Richie Kotzen Reveals His Real-Life ‘Spinal Tap’ Moment

Winery Dogs guitarist Richie Kotzen has served tours of duty with Poison and Mr. Big, so he's seen a lot of stuff over the years — including the concert bungle he shared when discussing his real-life Spinal Tap story.

They say comedy equals tragedy plus time, and Kotzen certainly seemed to appreciate the humor in this incident when reliving it for Ultimate Classic Rock in the above video, but in a career that has "quite a few" painfully surreal moments, he admits this is "one of the more embarrassing ones."

"I was doing a gig in Costa Rica," he recalls. "I do this little trick — a lot of guys do it, it's nothing new — where I kind of throw the guitar and it goes around like a hula hoop-type thing, and in this instance I was turned around facing the drummer when I threw the guitar, and it didn't come back."

Why didn't it come back? Well, according to Kotzen, "The strap broke, the guitar flew into the audience, and that was pretty much the end of the show, because when we went down there, we were very streamlined — we didn't take much gear. I took one guitar, and that was the end of it."

Fortunately, as he remembers it, this happened towards the end of the night's set, and the show ended more or less as planned, albeit with some extra embarrassment for Kotzen. As for the guitar? "Whoever caught it was nice enough to find me at the end, and I got the guitar back. Damaged, of course."

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