Live music is a fickle beast. Any number of things can go wrong at any given moment, particularly for bands that tour the country (or the world) with dozens of elaborate set pieces, choreographed routines, live animals or a lunatic drummer. For every Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, there is at least one Milli Vanilli at Lake Compounce, Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live or Britney Spears doing a catatonic shamble-dance at the MTV Video Music Awards. And sometimes, these disasters are far more entertaining ...

6 U2 Gets Trapped Inside a Giant Lemon

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This event went down in history as one of the most beautiful real-world re-creations of This Is Spinal Tap mankind has ever seen: the time U2 got trapped inside a giant prop lemon.

In order to promote the release of their 1997 album, Pop, U2 embarked on their PopMart tour, mistakenly believing that the two things people simply couldn't get enough of were U2 and Kmart. The band wanted to find a marketable conceptual hook for the tour, and the logical solution was to make use of wacky props, videos and costumes, making some kind of statement about commercialism in music or something.

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"Commercialism is wrong!" -Pepsi

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Anyway, one of these props was a giant hollow lemon meant to contain the band members as they rolled out onstage for their first encore. The lemon was chosen for two reasons: the first being a reference to the U2 song "Lemon," and the second being fuck you, thanks for all the money.

But you can't fault the unintentional result, which was magical: On more than one occasion, the lemon malfunctioned, leaving U2 helplessly trapped inside.

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"FREEDOM!"

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Thousands of people then just watched in stunned, awkward silence, because after two hours of cowboy suits and an inexplicable karaoke sing-along with the Edge, it was unclear whether clawing frantically at the walls of a giant piece of fruit was part of the show. In Norway, the band was able to climb out of the back of the lemon, but in Japan, they were sealed inside, presumably stuck listening to Bono's prerecorded voice reading passages from his own autobiography, as is customary in every vehicle he occupies.

When asked about it later in an interview, Bono said, "It was a beautiful thing, traveling in that lemon." This is perhaps less indicative of the crowd's response to the lemon and more related to the fact that the lemon was covered in mirrors.