I Like Music, Sometimes.: being a teenager

Showing posts with label being a teenager. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Slayer.

My introduction to Slayer was the Live Undead cassette that my friend Malachai let me borrow in the 8^th grade, right after he moved to my neighborhood, with the cool cover art and awesome song introduction (“They say the pen is mightier than the sword… Well I say fuck the pen, cuz it can DIE BY THE SWORD!”) I was sold and dove headfirst into their current and prior albums. I remember being on the bus in 1988, heading to the start of 9^th grade, and Malachai being so pissed at how slow Slayer’s new record, South of Heaven, was. He handed it over to me; I popped it into my Walkman and was like HOLY SHIT THIS IS HEAVY. Somewhere out there are two pictures of me from Halloween 1989 wearing my old jean jacket and Slayer “World Sacrifice Tour ‘89” Slaytanic Whermacht shirt; with eye makeup done up like Jeff Hanneman’s from the layout of Show No Mercy. You couldn’t tell me in High school that Slayer didn’t straight up rule.

this makeup, but NOT as cool.

The best photo ever taken of the author in a slayer shirt

Today, I got in a brief discussion about Slayer with a friend and it caused me to reflect briefly on all the times I had seen them. I first saw Slayer in the summer of 1991 on the legendary “Clash of the Titans” tour, which, though they played before Megadeth, they were the clear true reason why people were there. I think that was the height of their popularity and the last year (1991) that thrash metal was on top of its game. I was 17 and seeing Slayer meant a lot to me, even if I had to cram myself into the back my friend Jeff’s brother’s car- a Pontiac Firebird (they had no backseat) and tough it out for the 60 minute ride there and back.

The European leg of this tour had Testament and Suicidal opening and we get the very not thrash AIC, explain that.

I remember some Nazi skins from Rochester holding up some weird Slayer Nazi banner very briefly before they played and the pit being insane, but mostly, I watched Slayer, in awe. By this point, I had listened to them for 3-4 years and seeing them devastate an audience was awesome. As the crowd’s personal regard for safety had completely gone out the window, I found myself drifting further and further to the left of the stage, hoping to not catch a boot to the face. Hell Awaits/ The Antichrist/ War Ensemble/ South of Heaven/ Raining Blood/ Altar of Sacrifice/ Jesus Saves/ Dead Skin Mask/ Seasons in the Abyss/ Mandatory Suicide/ Angel of Death. Decade of Aggression came out a few months later and the first 11 songs were literally the set I had seen, though recorded 2 1/2 weeks later in Florida, not in an amusement park amphitheater in Buffalo. It remains one of my favorite live records (and Slayer releases) to this day.

Slayer came back around in early 1995 and played Buffalo again at the Connecticut Armory, but at the time, I was really down on Divine Intervention, their current album. Their new drummer, the “capable-but-too-many-busy-fills” Paul Bostaph and Tom Araya’s kl really detracted from the album for me. I think I enjoy it now, but then, it was too close to their “classic” material for me to really buy it wholesale. Most of my friends went; all of them praised the show. WHOOPS.

When Slayer came back around in the June of 1998, we went, even though the sampler we heard for their new record, Diabolous in Musica, was pretty bad. It came across like they were now trying to emulate the bands that they influenced to stay musically viable, than just being Slayer. Still we trekked up to Toronto and caught a great gig, with a setlist that only featured two songs off the current record (it had only come out 2 days prior) Hell Awaits/ Spirit in Black/ War Ensemble/ Death's Head/ South of Heaven/ Dittohead/ Captor of Sin/ Die by the Sword/ Black Magic/ Sex. Murder. Art./ Stain of Mind/ Dead Skin Mask/ Raining Blood/ Altar of Sacrifice/ Jesus Saves/ Chemical Warfare/ Mandatory Suicide/ Angel of Death. I remember losing my mind for Die by the Sword, Black Magic and Chemical Warfare. Though I saw them MANY times after, this was the last time I would see a great Slayer show.

