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Vaya, this is funny, we were set last Feb 12 to play at the Humming Bird Balcony. There was a warning emitted by the weather bureau about high waves and tide. The Humming Bird Balcony is located about 100 feets from the ocean front. So the sound equiment was been mounted,I left my Bongó at the stage and looked thru the back to see how was the ocean behavor, everything look calm. So I invited my Lady to have something to eat. Suddenly A wave went thru back door of the club, thru the stage and almost threw my bongo out the front door. Eveybody just got ruuning out like if there was a fire in the place or a sunami was comming. The gig was cancel and we went home.

I would have taken the bongo instead of the wife..........lol.....only kidding !!!!

juancho wrote:I would have taken the bongo instead of the wife..........lol.....only kidding !!!!

LOL.
I had all three of my congas set up one Saturday morning for a Summer Concert, while playing my Remos I was doing a solo and accidentally pushed my tumba, it fell in front of everybody man was I embarrassed.
When I consider what happened to my friend while singing as the lead singer I realize that I have nothing to be embarrassed of. After we all had some lunch we all went up on stage to do our thing, while singing in front of a very large crowd the singer got a very bad upset stomach causing him to through up right on stage in from of that large crowd.
Thats my story.

we played in Palistine Arkansas, for a festival, they put us up on a Trailer bed and everybody was asking for country music, our band played reggae, blues and smooth jazz, So we played them some reggae and our singer tells them now don;t that sound like country. the thing was that we were the only band booked. just like the Blues Brother movie..If you can't make the people happy your screwed..

I have a few stories of course here they are then u guys can pick the one u want to know about
1. Playing Carnegie Hall on crutches with a broken foot
2. Having guns pulled on us by State Troopers(the Gloria Gaynor band) while on stage in Pittsburgh
3. Playing on stage with Johnny Martinez during a shoot out in a club in L.A.
4. A riot at a Hotel Ballroom in NYC
and I have a bunch more .... "JC" Johnny Conga

POST REMOVED BY THE AUTHOR

leedy2 wrote:Back in the 70's when I was with Joe Quijano orchestra on a trip to Columbia after we finished gig the own of club tells us that we were not finished. He brings a bus and a few men mount all ower stuff in bus and takes us to his mansion in some mountain. There he had an other night club within his house ask us to play a couple of sets at his home, was packed with his friends. So we played 2 sets at end of the 2 sets we started to pack that' when all hell broke .All his friends ask were we were going that party was not over .6:am and party was not over they had guns,uzzy's we were so scared they had us playing for 2 days before they called it quits and no were to go from those mountain in Columbia. One thing I got to say the paid us extremely well after all said and done. after that trip band broke up never to go to columbia again.

Cuquito, only goes to show you how much Colombians appreciate Quijano's pachangas y charangas including me. Gots to go back to Colombia.
juancho

JohnnyConga wrote:I have a few stories of course here they are then u guys can pick the one u want to know about
1. Playing Carnegie Hall on crutches with a broken foot
2. Having guns pulled on us by State Troopers(the Gloria Gaynor band) while on stage in Pittsburgh
3. Playing on stage with Johnny Martinez during a shoot out in a club in L.A.
4. A riot at a Hotel Ballroom in NYC
and I have a bunch more .... "JC" Johnny Conga

Don't know about you guys but I want to hear about all of them...

POST REMOVED BY THE AUTHOR

1. How i wound up on crutches playing Carnegie hall was because a month earlier while touring with Sergio Mendes & Brasil 77, we were playing the old Sahara Tahoe Hotel..but before opening night some of the guys and I were playing with a frisbee in the hotel parking lot and i was barefoot..I went to make a behind the back catch, my body went one way, and my left foot didnt and i broke a bone in my foot...i was then wisked off to the nearest hospital, cause showtime was in 2 hours..they put a fiberglass cast on my left leg up to my knee...gave me a pair of crutches some pain killers and when it came time to do the show they walked me out on stage and propped me up on a stool and for the next 3 months I toured with a broken foot, and walked on to the stage(with crutches, on my own) at Carnegie Hall for the concert of my life, which went very well...."JC" Johnny Conga

2nd story to come....

2. Well I was touring with Gloria Gaynor and the City Lights Band and doing the Disco circuit-1975...we were doing a bus tour...most of the clubs at that time we played at were gay clubs, they were/still are, Gloria's biggest fans....now we were in Pittsburgh and we got booked into this gay club...everything was cool, or so we thought...we were in the middle of our show when from the back of the stage(which had a left and right entrance to the stage)...came Pittsburgh State Police/Troopers...they came around to the front of the stage pulled out their guns and declared "this show is over, now get off the stage and this club is now closed"..Gloria's road manager was gay and he came running out to confront the Police and had a gun in his stomach and yelling at the police...they simple said "u either shut it down or all of you are going to jail tonight"...what had happened was that a rival club owner called the police on this particular club saying they were dealing drugs and other lies...the good thing was we still got paid ..but I have never had a gun pulled on me while i was playing on stage,that was a first...... "JC" Johnny Conga more to come....

Yeah Johnny!! This sounds like the Blues Brother's movie! Good stuff!

I had a lady grab my crotch while i was playing at some club in New Jersey in the mid 80's and my mike was live, i yell out what the hell are you doing! over the p.a. I wouldn't halved mine if she was good looking instead of butt ugly!

Bongobilly wrote:I had a lady grab my crotch while i was playing at some club in New Jersey in the mid 80's and my mike was live, i yell out what the hell are you doing! over the p.a. I wouldn't halved mine if she was good looking instead of butt ugly!

What??? You can almost be sure that, if it were a man who did that same thing to a woman, then the man would have been slapped with a groping charge by now. And it probably wouldn't have been any different even if the man looked like, say, Brad Pitt or George Clooney.

Very interesting story, though.

leedy2 wrote: So we played 2 sets at end of the 2 sets we started to pack that' when all hell broke .All his friends ask were we were going that party was not over .6:am and party was not over they had guns,uzzy's we were so scared they had us playing for 2 days before they called it quits and no were to go from those mountain in Columbia.

If there was a prize to be won here for the worst thing that happened during a gig, I think you would win it hands down bro! (closely followed by JC's Gloria Gaynor gig bust up by the cops).
That's scary shit man, sounds like a freakin' nightmare. What a story. Glad to hear they paid you well tho - I hope it was worth it.

My story isn't as scary as yours but it was kind of amusing.

Last year I was playing a latin gig in a medium size venue which was quite packed as it was a big birthday celebration. The band was half way through the 2nd set when about 4 cops burst in wearing black leather jackets, packing pistols, with German Shepherd drug sniffer dogs in tow (the cops looked sort of like Nazi stormtroopers and behaved in a similar way). They ordered us to stop playing and turned the house lights up. The place was in stunned dead silence and they even brought the sniffer dogs on stage, which was kind of funny (I was just glad that mongrel dogs didn't piss on my congas).
The band was clean (at least according to the sniffer dogs), but to my surprise they dragged a musician friend away in the audience, roughed him up a little and busted him for possession of some kind of drug.
Pavlo