“I was in a dark place for about a week!”: Paul Gilbert recalls his biggest onstage mishap
No matter what level of experience you have, mistakes still happen when playing live. Although near inevitable if you’re lucky to have a long music career, some still feel mortifying, and Paul Gilbert is one guitarist who knows this feeling all too well.
From Bumblefoot to Sullivan King, who infamously threw his guitar at a photographer instead of his technician mid-show, there’s nothing like that kind of error in front of thousands of people. Though most of the time they can be laughed off, others can have a detrimental effect. Gilbert says his live error actually took him to “a dark place” mentally.
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Speaking to Total Guitar for its new print issue, he recalls, “I’ve made huge mistakes sometimes. But the one I remember most is when Mr. Big was at the peak of its popularity in Japan.”
He continues, “We were doing multiple nights at Budokan with all these cameras documenting it for a TV special. So, my wife at the time said, ‘Oh, you should learn this famous Japanese melody called Sakura’, which means Cherry Blossom. She hummed it to me, and I said, ‘Yeah, this is perfect’.
“Well, I opened my guitar solo with it, got it perfect, and then I played my whole solo, and everything went great. My solo was somewhat improvised, so at the end, I thought, ‘I should play Sakura one more time at the end, but an octave higher’. And, again, I’m much more fluid now with melody because I’ve worked on it, but back then I wasn’t.”
He adds, “I’d worked on it in the lower range for the opening of the solo, but I had not worked on it in the high range, and I messed it up really badly. If you mess up something that’s fast, nobody notices, but if you mess up a melody, it’s really obvious. And I remember after that show, which was broadcast across the country on television, I was in a dark place for about a week! Maybe that was the seed of me wanting to get more fluent in playing melodies – just to make up for that horrible mistake!”
Mr. Big’s new album Ten is out now. You can also catch them live this summer.
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