Saturday night's gig was a blast

[Undertoad]

For me, it was maybe the most memorable moment in the band. We're ending our second set, telling the crowd we're going to break, and this drunk guy comes up and has a request. This often happens - "just one more song!" - but drunk guy wants the Star Spangled Banner.

Dean, our singer, told him no and jokingly suggested the guy should be yelling out "Freebird!" The bar has a great laugh. Well, we've never played the damn song... nobody actually plays Freebird. But then our keyboard player, just for fun, doodles out the first few bars of it... AND OFF WE GO, like we don't have a choice.

Whoa. Dean tells 'em, "Hey we've never played this before, but, OK!" I'm grinning my big grin. Of course we all know the damn song! And we're playing it 100% perfectly, note for note... truly, never having rehearsed it once.

It seems like a joke that everybody's in on. But then the crowd gets into it. We get three minutes in, and we're near the hottest part of the song, the crowd is all flashing lighters and cell phones... when suddenly... the PA and all the amps go dead!

After a few seconds of confusion it becomes obvious we've blown a circuit, and it was all I could to to lift my bass over my head and shout power outage woohoo!!

And we all laughed. Someone in the crowd said "That's god telling you never to play that song!!!"