New tours are seemingly announced every week. Oftentimes, those tours feature outstanding multi-act lineups and other great supporting acts.
With that in mind, we can’t help but think about all of the strange opening acts and headliner combos in rock history, and there have been some doozies.
A great example of this was the Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto concert in 2003. The show was organized as an economic boom for Toronto, which was hit pretty badly by the SARS outbreak. (It’s also why the show is affectionately known as SARSStock. Over 450,000 people attended the show, which featured the headlining lineup of The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Rush, The Guess Who…and Justin Timberlake.
Bookers and promoters didn’t think about how a predominantly rock crowd would react to Timberlake. It’s a memory that still sticks with Timberlake, who reflected on it during a February 2020 appearance on BBC’s The Graham Norton Show.
“You would think Canadians are historically peaceful people, … It was a bit of a blur,” recalled Timberlake, who at the time had just started his solo career. “I just remember saying to the band before we went on stage, ‘I don’t think this is going to go well.’ Little did I know how bad it was going to go.”
So, how bad was it? People threw bottles of urine at him!
Jokingly, Timberlake said, “I still have a lot of trauma from this incident. After the first song, the host of the festival comes out and [tries to wave me off stage,] and I’m like, ‘No, man! I’m staying out here! We’re doing this!'”
Fans then continued to throw the bottles of urine at him, but things eventually calmed down. Timberlake said, “After [the second song of the set] either one of two things happened: Either they ran out of nerve, because they knew I was going to stay there, or they ran out of urine.”
Fortunately, no bottles of urine were involved in the following five examples of strange opening act and headliner combos. However, they all are very interesting and almost baffling that they even happened. Enjoy!
