I'm pretty careful at bar gigs to drink only pop or water until near the end. The last set I usually have a beer or two.

I remember a Warren Zevon concert I attended where he kept the audience waiting for over a hour, and when he showed up he was absolutely a babbling incoherent drunk. The music was fine, in part because he had a top-flight backup band. Warren's between-song blitherings had the crowd totally baffled, though.

In Tucumcari last summer, I went to a bar where a "One Man Band" was featured. The performer had a guitar, a fiddle and a drum machine, and he sang like Hank Williams. His wife worked as a waitress while he sang. They were a traveling all-purpose bar act I suppose. He drank double-rum and coke all night long, and as he came up to the bar right by me to get his drinks, we carried on a conversation through the night. He was an outwardly cheery fellow, but as the night wore on he told me "I learned fiddle from my brother. I'm nothing compared to what he was. He was murdered three years ago, but he's ok now. He's in a place where everything is so fine we can't imagine it. This world is a shit-hole." He continued the drinking until he was incomprehensible, while his wife helped him to his seat on breaks and sat holding his hand. His performance was flawless though. He played Orange Blossom Special like Bill Monroe, and sang I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry with tears in his eyes. The small crowd was focussed entirely on him, because he laid his soul bare, sad and twisted as it was.