Everything here says "this show will be bad," but it was actually good

About a month later, my band at the time, No Reason, went on a mostly disastrous tour, riddled with cancellations. After NOT playing a show in NJ with art metal band Isis opening- "listen, there's only ONE paying person here and she's here just here to take pictures of Isis." We called the promoter of our next show (Mike Riley, later of Pulling Teeth), two days away in Baltimore and asked if we could come out early. He was kind enough to let us stay at his place, but we did have some time before he got out of work, so we went to the inner harbor area of B-more to kill some time. After roasting in the sun for a while, we went into what seemed like an upscale mall attached and for whatever reason, there was former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo in a Bath and Bodyworks, with (what I assume was) his wife. He looked at us, sized me up with my Samhain shirt and quickly looked away, probably not wanted to be accosted by fans. When we passed him again in the thoroughfare of the mall 20 minutes later, he was wearing sunglasses (indoors) and was slouching his body posture, so we didn't bother him, because he clearly didn't want to be bothered and because we thought the sunglasses/ slouching thing was fucking hilarious.

the "metal wall" at my first apartment Circa 1995

Although the aforementioned Toronto show was the last great Slayer show I saw, I did see some good and decent shows during the God Hates Us All era, and I think that record is OK, but since then it’s been a slow slide down, with me ultimately deciding not to go see them live again after witnessing a miserable, muddy sounding performance in 2012 at the very same amusement park I had seen them at in 1991. Disciple/ War Ensemble/ Die by the Sword/ Hate Worldwide/ Mandatory Suicide/ Altar of Sacrifice/ Jesus Saves/ Seasons in the Abyss/ Hell Awaits/ Dead Skin Mask/ Angel of Death/ South of Heaven/ Raining Blood. The setlist isn’t even bad, it was the performance and that they followed Motorhead, who, even with an ailing Lemmy, blew the roof off the place. When a sick man, who is 20+ years older than you, levels your band, maybe it’s time to stop. Regardless, I still bought Repentless when it came out… old habits die hard.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

The first wealth is health?

Wife takes photo of the author during Gruesome while a sinus infection starts to do gruesome things to his insides

I didn’t bother mentioning in my post about the Asphyx show that I had just gotten over pneumonia, as I had already completed a run of antibiotics and felt pretty good. Around the time of my last post, that was starting to change, as I just started developing a sinus infection that went into my ears and wreaked all sorts of havoc. I went and saw Gruesome literally the day my right ear started feeling congested, but with ear plugs in hand, or rather, ear, I soldiered on through their incredible set. Three weeks after that show, a specialist and two rounds of antibiotics later, my ears are still fucked and full of fluid, but improving. The downside is that I missed a bunch of shows because of it; Ruiner, Testament, Pallbearer, Destruction, Candlemass, the list goes on and today I find myself reflecting on a show I went to even though I was sick as hell.

Gruesome, photo by the Author

In May of 1993, my friend Glen Symanski (who was later in NoReason with me) and I decided to go see Shelter at the Lost Horizon in Syracuse, NY. I had been diagnosed with Bronchitis that Friday, and was on an antibiotic, but really didn’t feel better the late morning of May the 23rd when Glenn picked me up. I had my Amoxicillin bottle with me and off we went; the thing is, I didn’t have my license yet and Glenn, aside from knowing it was “in Syracuse” had no idea where the Lost Horizon was. After the two hour drive there, we got off at a Syracuse proper exit and began the search.

Glenn thought that if we found a phone booth (remember those?) we could look up the address and go from there, but after driving around and not having any real luck, I think we stopped pursuing that route. It was early on a brisk Sunday afternoon in a college town and not too many people were out and about; we drove around for like an hour and got nowhere. Now knowing that the show hard started and feeling the pressure (with me feeling like total shit) we spotted the man who would be our savior; a guy in a Sick Of It All longsleeve. Mr. Longsleeve had no idea that there was a show that day, but knew where the Lost Horizon “kind of was” and we got to the show right as Vision started playing.

