The Worst Gigs Ever Part 2
The HULLABALOO – Hollywood 1967.
To think a place as famous as the Moulin Rouge would sink to calling itself something like the Hullaballoo. This particular gig wasn’t the worst by a long shot, but it was the defining one for what I always came to call the Hullaballoo Syndrome. The first requirement is always the a great many bands and or acts be present. So many in fact that it dawns on some of them that perhaps there are too many for the time allotted to performances. This always unleashes forces as varied as managers, roadies or groupies on diverse paths to make sure their band makes the cut.
The Hullaballoo (named after a disc jockey named Dave Hull) sought to work around this by staying open all night and closing at 6:00 am, at which time the remaining zombie audience exited into blinking morning. On the evening Kaleidoscope was slated to appear (on the revolving stage) there were enough bands backstage to open the world’s largest Guitar Center.
Some of them were quite good, but majority were stinking awful and with a phalanx of industry types bribed, lied or laid their way to the front of the line all evening. By 2:00am the real bottom-scraping started with an endless performance from
The Mandala – the Canadian Soul Experience wearing kind of leather fetish cut-out things. Just before 5 a.m the Buffalo Springfield were allowed to swing around on the stage to see if anyone was still awake. They weren’t.
It may actually be the worst six hours of music I ever sat through, in fact it would have to be because every time I smelled the Syndrome again my feet knew what to do.
In the following years in many different bands the odor suddenly would waft in from the Troubador, or the Ice House and I wouldn’t be there anymore to see the disappointment on my fellow musicians’ faces.
In the case of Kaleidoscope one of the worst examples I saw of this was when we were allowed onstage last at a benefit concert at the Hollywood Bowl while a dejected Bobby Darin sat in the wings in a blue denim outfit as he had through the whole program waiting for his agent to work his magic. As is always the case with these things, he wasn’t alone.
