Top this for the most embarrassing moment story.

Some years ago I was a rock n roll drummer and spent more than a year in England playing and touring with some famous rock n roll legends, namely: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and The Original Drifters.

At one point I got tired of the on the road gigs and wanted a nice steady gig where I didn’t have to travel.

I saw an add for a drummer in a house band playing 5 nights a week in a large ballroom in Bristol. This is perfect for me, I thought. So I answered the add. After checking me out on the phone the band leader asked me to come down to Bristol and audition for gig.

Now most of the material being played by this group was big band stuff like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, the forties dance tunes. I always liked these tunes and felt very confident to play them.

So now it’s my audition night and I’m watching the band consisting of
15 musicians, most with musical degrees and all reading music. Gulp!! I thought, I don’t read very well. Too late now I said to myself, but I am A good faker and I can pull this off.

After one of the breaks the band leader invites me up to sit in. To my left is a music stand with charts for each song. It might as well have been written in Chinese as for as I was concerned. So we go through several tunes and each time the band leader looks up to me, I quickly focus my attention on the chart and make like I am reading. Now you got to remember I had a good feel for the songs even though I couldn’t read music.

After the audition the band leader comes ups and shakes my hand telling me I did great. I do my best to blurt out that I don’t read very well, but he is just fine with everything and gives me the job. So I go back to London, grab my drums and move to Bristol.

Now it’s my first night on the job. We play a few tunes and each time the band leader looks up to me I once again focus my attention on the music and fake this reading stuff.

About half way through the evening me and the band are cooking along with this Benny Goodman tune and it comes to an end. So I rest my sticks on the snare Drum and start fidgeting with the music. Then the leader waves the band on and we play the tune again. We get to end of the tune and I turn To the bass player and ask “Hey Charlie, why did we play that last tune twice”? He looks at me with head bowed and says “We didn’t…there was a 16 bar drum solo in the middle”.

So for 16 bars every guy in the band is counting time and yours truly is fidgeting through the music oblivious to what is happening.

I got fired on that my first night. I could have died on the spot. I felt completely destroyed as a drummer and it took me weeks to talk myself back from this disaster. I did eventually learn to read music, never very well but enough to prevent moments like that from happening again. And the point of this story is?

“The greatest learning always comes
from our errors and mistakes, not
from our successes”