If years of watching America's Funniest Home Videos have taught us anything, it's that bodily harm is funny so long as no one dies and someone puts funny parrot voices over the footage. There was nothing hilarious about Patrick Sherry, frontman for UK group Bad Beat Revue, dying from an ill-timed stage dive. But if he lived, hell, we'd file that under broad comedy. So with all fearful respect to the Grim Reaper, here are some of rock's greatest unintentional slapstick moments.
1965: Violence erupts onstage at a Kinks concert in Cardiff, Wales, when Dave Davies suggests to drummer Mick Avory, "Why don't you get your cock out and play the snare with it? It'll probably sound better." Avory gets the last rude gesture by nearly decapitating Davies with a flying cymbal that knocks him unconscious. Where have all the good times gone, indeed!
1965: At the opening date of the Rolling Stones' Scandinavian tour, bassist Bill Wyman is knocked unconscious by an electric shock from a microphone stand, which probably changed expression more readily than he did.
1973: During an ELP concert in San Francisco, Keith Emerson injures his hands when explosives rigged inside his piano detonate prematurely. The ACME Company has a lot of 'splainin' to do!
1974: Uriah Heep bassist Gary Thain is nearly electrocuted onstage during a show in Dallas. Easy-livin' Gary survives long enough to get kicked out of the band and die of a drug overdose a few months later. Hey, it was the '70s!
1976: Alice Cooper trips on a wire and breaks multiple ribs in the fall. Unaware of his injuries, he continues dripping hemoglobin while singing (what else?) "Only Women Bleed."
1982: Rob Halford rides his Harley-Davidson onstage at the Metrocenter in St. Paul/Minneapolis and crashes into the orchestra pit! No word on whether he was driving legato or allegro.
2002: During the band's finale, Marilyn Manson drummer Kenny Frank Wilson flips over his drum kit, falling five feet to the stage, and breaks his collarbone. No one notices, until the layers of smoke-machine mist subside, that he's has been out cold onstage like Sunny von Bülow for almost half an hour.
2004: Here's one you can see on his Forever Wild DVD: During "Youth Gone Wild," Sebastian Bach leaps across the stage and it collapses beneath him. Pissed off and injured, Bach finishes the number, wearing the same expression he reserves for bitch-slapping tape recorders out of reporters' hands when they mention Bon Jovi.
2005: Vince Neil initiates a new kind of theater of pain in Atlanta when he leans too far over to the audience and tears part of his calf muscle, ironically the only part of Neil left undisturbed in his TV rock-star makeover.
2005: In Tampa, Florida, Paul McCartney falls five feet into a stage trapdoor out of which a piano is rising, injuring his arms and back. His hands are stuck in a thumbs-up position, resulting in hundreds of useless and unprintable photographs.
