Special Edition
Take a Bow: Performers Behaving Badly
From duelling sopranos to airborne television sets: three centuries of proof that no human character survives nightly applause.
The composers got their gallery; the performers have been waiting in the wings, and they do not wait graciously. The composer, at least, misbehaved on his own clock — alone with the manuscript, answerable eventually. The performer misbehaves on a schedule, in front of witnesses, and the witnesses cheer. That is the laboratory condition this gallery documents: applause is the only solvent known to dissolve character in real time, and the touring life administers it nightly, in controlled doses, for decades. What follows are twelve case studies, arranged chronologically from the candle-lit opera house to the amphitheater riot, so the reader may confirm that the instrument changes, the amplification changes, the hotel improves — and the man on the receiving end of the ovation remains precisely, reliably the same.
01
The Night the Opera Fought Back — Francesca Cuzzoni & Faustina Bordoni, 1727
London's Royal Academy of Music had engaged the two greatest sopranos in Europe simultaneously, on identical salaries, which is the sort of decision made by men who have never owned two roosters. At a performance of Bononcini's Astianatte on June 6, 1727 — with the Princess of Wales in attendance — the rival factions hissed, catcalled, and brawled until the opera collapsed, and the satirists of the day gleefully reported the two prima donnas trading blows onstage. Whether Cuzzoni and Faustina themselves threw hands hardly matters; London believed it instantly, which tells you what London had observed of them. Handel, who managed both, had already resolved a Cuzzoni tantrum by seizing her at a window and announcing: 'Madam, I know you are a she-devil, but I will have you know that I am Beelzebub.'
The verdict: The eighteenth century invented the diva and, within a season, the diva riot. Every genre since has merely changed the costumes.
Source: Wikipedia
02
Payable in Gold, Before the Overture — Adelina Patti, 1880s
The most celebrated soprano of the nineteenth century sang for $5,000 a night — roughly a working man's decade — payable in gold, in advance, before she would consent to make a sound. Her contracts excused her from rehearsals entirely, capped the size of her name's typeface relative to everyone else's, and left her free to cancel with a doctor's note from a doctor she employed. She toured America in a private railcar appointed like a Habsburg drawing room and retired to a Welsh castle, Craig-y-Nos, where she built herself a private theater so the applause would not have to stop merely because the public had gone home.
The verdict: The folly here is not Patti's — she named a price and the world queued to pay it. Genius sets the terms; the mark signs.
Source: Wikipedia
03
The Originator of Jazz, by His Own Sworn Testimony — Jelly Roll Morton, 1900s–1938
Ferdinand 'Jelly Roll' Morton was a genuinely great pianist and composer, an architect of early jazz — and the holder of the most audacious business card in American music, which identified him as the 'Originator of Jazz.' He wore a half-carat diamond set into a front tooth, so that his smile carried collateral, and when a 1938 radio program dared call W. C. Handy the father of the music, Morton fired off a letter to Ripley's Believe It or Not and the press announcing that jazz had in fact been invented by himself, personally, in 1902. He then sat for the Library of Congress and dictated his own legend for posterity, accompanying himself, magnificently, at the piano.
The verdict: Arrogance is usually a tax on talent. Morton is the rare case where the auditors are still arguing about whether he underpaid.
Source: Wikipedia
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04
The Maestro Breaks His Own Instruments — Arturo Toscanini, 1920s–1950s
The greatest conductor of his age enforced fidelity to the score with the temperament of a man defusing a bomb badly. He snapped batons across his knee, tore scores in half, hurled them at principal players, ground his own pocket watches underfoot in rage — colleagues learned to give him cheap ones — and delivered rehearsal tirades of operatic architecture, some of which survive on the NBC Symphony's recordings, where posterity may hear civilization's foremost servant of Beethoven screaming himself hoarse over an eighth note. The musicians endured it because he was right about the eighth note. He was always right about the eighth note.
The verdict: Toscanini raged at orchestras for betraying the composer's text — the one form of infidelity in Italian musical life he refused to tolerate.
Source: Wikipedia
05
The Concert That Was Still Being Written During the Concert — Charles Mingus, Town Hall, 1962
Mingus booked Town Hall for October 1962 to premiere his magnum opus, with one complication: he had not finished writing it. The audience arrived to find copyists seated onstage, inking parts while the orchestra sight-read whatever pages were dry. Mingus stopped pieces mid-bar, rehearsed in front of the paying public, apologized from the stage, and suggested that anyone dissatisfied could collect a refund — an offer accepted in volume. The stagehands, at the union hour, began closing the curtain during the finale. At his club dates he routinely halted the band to lecture the audience on their talking, their drinking, and their moral shortcomings, occupationally certain that the room had come to hear the lecture.
The verdict: Genius plans poorly because it believes deadlines are for the people who need them. The copyists onstage were the honest program notes.
Source: Wikipedia
06
Twenty-One Candles and a Lifetime Ban — Keith Moon, 1967–1978
The Who's drummer celebrated his twenty-first birthday at a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan, with a cake fight that became a fire-extinguisher barrage that became, by his own telling, a Lincoln Continental at rest on the bottom of the swimming pool. Biographers have never confirmed the car, and the correction misses the point: Moon had made himself the kind of man of whom the story was instantly believed, and he spent the rest of his short life defending the reputation — flushing cherry bombs down hotel toilets across three continents, earning a lifetime ban from the Holiday Inn chain, and budgeting for demolition as a fixed touring cost, like strings.
The verdict: Most men embellish their legends. Moon reversed the procedure: he told the legend first, then lived down to it, invoice by invoice.
