Beau Anderson - TOUR PRANKS

In this Tour Pranks segment, the alternative and alt rock artist, Beau Anderson, shares a wild prank that unfolded backstage on tour. You can check out the story below:

The year is 2021. I’m in Tampa on tour with my old band Seven Year Witch. We’re playing at a Harley Davidson dealership that has a huge outdoor space for shows.

We show up and it’s a typical show day, everything is normal. We meet the venue staff, the promoter, everyone is wonderful. We do our soundcheck around 2 pm, it goes off without a hitch, so we’re free for about six hours until showtime. So I decide to kill some time by wandering around the dealership, looking at motorcycles and jackets and other stuff I had no intention or ability of buying.

When I get back to the van to meet up with the other guys, they’re all really excited. “Yo! The promoter tipped us an extra $600!”

“Oh hell yeah,” I think to myself while doing a little excitement jig, “I’m gonna drink cocktails tonight!”

“But there’s a catch,” they continue, “he wants us to play ‘Brown Eyed Girl’.”

Naturally, I don’t care, I’m up for it if we’re getting paid, so I get right on learning it. Thirty minutes later, I’m an expert on how to play “Brown Eyed Girl.” Thank God it wasn’t a more difficult song. The rest of the guys said they already knew it because they used to play it years before for cover gigs, so we agreed to go over it in the green room before we go on so I could lock in and they could refresh their memory on it.

As we’re getting closer and closer to showtime, all the other guys keep putting off going over the song. “Oh, we can do it later,” “oh, let me eat first,” excuses like that piled up. I start to stress out.

Forty five minutes before we’re supposed to go on stage, we finally get together in the green room to go over the song unplugged. Me with an electric guitar without an amp, our drummer kinda just tapping on his lap, and our singer with the lyrics on his phone mumbling along. But our bassist is just sitting in the corner scrolling through his phone. “Eh, I’ll just figure it out when we get up there, it’s not that hard,” he’d say. WHAT?! My stress tripled at that point, but I was too new to the band at this point to feel comfortable making a big deal out of it, so I just accepted our fate, we’re going to go up there and make fools of ourselves. But hey, at least we got that big tip, right?

We agreed we’d throw “Brown Eyed Girl” in right before our song “Safe and Sound.” We go up and start our set, we sound awesome, we’re crushing it, but the only thing on my mind is that we’re about to absolutely ruin the flow and energy of our meticulously crafted set with this horrible cover that everyone but me was too apathetic to put any effort into trying.

The questions running through my mind: “We’re really willing to derail our set for a quick buck?” “We’re not willing to put even thirty minutes into at least making sure we do the song well for this man that was kind enough to tip us so generously?” “Is this really the work ethic of the band I’m in?”

The time has come. It’s time to play “Brown Eyed Girl.” I turn to our singer, give a heavy exhale, and ask, “oof, are you ready for this?”

He glances over at me passively in between his lines of stage banter and nonchalantly says, “oh, we made that up.”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! It was a prank all along? The wave of emotions that hit me. Firstly, anger of course. You had me stressing out for hours over this stupid song? Furthermore, you made me spend thirty minutes learning “Brown Eyed Girl” for nothing?

But that anger was soon superseded by euphoric relief. We continued our set as we would any other night on that tour and came off stage triumphant. Thankfully, the tip money was not made up, and we split it amongst ourselves. My tour wallet was saved at the momentary cost of my psyche and sanity… and then soon emptied at the bar next to this Harley Davidson dealership.

Just a week ago, my current live guitarist (who was our tour manager on that tour) was playing the very same dealership as a fill in for another band. He sent me a picture of a generic room with block walls, filled with plastic chairs and folding tables. He says, “Beau, if you remember this room and what happened here, I will buy you a pint.”

Little did he know I’d been preparing for this blog, and I recited to him this very same story. I could never forget that room. It was the green room where I had learned “Brown Eyed Girl.”

To this day, I’m still drinking on someone else’s dollar thanks to that prank.

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