Break the stage

by Adam Steele

In my old college band, we had this one fraternity that we used to play at every few weeks. You know how some bands have a regular gig at a local bar? Well, we were all under 21 at the time and with unbending underage laws at our small collegetown bars, a semi regular frat show was the closest thing we could get. But frat shows have their advantages sometimes. Anyway, this particular frat had their own home built stage. It was actually the first stage we ever played on come to think of it. It was amazing because we would let the crowd come up on stage most nights and it was always all out compared to our other shows. So during the third or fourth show we played there, everyone was up on stage as usual and we got the crowd jumping to the beat pretty hard. And then like magic, at the climax of the night near the end of our set, the stage collapsed and everyone fell into a huge pile on top of each other. We sort of managed to finish the song since the drummer was on part of the stage that didn’t cave in. The rest of the set was like the crowd was injected with speed.

The next week, I started hearing multiple people that I didn’t know talking about this crazy show that they heard about. This was the first time that I had ever overheard people talking about our band! I was floored and got that tingly feeling you get when (insert the other time you got tingly here). This was also pretty amazing since there were 40,000 students at our school and there were only about 100 people at the show.

So the other day I was reading Made To Stick which talks about things you can do to make things memorable to people and I realized that the reason this happened was because we did something unexpected…which it turns out is one of the things that studies have found make people remember something.

This got me thinking that if I were in a band now, maybe we would try to ‘plan’ unexpected things like this to get people talking about us…