5 Ways Live Bands Dealt With Unruly Fans

5 Fight Them

On December 15, 1997, Green Day was performing at The Filmore, a San Francisco venue that had been around for 80 years — and had recently reopened, following the old owner’s death. That owner was concert promoter Bill Graham, whose helicopter crashed into an electrical transmission tower, exploding and killing everyone aboard.

At the concert, some guy in the crowd acted up. The way this story gets told, the troublemaker was behaving poorly “towards a young and vulnerable girl,” while other versions of the story claim he threw a bottle to the stage. What we do know is that lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong stopped the performance to shout at the guy, saying, “Hey, why don’t you come here, you little mohawked motherfucker? You wanna fight? I’ll fight you right now. Come on, get up here on the stage.”

The guy didn’t accept the invitation. And you’d think that might be the end of it, as merely calling the guy out would set him straight. But this was no idle challenge, and Armstrong now jumped off the stage and really did fight him, until security pulled them apart. If this happened today, we’d naturally have footage of it, thanks to the countless phones with cameras filming everything. But this happened in 1997, which means we’d likely be denied that — except, no, a camera did capture the whole thing:

“Just because we’re rock stars doesn’t mean we’re not going to beat the living shit out of you,” said bassist Mike Dirnt from the stage. “Why don’t you go back to your momma, you little bitch?” Then, perhaps fearing they were losing the high ground a little, he said, “Sorry, but these people didn’t come here to put up with your shit.” 

See, this wasn’t the band versus the audience. It was the band defending the audience. 

4 Film Them

Like we said, if a fight breaks out at a concert today, you can expect phones nearby to record the action. At a 2014 Miley Cyrus concert, one of the phones recording such a fight happened to be held by Miley Cyrus herself. 

At first, she recorded the fight without even taking a break from singing. A few seconds of this attracted a lot more attention than the fight itself, so she did stop singing now, long enough to turn the camera to herself and yell, “Catfight!” 

The fighters, whom security had already pushed apart before they could rip each other’s clothes off, now jumped with glee, reflecting the seriousness of a typical concert brawl. 

3 Go on Strike

When Nirvana played Buenos Aires in 1992, the audience appeared to be plenty enthusiastic to see them. They weren’t so enthusiastic, however, to listen to the opening act, a punk group named Calamity Jane. The crowd booed them, for no clear reason other than that they were women and they weren’t Nirvana. Then the crowd threw stuff at the stage, till the performers left, crying.

Nirvana considered now refusing to come on. Instead, they did come on, but they refused to give the crowd what they wanted. At the start of every single song, they’d play the intro to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — but then they wouldn’t launch into it. They’d switch to some obscure song that no one in the crowd had heard before. They even played “Endless, Nameless,” a song they’d recorded as a secret track on their album just because they’d messed up recording a different song and now just wanted to record a bunch of noise.

We suppose that showed the crowd. Though, you might say real fans would still get a kick out of listening to new stuff, and “Endless, Nameless” went on to become a standard closing number at a bunch of Nirvana concerts to come.

2 Turn It Into a Charity Drive

The Barenaked Ladies song “If I Had a Million Dollars” runs through a list of purchases a fortune could buy. Some of these things are oddly mundane (“furniture for your house”), and the song switches to just listing a bunch of zany things bought by Michael Jackson. The singer also says that with a million dollars, they’d no longer have to eat Kraft Dinner — but they still absolutely would, the subtext being that Kraft would sue them for saying otherwise.

“Kraft Dinner” is what they call Kraft Mac & Cheese in Canada. It’s had a reputation as a cheap meal since at least World War II, when Kraft negotiated a special cheap rationing price for the product with the government.

At one 1991 concert, someone in the crowd threw a box of Kraft Dinner onstage at the relevant part of the song. That was kind of weird but forgettable enough. Then fans made it a tradition to throw boxes of the stuff during every single performance. There could be hundreds of boxes flying on stage, and some creative fans would throw just the cheese packets, stinking up the venue. Sometimes, the boxes would hit the singers in the face. Other times, it would be the balls. 

So, the band took to setting up bins where people could deposit the boxes they brought, as donations to a food bank. We don’t know if this fed a great many hungry people, but it did sap the enthusiasm of fans who would otherwise have launched their boxes directly at singer Steven Page’s testicles.

For a slightly more serious attempt at addressing the food supply chain, below is a video of the band doing the song at 2000’s Farm Aid benefit concert. They do the “Kraft Dinner” lyric, but they skip the usual several lines of Kraft-related patter that usually follow it, to avoid giving anyone any ideas. 

1 Mock Their Penises

Woodstock ’94 was a music festival with a fair number of problems. They sold 160,000 tickets, but twice that many people showed up, and the organizers had no way to keep them out. Rain turned the entire grounds into a mud pit, providing the audience with ammunition to throw at each other — and at the stage.

When Primus sang their song “My Name Is Mud,” that provided one more opening for the crowd to reach down and gather some up. So, Les Claypool, a man whose name basically means “mud pit,” addressed the audience. “Keep the mud to yourself, you son of a bitch,” he said. “You know, when you throw things up onstage, it’s a sign of small and insignificant genitalia.” 

Not all bands were quite so careful at calming the crowd. Another band that played that same stage the next day got thoroughly pelted, despite guards trying to hold back the mudslinging with a tarp. Soon, enough mud coated the stage that the lead singer was able to pick up clumps and throw them back at the crowd. “This isn’t love and peace, it’s fucking anarchy,” he said. “Look at me, I’m a fucking idiot.” 

They went on playing their instruments, despite having run out of songs, finally telling the audience to yell, “Shut the fuck up,” to force them to leave. The audience complied. Some of the audience then stormed the stage, and in the ensuing fight, security mistook the bassist for one of the interlopers and knocked one of his teeth out. 

That band was named Green Day, and the mud incident propelled them into fame. 

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