Not the five BEST concerts. . .
Just the five Best Concert Stories.
*Driving through a tour of suburban Chicago malls, killing time.
If you've ever been to the suburbs of Chicago then you realize the vastness of it's malling culture. Endless parking lots like moats surrounding three-storied shopping complexes as big as castles. On the way to a particular mall, the radio is on, announcing free concerts tickets to the first-comers. The radio station's loudly-painted trailor is parked in the mall lot we've just entered and we approach to claim our prize:
two free tickets for the Tears for Fears show.
We snatch our booty (which turns out to be the only snatch we'd witness that night) and proceed to downtown Chicago for an all-male-audienced show that turns out to be just fine.
*Walking through Ashville North Carolina for a day trip, I spot a sign on a bar promting the night's show:
GLOVE
I enter the establishment to use the bathroom and the band is on stage, very early, setting-up and sound checking. The half-bald-long-haired bass player is stationed behind his stand-up bass and ripping through a diggy diggy beat. The singer/guitarist/harmonica player is clad in a full denim ensemble and is a dead-ringer for a more aged, more drugged Bobby Brady. I realize that GLOVE is G. Love and the balding up-rightist is one third of the secret ingredients for the Special Sauce. We stick around and the show is a blast. Set two turns into a naked-hippy-titty-dance-fest (Ashville is the Hippiest town I've ever seen). Good toons, good boobs and an ass-shaking night to remember.
*In Toronto, at some Emo-liscious concert bill, I'm only slightly waiting to see Thursday. There's a band on stage that sounds familiar. I look to my comrade and exclaim that, "these dudes are stealing money from Ken Andrews, 'cause I'll be damned if this band doesn't sound exactly like Failure". A second later I realize the lead singer is a dead-ringer for Failure's lead-everything, Ken Andrews. A second after that a realize that this is Year of the Rabbit, Ken Andrew's newest incarnation of rock and roll's unrecognized perfection.
*In Omaha, Nebraska I step over a duo of little black boys wrestling on the floor of a bowling alley-game-room in front of a WWF stand-up video game. I had to leave the back-room-stage area to get to the seperate bar that is two rooms away. I'm with an unlikely crew. Performance artist John Wenderoth who once traveled the country dressed like an Indian performing spirit release ceremonies on inanimate objects, including beached whales and various road side attractions, after which point he'd set up a styrofoam igloo and document the whole process. He later moved to a buddist temple and lived there for a year in silence. He was not silent this evening. The other indivivual was a creepishly introverted kid I knew who would not drink alcohol, refused any drinks bought for him while he downed sodas, and ate bag after bag of vending machine peanuts until the show started. These two where an obvious mismatch. John was discomforted by the others lack of boozing, and the other just plain 'ole didn't like people talking to him. After a momentously ackward waiting period, we cross through the bowling alley, enter the back room and proceed to meet Mr. Bungle for a loud and rowdy performance by an entire band wearing loafers, dockers, Hawian shirts and brown-lensed-porno-shades.
Again, it was in a bowling alley in Nebraska. . .
*I'm with my soon-to-be-ex-fiance at a NIN concert well before the NIN frenzy hit the public. We uncomfortably run into her ex-boyfriend who was dating her and away at college the night we conjugated our relationship. Being a suprahuman enigma of positive energy and forgiveness, he hands us both a handful of mushrooms.
During the first act, the fungus seeps unnoticeably into our systems, only to rear it's bulbous mushroom head during act two's intro song. The shrooms hit hard and I witness for the first time in my life, deep in a hallucinogenic stupor, the Rock and roll glory of Marilyn Manson. They had no albums out at the time, no one had heard of them, no one had seen them, and I wasn't really prepared mentally to behold his unique brand of other-wordly dementia. The drugs had me convinced that the momentum of the crowds' push and pull was some stranger, grabbing me by the wrist and twisting me through the pit of gothy bodies. I'd try to leave the area in front of the band and the mysterious force would escort me back to the front of the stage where I would look up and see unthinkable sights that could not be deciphered as the reality of MM or the hallucinatory cartoon-play of my brain's expanding grasp. Real people didn't look like that. My drawings looked like that, but they weren't real people. My imagination was obviously creeping out into the dark of the theater. Marilyn Manson could not really look like that, could he? Did he really just ask, "Which one of you little boys is gonna come up here and let me put my fist in you?". And for the love of sanity and all that is balanced in this lifetime, why, when I'm on drugs and not so in control of myself, do I have to keep looking up and seeing men in bondage suits, towering over me without eyebrows, sounding a lot like thay're singing about cake and sodomy? A year later, when the first album was finally released, I was both relieved and disappointed to discover that the truth of the situation was less drugs than reality.
I sometimes wonder. . . I mean, you hear that by the time you die you'll have spent something like four months of your life brushing your teeth. . . how many months and weeks I've spent standing on sore feet, watching live music unfold in front of me?
Definately more than I'll have spent brushing my teeth.
*Driving through a tour of suburban Chicago malls, killing time.