Source: Wikipedia
07
The King Shoots the Messenger — Elvis Presley, c. 1968–1977
Elvis watched television the way other men played skeet. When a program displeased him — and the singer Robert Goulet displeased him with mysterious reliability — he would draw one of the handguns he kept about him for the purpose and execute the set where it stood. Staff kept replacement televisions in inventory at Graceland the way ordinary households keep light bulbs, and a bullet-scarred set survives in the trophy building to this day, preserved like regalia. It must be said in his defense that he shot only televisions he owned, which places him, within this gallery, among the moderates.
The verdict: A man who can have anything eventually discovers the one purchase that still satisfies: the argument no one can answer back.
Source: Wikipedia
08
Motorcycles Prefer the Ninth Floor — John Bonham and Led Zeppelin at the 'Riot House,' 1970s
Led Zeppelin rented entire floors of the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset — rechristened the 'Riot House' in their honor — and treated the corridors as infrastructure: motorcycles were ridden past the room-service trays, televisions departed by window with such regularity that the band budgeted for them at checkout, and John Bonham served as the operation's chief engineer. The establishment's tolerance was itself part of the legend: one hotel manager, presented with compensation for a defenestrated television, is said to have asked whether he might throw one himself — and the band, honoring a fellow professional, paid for his.
The verdict: Every institution meets rock and roll and faces the same choice: enforce the rules or sell them. The Hyatt sold, and made history's margin.
Source: Wikipedia
09
The Tapes the Band Made of the Boss — Buddy Rich, early 1980s
The greatest technical drummer who ever lived ran his big band from the front seat of a tour bus like a man perpetually discovering treason. His sidemen, wearied of the tirades, began secretly taping them — and the recordings became samizdat among working musicians: Rich, at full roar, threatening mass firings, disparaging beards, demanding to know what kind of house band he had been saddled with, all in cadenzas of invective as rhythmically flawless as his drumming. The tapes circulated for decades; writers for Seinfeld, devoted admirers, smuggled his choicest phrasings into scripts, giving Rich a posthumous sitcom career in anonymous quotation.
The verdict: He demanded perfection and delivered it nightly at the kit; the bus was where the difference between genius and grace got recorded.
Source: Wikipedia
10
Article 126: No Brown M&M's — Van Halen, 1982
Buried in the technical rider of Van Halen's touring contract, amid specifications for stage weight-loads and amperage, sat Article 126: a bowl of M&M's backstage, brown ones removed, absolutely. For decades it stood as the Rosetta Stone of rock-star derangement. Then David Lee Roth confessed the truth in his memoir: the clause was a canary. A promoter who had read carefully enough to sort the candy had read carefully enough to bolt the stage down; brown M&M's in the bowl meant line-check everything, because somewhere a girder was signed off by a man who skimmed. When Roth found the offending candy in Pueblo, Colorado, he trashed the dressing room on principle — a few thousand dollars of theater that the press inflated to $85,000 by crediting him with the arena floor, which had in fact buckled under the band's equipment. Exactly as the clause predicted.
The verdict: The maddest demand in rock and roll turns out to be the only rational document in the filing cabinet. The industry believed the diva story anyway — it preferred it.
Source: Wikipedia
11
One Camcorder Versus Twenty Thousand People — Axl Rose, Riverport Amphitheater, 1991
Mid-song at a sold-out Guns N' Roses show outside St. Louis, Axl Rose spotted a fan filming with a camcorder, concluded that security was moving with insufficient urgency, and resolved the matter personally — diving from the stage, striking the offender, and then, upon being hauled back up, announcing 'thanks to the lame-ass security, I'm going home' and leaving. Twenty thousand people, relieved of their evening by one videotape, dismantled the amphitheater in response. Rose was later convicted of misdemeanor assault and property damage; the tour rolled on. The camcorder footage, for the record, survived.
The verdict: The performer's arithmetic in its purest form: one unauthorized camera outweighed twenty thousand paying witnesses, because only one of them was pointed at him.
Source: Wikipedia
12
A Man with a Fork in a World of Soup — Noel & Liam Gallagher, 1994–2009
Oasis was demolished by no scandal, no lawsuit, no market force — only by the fact that its two essential members were brothers. The feud's collected works span fifteen years: Liam arrested with half the band in Amsterdam before their first foreign gig had even begun, while Noel, sober on the ferry, carried on alone; Liam withdrawing from MTV Unplugged with a sore throat, then heckling Noel's performance from the balcony, beer in hand, throat evidently restored; and the terminal engagement in a Paris dressing room in 2009 — which, by Noel's account, involved a thrown plum and a guitar swung like an axe, an account Liam has disputed — after which Noel resigned from the band and the brothers spent the next decade communicating exclusively through headlines. Noel's assessment of Liam stands as the feud's epitaph: 'a man with a fork in a world of soup.'
The verdict: Cain and Abel with a rhythm section. The applause of millions could not compete with the one audience each brother actually wanted: the other's.
Source: Wikipedia
The pattern holds from 1727 to the present with the regularity of a physical law: put a human being in front of a crowd that roars its approval on cue, remove every consequence that governs ordinary conduct, and character does not so much decay as evaporate — publicly, punctually, at showtime. The composers at least left us the scores. The performers leave us the testimony: that the standing ovation is a moral hazard with a box office, and that no one — not the diva, not the drummer, not the maestro with his snapped batons — has ever absorbed one safely. Applaud anyway. But know what you are feeding.
22 special editions. A new one every fortnight. The daily catalogue of human folly — free, every morning, from a trial lawyer who has run out of patience.