Shelter/ 108 tour poster from the internet

Vision were ok, they played a lot of songs that I didn’t know at the time, but what I do remember was that Dave, their singer, had all of his hair stuffed up into a winter cap and at some point a stage diver made a point to take the hat down with him and out came Dave’s flowing 90’s metal locks. 108 took the stage shortly after and were absolutely devastating. I remember standing in the middle of the “pit” during their set in total amazement about how insane their energy was. I also was hacking my lungs out, so apologies to anyone who got sick after. Shelter headlined but weren’t half as good as they had been the two years prior. For me, nothing can top the show they played at Randall Studios in Buffalo in June of ’92, which to me was their pinnacle, although more success definitely came to them later on.

The drive home was uneventful and the cool thing about a lot of those Syracuse matinees (but not all, some were goddamn marathons) was that, even after the two hour drive home, it was light out and the evening was still ahead of you. Long after I had gotten over the Bronchitis, the same tour played Buffalo the following August with Against All Hope and Slugfest (their last show) opening. 108 was even better that night, confronting dance floor bullies during their set and practically exploding on stage. Following that, Shelter came across like behaved school children.

The differences between 19 year old me and 43 year old me are often time few and far between and yet at the very same time stark. I think one of those stark differences is that sick 43 year old me would’ve missed 108 in their prime to gladly stay in bed.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

My Friend Malachai

I used to go out in public wearing these as pants.

The summer before 9th grade (1988), a new kid named Derek moved into my neighborhood and changed my life forever. I was firmly rooted into metal: Metallica, Ozzy, Anthrax, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and also Devo, Sex Pistols and the Ramones. I even had a Celtic Frost album I had swiped from my uncle. But I wasn't a cool looking metal head, I emulated Anthrax' corny style, which made my 14 year old pudgy male body look like a 30-something lesbian (no offense to 30-something 80's lesbians) and is why I generally do not post pictures of myself before 1991. But that didn't matter to Derek, he just wanted to listen to and talk about underground music.

The guitar player of this band was my neighborhood's paperboy- "87 demo"

Derek had a slightly older cousin that lived on the other side of town, and hung out with the guys in Malevolent Creation (hometown heroes before they relocated to FL). His cousin REALLY had his finger on the pulse of what was going on in the thrash/ death metal/ crossover scene. Through him, cool bands to check out trickled to Derek and then to me, where I got to choose what I did and didn't like. Derek introduced me to Slayer, Kreator, Destruction, Death, Dark and Death Angel, Possessed, Exodus, Pestilence, Sodom, DRI, COC, Excel... The list could go on. I'm not going to lie and say that I loved all of these bands right away, some I outright did not "get" and I called most death metal bands "super thrash" upon my first listen. I remember actually laughing the first time he played me Scum by Napalm Death, only to have them become one of my favorite bands within a year or so. The bands I liked right out of the gate though were Slayer, DRI and COC- then closely followed by Exodus and Kreator. By the middle of 9th grade (1989) I was a bonafide thrash metal maniac and went to see my beloved Metallica for the first time. Club shows followed and many times I went to shows, I went with Derek. By this time, due to his red-headed mullet and insane attitude, older dudes at school started calling him "basket weaver" presumably because people in insane asylums would weave baskets, he played into that a little bit, jocks didn't fuck with him the way they did with the rest of us and he was mostly popular, much to his chagrin. His popularity at school hit an all time high the end of that year when someone called him "Malachai" due to his resemblance to the kid in Children of the Corn. The new nickname stuck and he still answers to this, although his resemblance to the aforementioned antagonist (which was questionable in 1989) is mostly nonexistent.

Not our Malachai.

There is a list of hilarious Malachai stories. I could fill an entire book, but those are his stories to tell, not mine. Though, I should probably give some high lights. He was once headbanging to Kreator so hard that he got ran over by a car because he wasn't paying attention. Another time, he and another dude in our neighborhood named Evan (Who I was later in a band with) got into a fist fight in the middle of his street after school. A few minutes into it, Malachai's dad (Dennis), who looked EXACTLY like Mr. Brady from the Brady Bunch pulled up,as he was coming home from work, and broke it up. Evan took exception to this, calling Dennis something that alleged that he had a small dick. Imagine our surprise when Dennis, called Evan's bluff and started undoing his pants, "you wanna measure dicks, you little asshole? Whip it out!" everyone laughed and Evan and Malachai were friends from that day forward too. But back to the original point of writing this, Malachai introduced me to A LOT of music.

