When Bob Saget Crashed a Rock Concert
Bob Saget was always up for a good joke. In 2007, he surprised an audience of fans at a Guster concert in Boston when he burst through a homemade paper banner that had been constructed a few hours before.
The Boston alt-rock band was scheduled to perform a show at the Boston Opera House when band members noticed that Saget was performing a sold-out show down the street at the Orpheum Theatre. They reached out to Saget's management, asking if he might be interested in tearing through a paper banner that night during the encore. To their surprise, management told them to go ahead and make the banner.
(The actor and comedian best known for his role on ABC's Full House died yesterday at age 65.)
That evening, during the band's encore, the homemade banner was held up onstage as the group led the audience in a chant of "Bob! Bob! Bob!" It was then that drummer Brian Rosenworcel realized they had forgotten to tell singer and guitarist Adam Gardner about the plan. "He's strumming his guitar super-aggressively because he thinks this is a lame joke, an exercise in anticlimax," Rosenworcel wrote in a Twitter thread, "that we’ll have our bus driver or our guitar tech burst through and then play a deflated encore after riling up the crowd with an unfulfilled promise."
Except the promise actually was fulfilled – Saget burst through the banner to an ecstatic crowd. The moment was captured on film by an audience member. "The crowd went fuckin' bananas," Rosenworcel remembered. "He hugged [singer and guitarist] Ryan [Miller], shook the band members' hands, waved at the crowd, told Ryan, 'This is awesome' and walked offstage."
You can watch the moment below.
"I have also enjoyed thinking about this from Saget’s perspective," Rosenworcel wrote in his tour blog that week. "The guy performs at the Orpheum to a sold-out crowd, but before heading home to the hotel, he has his limo take a pit stop at the Boston Opera House, where some band he’s never heard of has invited him to make a random appearance. He walks onstage, breaks through a homemade banner with his name on it, waves at a crowd that is going gaga because they fuckin' loved Full House, shakes the band’s hands, tells Ryan, 'This is awesome' and then heads to the hotel."
According to Rosenworcel, several years later Miller ran into Saget in Los Angeles while hanging out with a mutual friend, actor Jeff Garlin. Miller asked Saget if he remembered appearing at a Guster concert in Boston. "Saget lit up," Rosenworcel recalled in the Twitter thread. "'I got in a car which drove me to a venue, walked directly on stage, the crowd erupted, I walked offstage and got right back in a car. It was the best!' It really was. RIP, Bob Saget."