Pop Evil Recall Their Worst Show Ever
What do they say about best-laid plans? It's hard to go through life without a few regrets and for our video series Do Over, rock bands share the moments they'd like to take back... or do-over. For Pop Evil, it's a show that they decided to never speak of again ... until we asked them about their biggest regret.
Frontman Leigh Kakaty calls it the "fly date from hell." A "fly date" is a one-off show that comes when the band isn't on tour. Since they don't have their road crew available, they do the gig and try to get by with a skeleton crew.
"You try to get a tour manager who can tour manage and do sound and do merch," he says. "It's impossible." But nonetheless, the band set off with the most minimal crew they could get away with. "We had one guitar tech for 20 something guitars," recalls the singer.
Everything that could go wrong did. Troubles getting the guitar sound to work forced the band to cut two songs from a six-song set, but that was just the start. First off, the in-ear monitors weren't functioning. "I literally can't hear anything vocally, so I gotta guess. Who knows how I sounded that night," says Kakaty, while Fuelling recalls, "All of a sudden I start hearing the drums swaying off the click track tempo." By the time all was said and done, the band only played three songs of their set.
Fuelling says, "I remember going up to our front of house guy as soon as the set ended and I'm like, 'Please tell me that sounded better up front than it did up here.' He said, 'It sounded like something.'"
"All that time and effort for three songs, it's one I'd definitely like to get back," says Kakaty.
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