The wild night in 1990 when Bill Murray crashed an MC Hammer concert: “I want to see this show”
There’s very little that Bill Murray can do at this stage of his life and career that’ll surprise anyone. You should always expect the unexpected when he’s involved, and for more than 50 of his friends and colleagues, it meant an impromptu trip to an MC Hammer concert.
If you were to name which actor would be the most likely to spend their downtime between shooting days hiring a bus to bring dozens of people to a gig without having tickets or even an invite, then the Saturday Night Live veteran and Ghostbusters star would surely be near the top of the list.
At no point in the last half-century has anyone been able to predict what the ‘Murricane’ would do next, and even though the production of Frank Oz’s 1991 comedy What About Bob? could generously be described as fractious, what with Richard Dreyfuss hating Murray’s guts and all, any animosity was put to the side in the name of having a good time.
The classic caper is one of Murray’s personal favourites from his own filmography, and rightly so, because it’s one of the best films he’s ever been in, but his fondest memories from the period aren’t strictly limited to the picture itself, with his off-the-cuff decision to catch an MC Hammer gig remaining a vivid memory.
“We’re an hour from Roanoke. We had to find our way back to see the concert,” he recalled. Most of What About Bob? was filmed in Moneta, a town in southern Virginia. Fortunately, Roanoke was less than an hour away, so the star called his representatives to see if they could pull a Hail Mary from their pockets.
“I called CAA and said, ‘I want to see this show’. I said, ‘I’m bringing people,'” Murray explained. “We hired a bus, 55 people completely parties all the way to the place to get there, and bouncers are like, ‘Hey Bill! Aw man, how many with you?’ And they put us on the side of the stage.” This being one of the industry’s most famous eccentrics, though, he wasn’t in the mood for standing still.
Set photographer Barry Wetcher was one of the lucky 55 who got to travel on Murray’s party bus, and his recollection of that wild night on October 4th, 1990, was every bit as vivid, seeing as three decades later, he remembered how “Bill got up onstage and was rapping with Hammer,” dramatically underselling the evening’s festivities as “fun.”
As you might expect from such a famous oddball, the story didn’t end there, either. While he was rapping, not to mention dancing, onstage with MC Hammer, Murray got so into it that he split his trousers open, after which he enlisted the help of a young woman and six safety pins as a makeshift solution to his wardrobe malfunction.
After that, he ended up backstage, and when the gig’s headline act spotted the state of his trousers, he was gifted a pair of Hammer’s signature oversized trews of his very own, which he naturally wore all night and to the set of What About Bob? the following morning, putting the most Murray-esque exclamation point on a typically crazy adventure.
