(Flogging Molly)
Kings of the drunken sing-along, Celtic punks Flogging Molly got their name from their early days playing beer-soaked dive Molly Malone’s in LA. Front man Dave King has embarrassed himself plenty on stage, reflecting on a Spinal Tap-level calamity opening for Iron Maiden. No raccoons were harmed in the writing of this chapter.
This one still cracks me up. We were playing a show in Vancouver, at this beautiful venue right on the bay. We had this lighting technician at the time called Ned Sneed, who is an absolute fucking genius. He was having a nap on the couch backstage before the show, and from above him, out of the Styrofoam roofing, a raccoon dropped down right on his chest. Ned screamed and there was a brief scuffle before he was able to trap the raccoon in the bathroom. Bridget [Regan] walked into the dressing room, and there was this huge hole in the ceiling, and Ned was scratched up. She looked around and said, “What the fuck happened here?” We had to wait for animal control to come pick up the little guy.
We all thought it was hilarious, but I don’t think Ned found it as funny. When we finally got on stage, during our second song, one of the guys from the first band was hanging off to the side of the stage, watching us. He accidentally tripped a switch which brought the front-of-house screen down. I think they used it to project football games or something on this massive screen, and it suddenly lowered down on us in the middle of the song. The guy who hit the switch didn’t know how to fix it, so we were just hidden behind this screen. We stopped, laughed, and started playing “Folsom Prison Blues” until it got sorted out.
This next story is just one I thought was really cool. It was in Belgium, and we were doing this big festival with loads of stages. Just as we were about to go on stage, Black Sabbath was just finishing up. We were waiting in the wings, and someone from the band said, “Do we know ‘Paranoid?’’ We all agreed that yeah, we could probably figure it out. We walked out to 40,000 people, Bridget played the opening notes on her fiddle, and we launched into it. We fucking opened with it, and the crowd had no idea what was going on. It was brilliant. It was priceless. I used to know Ozzy pretty well, so I figured I could get away with it. It was just fun and games, and when we broke into our own songs, the crowd went mental.
The most embarrassing show was from when I was in my first band, Fastway, with “Fast” Eddie Clarke of Motorhead. I was a young kid, and we were on tour with Iron Maiden in Canada. We were already feeling the pressure, and a local radio station had asked if they could introduce us. We said sure, and one of their people came on stage dressed up as a huge bear, which was the station’s mascot. One of the female DJs came out, leading the bear by the hand. This was back in the old days when you still used guitar cables, and the woman announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from the UK and Ireland…Fastway!”
Eddie Clarke started out the set, and he ran to the front of the stage just as the DJ and the bear were running off the stage. The bear couldn’t see the guitar cable and tripped, falling flat on his bear face. There were absolute crickets in the audience. We thought the bear was dead, and our guitar tech was scrambling to get the fucking guitar plugged back in, so we could start the show. They had to drag the bear off the stage, and it was such a sorry spectacle. That was the how the show started, and it got worse.
At the time, Iron Maiden was using linoleum stage flooring, which covered the stage in a huge, checkered design. Somebody hadn’t taped it down properly in one spot, and as I was running across the stage, I hit that spot. I was nineteen and not very graceful to begin with, and I tripped over that fucking linoleum and slid across the stage on my face. Suddenly, 20,000 people start laughing at me. They’re all solemn and silent for the fucking bear, but not me.
I picked myself up off the floor and figured I had to do something really spectacular to win the crowd back. I had learned the microphone windmill from my hero Roger Daltrey, so I figured a big, microphone swing would look pretty cool. What I hadn’t learned from Daltrey was that he tapes the microphone and cable together with gaffer tape, so it doesn’t go flying out into the crowd. I started swinging it, and the fucking microphone flew right out at the audience. I’m just standing there holding the cable with no microphone, and we didn’t have an immediate backup.
That was even more humiliating than my stage slide, and I was just dying inside. We limped off stage, and Eddie was fucking furious with me. He was just furious about the whole night, and he was cursing at me, “I’m gonna send you back on the fucking dole where I found ya!” We got on our bus, and he suddenly ran at me. There was a wooden cupholder on the bus, and as I ducked to get out of the way, Eddie whacked his fucking head on it. It knocked him out for about two minutes.
That was our dynamic, as I was a young kid, and he was an experienced musician from his days in Motorhead. Our drummer was Jerry Shirley from Humble Pie, who had tons of experience. I learned so much from them, and one time I made the mistake of putting the Spinal Tap movie on in the bus. I said, “I’ve got this great video—you guys have to watch it.” They did not think the movie was funny at all. They turned it off, and couldn’t look at it. I’m breaking my shit laughing, and they were cringing in pain. It was too real for them, and I don’t think they understood that it was a mockumentary. What’s great about that film is that it’s true. Even to this day, I still get lost backstage occasionally!
Now we have a guy who comes and gets us when it’s time to play, but in the early days, it was completely possible to get lost backstage in big venues. One time we were touring with AC/DC, and this happened during our first show with them. We were at a sushi restaurant the night before the show, and Fast Eddie got a little tipsy. He went to slam his hand on the table, and he accidentally smashed his hand right into a glass sake bowl. He was a bloody mess, and the next day he was in serious pain. The roadies had to gaffer tape the pick to his hand.
He thought he had ruined the tour, but you never heard a word of complaint out of Eddie that whole tour. He was such a great rock ’n’ roll character, and I miss him dearly. We had a lot of good times, and it was a terrible shock when he passed. I didn’t even know he was sick.