Audience members climbing onstage is about as bad as it gets for a performer. So imagine how James Brown felt while performing in Boston in 1968 on the night after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the rest of the country's inner cities were burning and the city of Boston decided to use his concert to try to prevent the same thing happening there by broadcasting it live and then his fans started rushing the stage and cops began roughly shoving them off.
Brown dealt with it by keeping his cool, pushing the cops back, and gently persuading his fans to get down so the show could continue: "You're not being fair to yourselves or me either or your race...Now are we together or we ain't?" Watch below (from "The Night James Brown Saved Boston"):
And btw, this is how you get the title of Hardest Working Man in Show Business (from the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964):
Love the cape routine. According to Wikipedia, Keith Richards claimed that choosing to follow Brown on this show was the biggest mistake in the Stones' career. And Rick Rubin said that when he was visiting Prince's offices, this performance was looped on a lobby television. Rubin says it "may be the single greatest rock & roll performance ever captured on film."
Related:
How Leonard Cohen soothed the savage beasts at the Isle of Wight in 1970
Thom Yorke dealing with a passed out crowd member
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