Our Malachai in Seattle in 2009, photo by the author

The last band Malachai got me into was Asphyx, the classic Dutch death metal band. he introduced me to The Rack, their debut, shortly before they played Maryland Death Metal Fest in 2009. I was obviously familiar with Pestilence, the singer's former classic band, but not Asphyx; who I ended up liking right away. I was so fucking pissed when the sub-par Mayhem overstayed their welcome onstage at the fest resulting on a truncated Asphyx set, which was still great, but I, and the crowd, were pissed and wanted more.

so good.

Last December, when I got to see Metallica absolutely kill it in a club , the first person I thought about was Malachai and how he didn't get to see Metallica in 89 AND had to wait many, many years before he finally did. I feel badly that I haven't spoken to him since I've moved to California, nearly two years now. I should call him and see what's up, I know it will be exactly the same as if we talked last week, as if no time has passed; especially because a week ago, I went and saw Asphyx headline a show at the Oakland Metro and they were fucking awesome.

Skeletal Remains, a recent highlight

I got to the show late, missing what I assume were the first two openers, save for about 12 seconds of a last song. Skeletal Remains, from LA then blazed through an awesome set of classic styled death metal and really impressed me. Pumped on the Skeletal Remains set, I bought their debut and a shirt, then purchased their sophomore effort on iTunes over the weekend. I even convinced the guys working the door to let me run out to my car (no ins-and-outs) to throw it in my trunk, much like they had let me in October 2015 when I saw Infest and Excel there.

Asphyx, so cool.

Asphyx were on the last California date of their "Death Across The West" tour and there was a pretty good crowd of around 300 die-hards. They raged through 15 songs, but, although I have their most recent efforts, I am not as familiar with stuff that isn't on The Rack. I tend to post set lists, but I can tell you they played Wasteland of Terror really fucking fast and that was cool, but the rest was a blur. Some of vocalist Martin van Drunen's stage banter was a little more corny than I expected; relating their song about the WWII battleship Bismark to "motor-boating tits" and complaining that the ride to Portland for the next gig wouldn't even "give them enough time to get laid." But I guess metal is as metal does. Still, I was again grateful to see another incredible set (two in one night!) and picked up a shirt and their new record, that the opening track, "Candiru," regardless of how ridiculous, is awesome. Maybe I'll call Malachai, or rather, Derek, and thank him for introducing me to a world that has continued to pay dividends to my quality of life for nearly 30 years, I really should.

Monday, April 17, 2017

I never saw Black Flag, or rather, an ode to reunions.

This cassette cannot swim, trust me.

I never saw Black Flag.

My first introduction to Black Flag was the Wasted… Again cassette I got from a dude named Pete Coit my sophomore year of high school. But on a hot day during the summer of 1990, I jumped into a swimming pool with the cassette in my pocket, thus ending my Black Flag collection in one triumphant splash. Remarkably, the other cassette in my pocket, Dead Kennedys’ Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death, survived and provided enjoyment for many years to come, albeit without any text on the cassette shell or cover.

I never saw Black Flag.

In February, 1991, my friend Greg, his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer, and I all gave each other stick and poke tattoos; I think Greg got an anarchy symbol , but to show my new found devotion to hardcore, I got the best approximation of the Black Flag “bars” we could pull off. We also pierced my nose, which, of course, after noticing, caused my parents to ground me, in turn missing the last show at my beloved Skyroom.

26 years later and it's almost still visible.

I never saw Black Flag.