If you've ever been to the suburbs of Chicago then you realize the vastness of it's malling culture. Endless parking lots like moats surrounding three-storied shopping complexes as big as castles. On the way to a particular mall, the radio is on, announcing free concerts tickets to the first-comers. The radio station's loudly-painted trailor is parked in the mall lot we've just entered and we approach to claim our prize:
two free tickets for the Tears for Fears show.
We snatch our booty (which turns out to be the only snatch we'd witness that night) and proceed to downtown Chicago for an all-male-audienced show that turns out to be just fine.
*Walking through Ashville North Carolina for a day trip, I spot a sign on a bar promting the night's show:
GLOVE
I enter the establishment to use the bathroom and the band is on stage, very early, setting-up and sound checking. The half-bald-long-haired bass player is stationed behind his stand-up bass and ripping through a diggy diggy beat. The singer/guitarist/harmonica player is clad in a full denim ensemble and is a dead-ringer for a more aged, more drugged Bobby Brady. I realize that GLOVE is G. Love and the balding up-rightist is one third of the secret ingredients for the Special Sauce. We stick around and the show is a blast. Set two turns into a naked-hippy-titty-dance-fest (Ashville is the Hippiest town I've ever seen). Good toons, good boobs and an ass-shaking night to remember.
*In Toronto, at some Emo-liscious concert bill, I'm only slightly waiting to see Thursday. There's a band on stage that sounds familiar. I look to my comrade and exclaim that, "these dudes are stealing money from Ken Andrews, 'cause I'll be damned if this band doesn't sound exactly like Failure". A second later I realize the lead singer is a dead-ringer for Failure's lead-everything, Ken Andrews. A second after that a realize that this is Year of the Rabbit, Ken Andrew's newest incarnation of rock and roll's unrecognized perfection.
*In Omaha, Nebraska I step over a duo of little black boys wrestling on the floor of a bowling alley-game-room in front of a WWF stand-up video game. I had to leave the back-room-stage area to get to the seperate bar that is two rooms away. I'm with an unlikely crew. Performance artist John Wenderoth who once traveled the country dressed like an Indian performing spirit release ceremonies on inanimate objects, including beached whales and various road side attractions, after which point he'd set up a styrofoam igloo and document the whole process. He later moved to a buddist temple and lived there for a year in silence. He was not silent this evening. The other indivivual was a creepishly introverted kid I knew who would not drink alcohol, refused any drinks bought for him while he downed sodas, and ate bag after bag of vending machine peanuts until the show started. These two where an obvious mismatch. John was discomforted by the others lack of boozing, and the other just plain 'ole didn't like people talking to him. After a momentously ackward waiting period, we cross through the bowling alley, enter the back room and proceed to meet Mr. Bungle for a loud and rowdy performance by an entire band wearing loafers, dockers, Hawian shirts and brown-lensed-porno-shades.
Again, it was in a bowling alley in Nebraska. . .
*I'm with my soon-to-be-ex-fiance at a NIN concert well before the NIN frenzy hit the public. We uncomfortably run into her ex-boyfriend who was dating her and away at college the night we conjugated our relationship. Being a suprahuman enigma of positive energy and forgiveness, he hands us both a handful of mushrooms.
During the first act, the fungus seeps unnoticeably into our systems, only to rear it's bulbous mushroom head during act two's intro song. The shrooms hit hard and I witness for the first time in my life, deep in a hallucinogenic stupor, the Rock and roll glory of Marilyn Manson. They had no albums out at the time, no one had heard of them, no one had seen them, and I wasn't really prepared mentally to behold his unique brand of other-wordly dementia. The drugs had me convinced that the momentum of the crowds' push and pull was some stranger, grabbing me by the wrist and twisting me through the pit of gothy bodies. I'd try to leave the area in front of the band and the mysterious force would escort me back to the front of the stage where I would look up and see unthinkable sights that could not be deciphered as the reality of MM or the hallucinatory cartoon-play of my brain's expanding grasp. Real people didn't look like that. My drawings looked like that, but they weren't real people. My imagination was obviously creeping out into the dark of the theater. Marilyn Manson could not really look like that, could he? Did he really just ask, "Which one of you little boys is gonna come up here and let me put my fist in you?". And for the love of sanity and all that is balanced in this lifetime, why, when I'm on drugs and not so in control of myself, do I have to keep looking up and seeing men in bondage suits, towering over me without eyebrows, sounding a lot like thay're singing about cake and sodomy? A year later, when the first album was finally released, I was both relieved and disappointed to discover that the truth of the situation was less drugs than reality.
I sometimes wonder. . . I mean, you hear that by the time you die you'll have spent something like four months of your life brushing your teeth. . . how many months and weeks I've spent standing on sore feet, watching live music unfold in front of me?
Definately more than I'll have spent brushing my teeth.
posted by Matthew Pazzol at 6:27 AM
2 Comments:
dude why dont you email me back and tell me how fantastic ruins are? you dont like me...... bbooooooo.
that was a mmmmeaty post. i have nothing else to say to you about it right now, except, i was unable to attend the recent autolux, qotsa, nin concert and the disappointment still hasn't worn off even after i've heard all the negatives about it. so there. cry a tear for me.
Post a Comment
<< Home