There’s one guy who does it at every concert…

You know it, I know it, WE ALL KNOW IT.

I’m talking about that one guy who yells out “Freebird!” and gets a chuckle or two.

And you can imagine how annoying that is to the people who are actually on the stage playing music.

But this person and their bandmates found a way to push back against these hecklers.

Check out what they did in the story below.

For everyone that yells “Freebird!” at concerts…

“I used to tour with a band, and we had around 200 concerts a year.

There’s no escape from it!

At least 200 times a year, someone would yell “Freebird!” and laugh like they said something clever. I don’t understand why it’s funny, and hearing it every day for thousands of shows… yup, still not at all funny.

So, one day we tried to find out the deal. When the Freebird-guy of the day yelled, we invited him on stage to answer a few questions.

“Why do you yell Freebird?”

“Because it’s funny!”

“Why is that funny?”

“…” *look of confusion and shame*

Ok, so we didn’t get any answers, but we certainly came up with one. Nobody comes up with ridiculous ideas like a group of 20-somethings who spend 15 hours a day in a van together.

They came up with a plan.

First thing we had to do was buy a sampler, this is a small piece of equipment that you can pre-program with any sounds you want and press buttons to trigger them. They are pretty expensive, the one we bought for the prank was $,1200.

Side note- we were staying all 5 members to a single hotel room every night and eating nothing but dollar menu garbage and ramen because even if your band is doing good, you’re still broke.

I just want you to understand how ridiculous it was for us to spend a grand on this. As far as I’m concerned, it was worth it ten times over.

The next thing we needed was a folding table with chairs for all of us, some teacups and a newspaper or two. We would set these up next to the stage and no one would even notice it was there.

It was GO time.

So we found a 16 minute long version of Freebird and loaded it onto the sampler. The trap was set. Sure enough, someone yelled “Freebird!” at the next show. This time, our lead singer acted really interested.

“What’s that you say? Freebird? Do you want to hear Freebird?”

*The audience cheers loudly*

“So, just to be clear, you want us to stop playing our set and instead play Freebird?”

They cheer again in approval, and now the Freebird guy clearly looks like he’s never been so proud of anything he’s ever done in his life. We all step to the center of the stage in a very serious-looking huddle.

We made it a point to go comically long discussing Freebird, and sometimes we would just talk about movies we liked for a while or make fun of each other’s sisters.

When we felt like it had gone on long enough (and we were terrible about making jokes go way too long) we all nodded and made it clear that we had just agreed to play Freebird.

Here you go!

“Allright folks! You asked for it! You’ve got it! Here we go, FREEBIRD!”

While the crowd went absolutely nuts, the singer went to the sampler and like an old man fumbling to use a remote, he found the button and pressed it as anticlimactically as possible.

Freebird begins to play, and we all put our instruments down and sit around the table. We sip on pretend tea and browse the newspaper quietly. At first everyone thought it was hilarious, but after a few minutes they started to revolt.

Chanting for us to come back and all. We would look at each other in a very confused manner, and shrug it off a few times before the singer would finally go back to the mic.

“What’s going on? You don’t want to listen to this anymore?”

“NOOOOOOO!”

“You want us to play our stuff again?”

“YEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHH!!!!”

“Well, what about that guy who yelled Freebird?”

LOL.

“THAT GUY SUCKS!”

And then the booing would start for that poor Freebird guy. We did this for an entire tour, and it absolutely never got old.

I’d like to think that after that year, tens of thousands of people stopped yelling Freebird at every show they go to. At least for me, that makes the world a slightly better place.”

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