By summer 1991, I was 17 and my parents loosened up the reins, which allowed me to spend a lot of time shopping for records and going to shows. I bought the cd for Damaged that came with Jealous Again as the bonus tracks. I listened to that cd a lot that summer and even had liberty spikes for a short time. I loved the line “I know the world's got problems/ I've got problems of my own/ not the kind that can't be solved with an atom bomb.” My teenage mind thrived on nihilistic ideas, delving into painful punk, death metal and hardcore; all tucked safe and sound in the suburbs and wrapped up, by stark contrast, in straight edge.

pure devastation

I never saw Black Flag.

In the 90’s I saw Henry Rollins do some spoken word, which was pretty funny and caught a fairly OK Rollins Band gig. I like Rollins Band, but they’re more like a smart bomb, precise, whereas Black Flag is continual carpet bombing—Both can be, at their best, effective, but in different ways and appeal to different sides of the brain.

I never saw Black Flag.

In June of 2003, I went to Cleveland with my ex-wife and a couple friends to see Rollins Band perform an entire set of Black Flag songs (the “Rise Above” tour to benefit the WM3). While we were waiting for the show to start, standing in the crowd, I got full on hip checked from behind. Henry Rollins, apparently prepping for his agitated stage presence, was just shoving folks out of the way to make his way back stage. I was one of the unfortunate few in his path. It was like being bullied in high school, but by the guy who literally, just by singing words, helped me deal with those bullies. I guess you really should never meet your heroes. Still, all was forgiven once the set started (Keith Morris) Nervous Breakdown/ I've had it/ Depression/ Wasted/ No Values/ Fix Me/ Revenge/ Gimme Gimme Gimme. (Henry Rollins) Rise Above/ Thirsty and Miserable/ Clocked In/ Revenge/ Damaged/ Modern Man/ I've Heard It Before/ American Waste/ Jealous Again/ I Don't Care/ TV Party/ Can't Decide/ Police Story/ Six Pack/ What I See/ No More/ Black Coffee/ Slip It In/ My War. It was good with Morris singing but with good old Hank, it was incredible. We barely noticed that it wasn’t REALLY Black Flag.

I never saw Black Flag.

In 2013, Greg Ginn came back out of the woodwork and pieced together a new line up of Black Flag, with “Chavo” back on vocals. Reports from all fronts were pretty varied, but any question if the new line up was any good were silenced with the release of What The… it wasn’t good, at all, from the amateur hour cover art to the lack luster songs,22 songs; 22 odes to failure, and 22 reasons to NOT go see Black Flag.

Shoot me if I ever think something like this is acceptable.

I never saw Black Flag.

Also in 2013, in a bizarre case of tit-for-tat synchronicity, and as an alternate to the tepid, flaccid Black Flag reunion, former members announced they would be touring under the name Flag. I went to one of their shows and thought it was pretty good, but the “Rise Above” tour was heads and shoulders better. Revenge/ Fix Me/ Police Story/ Don't Care/ Depression/ I've Had It/ No Values/ My War/ No More/ Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie/ White Minority/ Jealous Again/ Wasted/ Clocked In/ Nervous Breakdown/ American Waste/ Spray Paint/ Thirsty and Miserable/ Padded Cell/ Six Pack/ Rise Above/ Louie Louie/ I love You/ Damaged. Weird to have Morris singing My War and I Love You, but, you know, not THAT WEIRD.

I never saw Black Flag.

Now it’s 2017 and a lot of bands play reunions at festivals or slug it out again on the road for a payday. I am grateful that I get to, when the mood strikes me, visit such events and see “the guys” or “some of the guys” play “the songs.” But it’s not the same, and everybody knows it. You’re not the same person in your forties or fifties that you were in your teens, twenties or thirties and you shouldn’t be. Seeing reunion gigs, is like visiting an ancient ruin on vacation; you can appreciate the beauty of what it is, and what it once was, but the purpose, the intent, and context has forever changed. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it, or that it’s wrong, just recognize it for what it is: musical tourism, a way to visit history without all the mud and guts.

I never saw Black Flag, and that’s ok.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

More Halfmast photos

I really enjoyed the post yesterday about my time in Halfmast and the feedback I got regarding its content, so I upload a few more things from my archives, and that I stole from Facebook. Enjoy!