Concert tours are great.
Many bands love going on tour, and their fans definitely love getting to see their favorite
artists up close and personal in cities all over the world.
Unfortunately, though, some tragic accidents have happened to bands on the road.
On September 27, 1986, Metallica was in Sweden promoting their latest release, Master of
Puppets.
They were heading to their next tour date when, just before 7 a.m., their driver skidded
on a patch of black ice and lost control.
The tour bus flipped and threw bassist Cliff Burton through a window.
What happened next is told differently by people on the scene, but they do all agree
that the bus landed on top of Burton and killed the 24-year-old musician.
There were questions as to whether the accident could've been prevented, but an investigation
cleared the driver of any wrongdoing.
In a bizarre footnote, Burton was sleeping on a top bunk when the accident happened,
and he'd ended up there because of a single draw from a deck of cards.
He and guitarist Kirk Hammett drew cards to choose who was going to get the pick of the
bunks, and Burton won with the ace of spades.
He chose the bunk that Hammett had been using, and that choice ultimately led to his death.
"I still miss Cliff, no doubt, and I'd love to see him again at some point."
Stevie Ray Vaughan's 136-show In Step Tour kicked off on May 4, 1989.
It ended with an epic outing featuring Eric Clapton, but that was followed by a tragic
helicopter accident that took away one of music's most respected guitarists.
After the show at Wisconsin's Alpine Valley Musical Theater, a group of four helicopters
were on hand to fly the performers back to their Chicago hotel.
One of the choppers had been reserved for Vaughan, his brother Jimmie, and Jimmie's
wife Connie.
Some of Clapton's entourage was already on board, though, so Stevie asked Jimmie and
Connie if he could take the last seat.
It was only the next morning that reports started to go out that the chopper had never
reached its destination, and when friends found Vaughan's hotel room empty, they suspected
the worst.
Shortly after 7 a.m., Jimmie was called and asked to identify his brother's body.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, along with everyone else on the chopper, had died only half a mile
into the flight, when the pilot banked sharply in the fog and collided with a ski slope.
Eerily, only the day before Vaughan had shared a disturbing dream with his bandmates in which
he was a witness to his own funeral.
He was only 35 when he died.
The end of 2014 was a bad time for the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys.
On November 13, lead singer Al Barr received word that a childhood friend had passed away.
He announced to fans that he was going to be unable to make their next scheduled show
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as he would be flying out to attend his friend's funeral.
But to add to the tragedy, the band never made it to the airport.
Instead, they announced that they were canceling their Tulsa show after their tour bus hit
and killed a pedestrian who had run into the highway in front of them.
The Boston Globe later identified the man as a 23-year-old father of one.
The band expressed their condolences and requested that their fans keep the man's family in their
prayers.
The family returned the sentiment with sympathies to all the band members involved and to the
bus driver.
Black Sabbath had given Ozzy Osbourne the boot in 1979, but by the early '80s, things
were sort of back on track.
Part of the credit for that should go to guitarist Randy, so it's unsurprising that the "Crazy
Train" singer is still haunted by the bizarre accident that killed Rhoads in 1982.
On March 19, bus driver Andrew Aycock, who had an expired pilot's license, hopped in
a small 1955 Beechcraft Bonanza plane with Rhoads and a woman named Rachel Youngblood.
With Osbourne and the rest of his band asleep on the tour bus, Aycock buzzed the bus a few
times before losing control, hitting a tree, and crashing into a house.
Aycock, Rhoads, and Youngblood were all killed instantly.
The incident had a lasting impact on the other band members, particularly bassist Rudy Sarzo,
who parted ways with Ozzy and returned to the band Quiet Riot after the accident.
Sarzo later spoke out about how difficult it was to go onstage without Rhoads.
Because of that pain, he chose to leave a hugely successful band so that he "could enjoy
playing again."
It was Ozzy's wife Sharon Osbourne who pushed the band to move on.
Within a week and a half, they were back on tour with replacement guitarist Bernie Torme,
but memories of Randy Rhoads continue to live on.
"I think about him a lot still.
I also think where he would be in the picture if he were still around.
He was just a great guy."
Gary Numan, the musician best known for the 1979 new wave hit "Cars," is still touring
and recording new music.
In 2018, he announced that he was going on tour to support his 22nd album, Savage (Songs
from a Broken World).
That was in April, and in September, he canceled a show at the Cleveland House of Blues after
his tour bus was involved in a tragic accident.
The bus was making a right turn when it collided with a 91-year-old man who had been pushing
a cart through a crosswalk.
The man died at the scene and was given last rites by a priest from a nearby church.
Numan canceled the show and issued a statement that read in part:
"We are all utterly devastated by the fatal accident involving our tour bus earlier today.
Every one of us is filled with a sadness that made it impossible to even consider playing
our show this evening, and out of respect it would have been entirely wrong […] At
the moment all we can think about are the people affected by this terrible tragedy,
and to them we send our love."
