What is the most drunk / stoned / otherwise incapacitated you've ever seen a performer?
Live, or on video.
I can't think of any live ones, but tonight I looked up Mixed Up Shook Up Girl and came across the below video.
Musically, it is superb, until Mr De Ville starts singing. The sideways sniffing, the vacant eyes... I seriously can't recall another performance where the singer is so obviously wacked off their dial. Does anyone else have some similarly bad examples?
We might have a winner... Keith Richards at the LA Forum. Yet, somehow still able to play some rudimentary guitar even though Mick has to almost hold him up to sing.
When @Jerseyforniaasked me about Cold Chisel and Jimmy Barnes earlier in this thread, this is what he was talking about...
He doesn't seem quite as far to the wind here, but covering Warren Zevon's Spanish influenced ode to being fucked up has to be one of the most appropriate cover versions ever...
This has sent me off to listen to those old records - what a great listen they are, and such a terrible loss.
Don't do drugs kids.
Got me wondering if you saw Chisel on any of Barnsey's fucked-up nights?
Damn. Willy is gone, gone, gone during that performance.
I can't recall seeing anyone live who was so obviously fucked-up, but in some vintage live videos of Meat Loaf, he seems pretty loaded. Or he might just be Meat Loaf.
I recall seeing UFO, would've been the late 80s, when Phil Mogg had obviously enjoyed a glass of lunch.
I only saw The Pogues once and Shane was rat-arsed, but that was, and possibly remains, his default state.
He belted out the songs fine but was incapable of speech in between.
A converse example was, sadly, Phil Lynott.
At one Thin Lizzy gig he tanned a half bottle in the course of the first handful of songs in the gig and it didn't seem to remotely affect him.
I guess the chickens came home to roost, lifestyle wise, fairly early for the big man.
I just wonder how drunk Willy's hair stylist was.
Turning this on it's head, I have no recollection whatsoever of Bowie at Murrayfield on the Let's Dance tour.
I have an even more embarrassing example which doesn't really fit the brief.......
I guess Neil Young at the Last Waltz, but when you have a (removed on film) piece of cocaine stuck up your nose, a drawled out 'I think I got it now, Robbie' to begin with, but then make your performance utterly transcendental...