We Asked Bands About Their Worst Festival Experiences

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada

On paper, the concept of an outdoor music festival seems like Xanadu. Floating freely through a field with friends while dozens of your favorite bands play a series of stages sounds like an ideal way for any music fan to spend the day. Thing is, the dream gets shattered once you get through the gates and realize you've basically been corralled into a Dante's Inferno of human misery, and you actually paid to get yourself inside. Standing under a beating sun for 12 hours isn't all it's cracked up to be, the food cart racket is built to bleed you dry, and there's nothing more annoying that having to navigate yourself from the front of the stage to a rancid port-o-john a half-mile away through a gauntlet of half-passed out zombies in flower crowns.

You'd think playing on-stage would come with a few perks, but it generally doesn't get much better if you're a performer—a fact that apparently took Twisted Sister's crew by surprise at Amnesia Rockfest in Montebello, QC earlier this summer. With the busy summer festival season across Canada in full swing, VICE spoke to a handful of event veterans about the stage hazards, backstage beefs, and brutally annoying audiences that come with festival life.

I've played a lot of festivals overseas. My most favorite memory that was kind of a nightmare, but more a crazy hilarious, random experience, was playing a festival called the Inter City Music Festival in Inner Mongolia. This was sometime in August, and we [the Blue Violets] were driving there from Beijing. The drive was supposed to take five hours or so, we get on the highway and we're in this giant van. Soon, we realize it's been, like, seven or eight hours. Lots of time has gone by, and we're in a traffic jam. It takes us probably nine hours to get to the actual festival site. We later found out that we were in one of the biggest traffic jams in history, it was called the China National Highway 110 traffic jam. It began on August 14, 2010 and lasted quite some time. We ended up getting stuck in a little part of history, but we show up and it's literally in the most beautiful field I've ever seen.

We were scheduled to play with a lot of Chinese bands that we didn't know. Everything was going smoothly in the daytime, but it started to rain so hard that the stage itself was at risk of blowing up, because there was no cover over top of the equipment. I had to have a really frank conversation, because I was tour managing the Blue Violets at the time. Myself and the tour manager for the Killing Joke had to sit down and say, "Do we do this? Do we put everyone's lives at risk when the stage is not covered and it's raining, and there are electrical wires everywhere?"

They covered the stage in the end, and it was all OK, but it pushed back the time by five hours. We played to a crowd of thirty people at two in the morning.

I would say the biggest nightmare for any festival is the lack of washrooms behind your stage. I know this sounds stupid, but you want to go pee before you go onstage so you don't have to go in the middle of your set. Sometimes you have to walk three miles to get to an area where you can actually go to the bathroom! It's been a problem.

Recently, we were in Germany for a festival where there wasn't really a backstage area to speak of. Behind the stage was this field, and it's open to the public. There's no specific area for us to warm up in… you couldn't just find a tree. We all basically ended up peeing in the middle of a bunch of people the whole day. I'm sure everybody snuck a peek. There was no chance we could be hidden. It was this big pool of urine behind the stage.

Hot Hot Heat was playing Reading Festival in the UK for the third time, and after our set, Paul [Hawley, drummer] and I were hanging out backstage in the media tent with our ex-publicist-turned-good friend, Mike. He was teasing Paul about the airport-purchased spy novel he was reading, so Paul pretended to beat on him, as one does in a clearly jovial manner. Unfortunately, the fame-hungry, faux-punk boy band Towers of London saw this as an opportunity to pick a fight while the journalists were around; I'm assuming to help perpetuate their "bad boy" status in the NME.

Before I knew it they had jumped Paul, given him a brutal black eye, and run off. I was seething. Considering all the times Paul had saved me from getting my ass kicked, I ran straight to their green room. I'm not sure what I was planning on doing, but when they weren't there. I freaked out on their rider, squeezing condiments on the walls, and smashing all their many bottles of orange juice and milk into a pool that filled the floor (their booze was gone and I'm not sure why they had so much milk). That didn't seem significant enough though, so I ran to their tour bus with a long knife I took from their backstage, and attempted to slash one of their tires.

Unfortunately/fortunately the Hot Hot Heat bus driver ran at me screaming and pulling me off the tire violently, explaining that I would only screw over their bus driver, not the band, and if I continued, he would quit on us. He had a good point and I let it rest. We ended up getting interviewed by the NME about our little rift, but it never went to print, and Towers of London singer dude went on to play an annoying twerp on reality TV.

