Thursday, November 22, 2012

When An Artist Has A Meltdown

Here's a series of videos that are at the same time funny, sad and wonderfully informative. The first video shows the singer of the Antaris, Kris Roe, go bonkers on his drummer in the middle of the gig. There's more about that on my Big Picture production blog, but the real learning experience is the response videos.




Here's a video from the band attempting to explain what happened. It's all well and good, but it drones on and on for 6 plus minutes. By the end, it seems counterproductive, as you start to side with the drummer for having to put up with a hyper-controlling frontman.




Now here's a video response from drummer Rob Felicitti, as it defends himself.


Here's the upshot. Regardless of who you feel is right or wrong, this is a wonderful use of YouTube and social media. It enables the band to take an unfortunate incident and get in front of it, and it enables the drummer to both defend himself and raise his profile in the process. I'm not picking sides here, just saying that whether the parties were aware of it or not, they did absolutely the right thing by making these videos. From a PR standpoint, they caused an event, then followed up on it, raising the profile of the band(s) and the individuals involved along the way. From a professional standpoint..........well, read the Big Picture blog.

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1 comment:

Jef Knight said...

I once had my 2nd guitar guy show up to a fairly important show baked on acid, with no gear, at the last minute. He used my fallback gear and proceed to go all Jimi Hendrix all over the music.
I should haved stopped the show and beat him within an inch of the law right on stage, but I didn't. Not my style anyway.
But everyone saw his nonsense, and my humorous approach to it all, and I scored huge points and a ton of fan respect, even though they were all, "dude, you should have kicked his a**, everyone was hoping you would." They were really hoping for the JK version of that Ataris live vid.

But I'm pretty much alone in terms of a pro attitude.

Every band in my town pretty much hates each other for some real or imagined petty grevence. Sad. 20k residents, 50 or so solid players and no music scene to speak of. It's like living in a live version of the Ataris response video.

To misquote Charles Shultz;"I love music, it's the musicians I can't stand."

Cheers

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