. And there was one song in particular that was the signature piece of our set, called “This One [sic] Night,” that ended with this gigantic drum jam, where everybody in the band was wailing on a tom-tom or a bass drum or a shaker or something. And the whole thing was held together by the shaker click, which came from the sequencer. We made a big production out of this, we would pull drums out from the side and set them up and we’d go into this drum jam and it was this big moment in our set. Everybody waited for it.
The thing immediately prior to this drum jam was a short three-bar somber piano and vocal thing, the last note of which was the downbeat for this enormous drum jam. So we were playing a gig in San Jose and it was sold out, there were like three hundred people there. There were some industry folks, A & R guys there - it was the important gig for band. I’m doing the last four chords before the drum jam and I looked to the side of the stage where the keyboardist had plugged in the entire keyboard stack. The electrical output jack was halfway up the wall, about eye level. And his six output junction box which had six cables in it, was hanging off of the outlet. And as I played the last chord I watched it fall out of the wall, and all of the lights on the keyboard stack went black. And the keyboardist, the drummer and the bass player, all of whom were receiving the click looked up wide-eyed in horror and nobody played the drum downbeat except me. So now I’m sitting there on stage in front of three hundred people wailing on this tom-tom alone. There’s no support. And I just kind of went a little crazy from stress and I kicked the tom-tom off of the stage, threw it into the air then started jumping on it and it busted into little pieces. I was so mad that this thing had fallen out of the wall. And the audience started yelling, ‘Kill that drum!’ It was totally ludicrous. But we did get a standing ovation for that.