[Sloan] played an outdoor show in Whistler where it was some snowboarding event. People are whipping snowballs at the competitors as they're going over jumps and doing flips. I couldn't believe it! There was also a judge's booth on the scaffolding surrounded by tarp. Everybody in the audience was a shitty kid, just whipping snowballs at the competitors and the judges.

The sun is going down and we're just about to start, and it's like, "we're dead!" Of course, they whipped snowballs at us too. Two songs in, I get a whole bunch of girls onstage, essentially to form a human shield. I figured people would stop, but they did not. At one point, this girl turns around and she's got this giant welt on her face. "Show's over!" We shut it down.

It was a good payday for us, we only played four songs! I think we dragged our asses out again and played a couple more until someone gave us the thumbs up. "We're out of here! Fuck you, Whistler!"

Read More: I'm Not Even 30 and I'm Too Old for Music Festivals

The ones I remember, they have to do with the weather conditions. One thing with festivals is that people try to make them work no matter what is going on weather-wise. Another thing people like to do in Canada is have festivals in the winter, which always seems like a good idea, for some reason. There was one where we playing in [Toronto's] Nathan Phillips Square—it was the end of January, probably minus 30. There was a bunch of snow that was piling up on the tent roof, over the stage, and a huge pile of it just dropped on the turntable. It ruined not just the song, but the turntable. I kept rapping with no beat. I forget what song it was, but I had to break into a super long a capella. It became a spoken word show.

I remember another festival I played in Kelowna called Keloha. It was a beautiful day, but the heat was warping the records. Fortunately, Max Kerman from the Arkells was there side-stage, just hanging out. He came up and grabbed a guitar, and I think we did a cover of "Ms. Jackson" by Outkast. He bailed us out that time.

Al-P: I can't recall what the festival was, but it was in London England at Hyde Park. We're playing during the day, and because there are lot of rich houses around there, they had a noise limitation in effect. They were running the sound system super quiet; it was embarrassingly quiet. We're used to being in loud nightclubs and our ears are not as sensitive as others, but when you see the crowd is unhappy about the volume, you know it's pretty low.

So we're like, 'What the fuck are we going to do?' What we ended up doing was that we would slowly bring down the master output on our mixer, so the front of house engineer would slowly bring it up on his end—he had a meter that he was following to keep it at a certain level. We'd bring it down leading up to a break, and when the kick drum would come back in I'd go back up to the full level, and the sound system would erupt. The crowd would go crazy! Then the engineer would panic to bring it down again. We got away with doing this two or three times, but on the fourth time we got in trouble for it.

Jesse Keeler: The crowd figured out that it was the sound guy, not us, and they're yelling. Every time the music went down the crowd would boo. At one point, he's on the side of the stage and we made frowny faces and pointed at him. The whole crowd got angry and was throwing bottles and cans at him. He was an older guy and he started to cry. I felt bad for him. He was, like, "I'm so sorry…I love music!" That's a nightmare, to put him in a bad situation with an angry crowd. But you should probably figure out your noise clearances before you have a festival in the middle of a park.

We were playing some whatever festival in the States this summer. I mean, it was like chill, fun, free festival. I was all excited to go drinking with the girl from Bully [Alicia Bognanno]; we were going to go hang. I went to the van to go grab my backpack after I had played my set. The van was tilted on this big slant and I slammed the sliding door on my two fingers, which I use to play guitar and also have sex with people. I just totally crushed/annihilated my fingers and the band wasn't around.

I was just lying down on the ground screaming really loud. "Nooooo!" My fingers were not supposed to go that way. I pulled back open the door and was screaming. I was by myself and just laid down on the ground, super dramatic and totally intoxicated. I finally heard Liz [Ball, guitarist], like, "What?" I was like, "I need you, Dilly Dally!" She was pissed off, like, "chill out man." I came out crying from behind the van, "They went in ways they weren't supposed to go," and held up my two sexy fingers.

Liz was like, "Yo girl, I know in the back tent there's this huge bin full of ice, come with me.' I went to the back room and there's this big bin of ice and some annoying people. She said, "keep them in there, it'll help the swelling. I'm going to find you a joint." She had to ask 20 different people at this festival in Cincinnati before she could find papers, which is quite telling of the festival as well.

She finally found some papers, rolled up a big old doobie, and got me ripped.

The place we stayed that night, this lady made this amazing potion out of wax and herbal oils to help my fingers completely heal. Now everything's OK.

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