Q: Why did Bono fall off the stage?

It was not a shining moment for Sly, a veteran of the 1969 Woodstock festival, whose MIA status for the past several decades reflects his sad status as one of pop music's most notable living casualties. His brief "concert" was such a debacle that it made the train wreck-like shows Courtney Love often delivers seem like marvels of inspiration and precision by comparison. Songs that began with a lurch sputtered to a halt moments later, several times in a row. Sly stumbled repeatedly, lost his balance more than once and even sprawled out on the stage. He also had difficulty in the high-backed office chair he sat on, situated behind two electric keyboards, apparently unaware that the chair was on wheels that would roll each time he moved his feet or torso. Constant technical problems led to him sometimes becoming a bystander at his own show, as roadies fiddled with microphone stands and raced to get a back-up laptop computer when Sly's went on the fritz. Why the laptop? So that his very good band could stand on stage doing nothing, while Sly gave a hard-drive "preview" of his performance. Never mind that the tinny music emanating from his computer bore little resemblance to what followed -- or to his ground-breaking albums of four and five decades ago. When his band finally joined in, it was for a series of shaky, stop-start-and-self-destruct songs that soon had some fans jeering and others walking out in disgust. That's assuming they hadn't already left after trying to endure his rambling, five-minute rant against his former manager, unnamed law enforcement officials and, quite possibly, people who enjoy macrame or the Macarena. He mumbled so much, it was hard to tell, although his promise-cum-threat to "name names" was at least mildly intriguing. "How long I been on stage?" Sly asked, after all of 18 minutes, perhaps half of which was actually devoted to music. It was a fair question considering his remarkably erratic performance and slipshod vocals, which required his one male and three female backing singers to do the heavy lifting. To add to the bizarreness factor, he was wearing what appeared to be a late 19th Century policeman's outfit, replete with a large, star-shaped silver badge and a blue cap, which rested on top of his nearly shoulder-length white wig. The song selections were generally sound -- "If You want Me to Stay," "It's a Family Affair," "Dance to the Music" and the inevitable "I Want to Take You Higher" -- but the manner in which they were mangled verged on the tragic. Strange? No doubt. Weird to the point of perversity? Absolutely. Tragic (especially for a living legend who once soared to heady heights on a regular basis)? Yes, sadly. But it was precisely because of its singular wretchedness that Sly's Coachella performance could become the stuff of legend, an event far more fans will claim to have witnessed in person than they actually did.