Best story I have was at GD Richfield in march '93, the second night after the blizzard show that was cancelled. I got in late due to how I got there from the shut down Pittsburgh airport (a whole other tale of incredible Dead kharma). I was running a 3 Nak 300 rig into an MX100 and when I got it all set up, the damned external battery box to the mixer was dead. Opened it up, and a wire was broken inside, and there was no way to secure it because it was too short to strip and try and twist it on the plug terminal.
There I was at a show that I should not have even made it to due to the weather, great front row OTS spot that was saved for me by some buddies, and my rig had a problem. Now what? Well, my friend Rob saw Don Pearson tinkering around the racks, and called him out. He asked him if he had a soldering gun we could use. He said no, but then called over one of his Ultrasound techs and told him to see if he could help us. I showed him the problem, he stepped back up on the board, opened a drawer next to Dan Healy's chair, pulled out a wire with insulated alligator clips on each end, and said "here you go, just give it back at the end the night". He said it was the way they solved the same kind of issue when a problem was found without enough time to permanently fix it.
Well, I clipped both ends of the broken power circuit, and I was up an running. After the show, I returned the clips to the Ultrasound guy, told him thanks, he said "no problem". On the off night before the Cap CTR run, I soldered the break, and had a great rest of the tour. Saw the guy in Atlanta a week later at the Omni run, and he joked with Healy, "there's that guy that used your clips in Richfield", and Dan cracked a big smile and asked if I was good, and I gave him the thumbs up.
One of the best taper stories I have about being helped out by a band's crew.
This year, the helpful crew member award goes to Bob Cogswell who hooked me with a stand for the TLG SoCal run so I did not have to fly with one.