What's the Weirdest Thing Anyone Has Ever Thrown at You While You Were Playing Music?

Unknown source, 2011
by John Flansburgh

Well we've had the range of underwear and bras, but it's been relatively okay. Did you ever hear about the Foo Fighters Mentos thing? It's so fucked up. That video that had a parody of the Mentos ad in it, well people would come to their shows and chuck Mentos at the stage. Nobody wants to have stuff thrown at them. It's the worst feeling. I once had somebody who was very, very high--I met this person years later and they explained that they were high on psychedelic drugs--and they had some of this stuff that Nickelodeon had called Gak. They weren't high on Gak; it's this sort of toy gloopy stuff that kids would pull apart, kind of like a high tech version of Play-Doh. He had this thing that was basically the size of a baseball of Gak, and he was just swinging his arm around and let go. It flew straight across the audience and hit me in the face. Like he was a major league pitcher going for me. It was so unexpected, like getting hit by a rock in the face. I was singing a song and all of a sudden I've got this near knock-out blow from this Gak. It was extremely unpleasant. And man, it just pissed me off so much. It's always a mistake to think of the audience as one thing, it's a ton of individuals having their own experience. The person in the back not clapping might actually be the most interested and intrigued person. But it did sort of really cheese me off. It's also sort of embarrassing, like I just got knocked in the face by a hardball of Gak.

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