10 Most Embarrassing Onstage Moments In Rock

Some of the greatest bands in rock history do most of their damage live. No matter how much some other acts might labor over their studio creations, the real lifesblood of rock and roll exists whenever you're delivering a smack in the face to the people directly. Then again, not all bands have necessarily had the smoothest of transitions to the live stage.

Since everything is live, things can go a little bit haywire when artists are left to their own devices on the stage. With no real safety net to speak of, there have been plenty of foul ups that happen through rock history, from little mistakes to full on crash and burns onstage. Even some of the more complex shows out there find themselves having incidents from time to time, whether it's someone forgetting the lines of a song or just blanking out on entire sections of the tunes they play.

Whereas this might look unprofessional in some people's eyes, it shows that underneath all the rock star BS, these people are still human and have hang ups just like the rest of us. That's not to excuse some of these though, which are so bad that most people would laugh them out of the room if it were an open mic night. For as many hits as these artists have, even giants can fall.

You ever have one of those really off days at your day job? The kind of regular work day where every single thing seems to go wrong no matter what you might do to try and stop it? Well, it turns out that those days are not exclusive to musicians either, especially when playing on a major festival.

At this point in Queens of the Stone Age's tenure, Joshua Homme and co. had just started to gain some real traction off of their album Rated R before going in to the festival Rock Am Ring. Once they started to plug in though, every technical foul up that you can imagine happening to a live band unfolded as they played. While it started with a few hiccups in the performance like coming in on the wrong beat, things quickly escalated to a smoke machine blowing for no apparent reason and more than a few instances where both Homme and Mark Lanegan's mics weren't even plugged in, leading to awkward bits of silence where singing would normally be.

Since that historic date, both Homme and bassist Nick Oliveri got tattoos of the day etched into their skin to commemorate their failure and remind themselves to never give that lackluster a performance ever again. Seeing how they were about to blow up with Songs for the Deaf though, the musical gods have definitely come around for QOTSA.