Lynyrd Skynyrd's iconic 1977 album Street Survivors had hit shelves only a few days
before the band members boarded their leased 30-year-old plane in spite of many misgivings.
They'd already played five shows on the tour, and it had gone well.
They had plans to upgrade their old Convair 240 to a Learjet, and their 600-mile flight
from Greenville, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, Louisiana was supposed to be one of their
last trips in the Convair.
And it was, but not for the reasons they thought.
Survivors of the accident said that nearly everyone onboard had reservations about the
trip.
Those concerns were amplified by the fact that just a few days earlier, flames had been
seen spitting from one of the engines.
But lead vocalist Ronnie Van Zant was adamant that they move forward, pushing everyone with
these fateful words:
"Hey, if the Lord wants you to die on this plane, when it's your time, it's your time.
Let's go, man.
We've got a gig to do."
The plane ran out of fuel towards the end of the flight.
The pilots attempted an emergency landing but ended up crashing into a large tree.
Van Zant, guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines, and his sister, backing vocalist Cassie Gaines,
all lost their lives in the Mississippi swamps.
Strangely, Van Zant had been convinced that he would die before he turned 30, and he was
indeed just a few months shy of his 30th birthday when the plane went down.
There's no denying that a single decision can change the course of an entire life, and
for Reba McEntire, that decision happened in 1991.
She and her band had finished a show in San Diego and were heading to their next gig.
She decided to spend one more night along with her husband and stylist in California,
while the others went on ahead in two separate planes.
One plane arrived, but tragedy struck the other one as it carried eight of McEntire's
close friends and bandmates.
One of the plane's wings clipped a rock protruding from the side of Otay Mountain.
No one survived the crash.
Other country music superstars stepped up, even offering to give McEntire their own backing
bands so she could continue on and finish her tour, though she declined.
She continued to memorialize the crash and remember those she lost, dedicating her next
album, For My Broken Heart, to those who died in the crash.
She visited the crash site on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy and posted a message on Facebook:
"I feel in my heart that they know we still miss them so much.
My love and prayers to all the families and friends."
"I mean, if you've got somebody you love, you better tell ‘em.
Because things can happen in an instant to change your life.
And do things that make you happy."
Some people are fortunate, and determined, enough to turn a tragedy into something good,
and that's exactly what Gloria Estefan has managed to do.
In 1990, she was headed for Syracuse, New York, when her tour bus was rear-ended.
She broke her back and was told there was a very good chance she would never walk again,
much less get on stage and dance.
Years later, Estefan talked frankly about the accident on Oprah's Next Chapter.
"Those things can either tear you apart."
“Yeah, it tears most people apart.”
“It does because it's hard to handle."
Estefan gives her husband Emilio a huge amount of credit toward aiding in her recovery, which
included nine months of therapy, every day, for seven hours a day.
She was up and out of bed every 45 minutes, not because her therapy called for it but
because she was in too much pain to sleep.
She came to this conclusion:
"And then I thought, Maybe this was the whole point of me becoming famous, to now go through
something like this in the public eye."
Estefan has gone on to do charity work, campaigning, and fundraising, all in hopes of furthering
medical research done on spinal cord injuries and paralysis.
Trace Adkins was already at the CenturyTel Center in Bossier City, Louisiana, in 2010
for his scheduled show when he got the news that his tour bus had been involved in a horrific
accident just north of Shreveport.
The bus had collided head-on with a Ford F-250 truck.
Five members of Adkins' band who were on the bus suffered only minor injuries.
However, the two men who were in the truck were killed.
According to the official investigation, the truck had been swerving as it approached the
bus, and the bus driver was unable to avoid it.
Ultimately, the cause of the accident was ruled to be driver fatigue.
The men in the truck had been up for around 24 hours at the point of the accident and
were on their way home from an all-nighter at a nearby casino.
Adkins played a "scaled-down" version of his show following the accident, and canceled
his following show in Pensacola, Florida.
In 2015, metalcore band The Ghost Inside were on their way from a gig in Texas to their
next show in Phoenix when they were involved in a catastrophic accident.
They were just outside El Paso when a truck hit their tour bus head-on.
At first, details were sketchy.
NME reported that the bus driver and one person in the other vehicle had been killed, while
drummer Andrew Tkaczyk had been seriously injured.
In the immediate aftermath, Andrew's brother Nick said that Andrew had suffered head trauma,
a shoulder injury, and broken bones.
It later came out that Andrew had spent 10 days in a coma and had one of his legs amputated.
It wasn't until 2018 that it was reported that it might be possible that the group would
play again.
Tkaczyk had been fitted with a prosthetic that wasn't ideal for playing, but his father
built a device that adapted his drums to his missing leg.
The Ghost Inside currently have plans to play a single live show in July 2019, but what
will happen after that is unclear.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.