PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic WAR STORIES (horror tales from your past music performances)

Back in the late 70's and early 80's pyrotechnics were all the rage. Flashpots.

We used them and in one club in Wrightsville Beach NC, an old movie theater, we set them off at the very beginning of the show. The song was "Ain't living long" as a full tilt rock and roll song. I was on the drum riser when the song started and the lights came on.... rocking with the drummer. He's laughing and rocking with me... pointing with his stick at the audience... I pay it no mind and rock on through verse one of the song.

As we hit the chorus, I jump off the riser to join vocally with harmony, spinning in the air and hit the stage, take a few steps up to my mic.... which was on fire. Yep... burning like a torch. Seems the flash pot was too close and set the windscreen on fire. I blew it out and sang.....


Later on down the road.... in another club, we had planned to end the night with a flash pot but played a request and changed the song... so the pot never got used. Saturday night was a slow starter so we didn't use it on set one. By the second set, the crowd had picked up so we plugged it in and started that set with ...Ain't living long.... It didn't go exactly like expected.... we expected a ball of fire and residual smoke.... what we got instead was the equivalent of a fragmentation grenade tossed at the front of the stage.

The loudest BOOM I have ever heard. And it felt like someone body-slammed me. Then everything looked and sounded really weird.....then I realized the drums weren't playing....so we stopped and looked around... The drummer had fallen or been blown off his stool into the wall and dragged our curtain backdrop down on top of himself.... The stage looked strange because all the PARs were white... the concussion knocked all of the gels out of the cans. Our sound was funny because all of the open back speaker cabinets took the full force and the speakers were all ripped from their baskets. The ceiling paneling was hanging down where the blast knocked it loose.

All in all we lost over 14 speakers to that blast.... one 15" JBL in the bass bins, all the guitar and bass amp speakers in open back cabs, and all of the floor monitors. The blast was picked up by the mics and it ran through the system. We had a limiter on the mains and only lost one speaker in the mains, but the entire monitor system was toast. We also lost one power amp from the back pulse from the speakers being slammed by the pressure wave. The footlocker the flashpot was setting on (down on the floor) was destroyed and the block of wood that the flash pot was screwed to was never found.

As the pot exploded, it was made from 2" steel pump pipe.... it fragmented and pieces went in every direction. Fortunately, no one was hit by any of those fragments except our drummer. A piece entered the kick drum tearing the front head, hit the top of the drum, dinging it like a bullet does to a window, and bounced back down through the beater head and hit him in the leg just below the knee. Cut clear to the bone. So we had to take him to the hospital to get stitches. Needless to say, the show was over and we were almost out of business. We needed a couple thousand dollars for repairs to our gear. The club owner laughed, said don't worry boys, paid us the door take to that point, and asked us to not use pots in his building again.

We were so "gun shy" from that point on that we decided to get rid of the pots from our shows. We had had several other disasters with pyro but nothing like that wakeup call on that Saturday night.

Note: Our band was responsible for getting the use of fire, flames, and explosives banned from the military base in Jacksonville NC. We had a drunk Marine trying to set an unused pot off by throwing matches into it after the show one night. Our drummer told him to stop... several times. He replied that he knew what he was doing since he worked with demolitions every day. Our drummer told him that if that was the case, he should know that he had to "put the fire into the powder to ignite it". Yep... you guessed it. That's exactly what he did..... to photographic flash powder. It sounded like a gun when off and the Marine starts hooping and hollering and jumping around on the floor. I thought he was happy util I heard him yelling ... "I CAN'T SEE, I CAN'T SEE"!!! He was white from his arms to his face from the powder residue and not a hair left on his arms, face, or head. Fortunately, the guy was OK.... they took him to the base hospital and treated him for mild burns and rinsed him off. The flash was what had blinded him temporarily. I got a call the very next morning from the base booking agent..... " Herb... are you trying to kill my Marines?"... NO more flashpots.

The other band partially responsible for the ban was a band doing a Kiss tribute set.... someone in the band did the fire eating thing..... and some of the flammable liquid didn't come out of his mouth properly and he set himself on fire in the club....

Anyway... we had fun....I guess that's what matters and no one put an eye out....