The worst concert I’ve ever been to in my life was my own.
Sophomore year of high school. A talent show was happening at my school, which was a big deal. I’d been obsessed with guitar since I was twelve. It was everything. My identity was already built around this and I was sure I was going to become a great songwriter. I’d spent countless hours in my room writing tunes that were terrible, but that’s what I wanted to do.
It would be a stretch to call us a band, but my friend Miles and Bobby were up for playing in the show with me. Miles on drums and Bobby on bass. The song I had chosen for us was by a band called Big Head Todd and the Monsters. It had maybe three or four chords, pretty straightforward. An intro, a verse, a chorus. Nothing overly complicated.
The problem is that when the three of us practiced together in Miles’ basement, we never actually played the whole song from start to finish. We’d play the intro, then jump to the chorus, then mess around with the verse separately. We understood it. We all knew our parts. In our heads, we could see how it all fit together.
We just never actually did it. At the time, I didn’t think that was a problem.
When the talent show came around, I was nervous. We set up our gear on a stage in a gazebo in front of 200 people, mostly from school. We started playing. The intro went okay, though I was self-conscious about how I looked and overly concerned about my stage presence. Thinking about looking cool is basically a guarantee that you won’t look cool, so that didn’t help.
Then we got to the first verse, and I blanked on the lyrics. Everything just disappeared so I mumbled my way through it. Later, when I watched my favorite musicians perform, I realized they weren’t thinking when they played. They’d played their songs so many times that their hands knew where to go, their bodies knew how to go with the beat. The thinking part was over.
But that was only the warm up for the real disaster.
None of us had played in front of an audience before, so we didn’t know things that seasoned players know. When you see a band play live, maybe you have noticed that drummers always put a rug under their drum kit. When you’re beating on drums, they slide across the floor. The rug keeps everything in place. We were playing on a wooden stage made of wooden risers. A very smooth surface.
During the song, Miles’ snare drum started inching away from him after each hit. Not a huge problem at first, he just extended his arm a little further. But eventually it got out of his reach. Miles kept straining to hit it as it moved, doing his damndest not to torpedo our performance. The risers were arranged in a grid, and there are little gaps where the risers butted up to one another. When the snare drum inched its way to one of those gaps, the stand caught the edge, and the drum tipped over.
While I’m trying to avoid (further) butchering the lyrics, I noticed that I can’t hear the snare drum anymore. Why is Miles not hitting the downbeat? That question gets answered when it rolls right in front of me, careened off the stage, and settles on the ground like a coin coming to rest.
My eyes flashed wide. Yes, it’s true that I didn’t know the drums needed to be situated on top of the rug. But I damn sure knew the snare drum isn’t supposed to be a moving target. Dying inside, I limped my way through the rest. Miles scurried after the drum, scooped it up off the ground, and set it back on the stand. A couple of strums later, to my relief, I hear the downbeat reestablish itself in the song.
At the beginning of the performance, my mind blanked on the lyrics. But the snare debacle caused a full blackout. Embarrassment is flooding my entire being, overwriting my consciousness such that it’s wiping my nervous system. So much so that I literally have no recollection of what happened at the end of the tune. I came to minutes later. Our gear was gone from the stage—we must have removed it and set it off to the side.
My memories start to come back when I saw my friend chatting in a circle. I sidle up to them and enter the circle. No eye contact. No one said anything. That silence was brutal.
Sixteen years old, one rogue snare drum, two hundred people watching. It was brutal. But it hardwired something into me that day: I’d confused preparation with understanding. We’d practiced the parts. I’d memorized the lyrics. In my head, I could see the whole thing working. But none of that told me what would actually happen when I got on stage—how my mind would blank, how the drums would slide, how the silence afterward would feel.
You can’t think your way to that knowledge. You have to be there, failing, to uncover the things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
Thanks to readers of early drafts: Cansafis Foote, Ved Shankar, Domink Gmeiner