Maryland Deathfest Is Decadent And Depraved, Part the First

So, at this year's Maryland Deathfest, my Invisible Oranges colleague Richard Street-Jammer and I were discussing the inevitable task of writing the fest up whilst driving there in his car.  During the course of the conversation, Street-Jammer began to drive erratically, as he is wont to do, prompting me to comment how much he drives like a character from a Hunter S. Thompson novel.  Cue an escalating conversation, the end result of which was how much someone should write up Maryland Deathfest in the Gonzo idiom.  This, o my brothers/sisters, is the end result.  It was too over-the-head to have a place on IO, but here it should have a good loving home.  Brace yourself.  WE CAN'T STOP HERE, THIS IS METALHEAD COUNTRY. 

Maryland Deathfest Is Decadent And Depraved

By Hunter-Hunt S. Thompson-Hendrix

(Names have been changed to protect the guilty, with the exception of Richard Street-Jammer, and he’s so mysterious that no one knows who the hell he is either.)

Day 1

We were about four miles outside of BWI when that goddamned maniac Richard Street-Jammer started playing Rotting Christ in his car.  It was a Thursday and hot as goddamn Hell.  We’d been going hard all afternoon, roughly navigating the mean, sidewise looking streets of Bodymore, Murderland past the fat pigs and aggressive motorists that clog its blacktop.  Traveling together in the heat of the bloody Atlantic Coast was me, Dr. Dick-Jam, and that international metal warrior Black Kat Killian all crammed into that tiny Cobalt: thankfully for us, Kat had just gotten into town, and was placated by lack of sleep and hangover.  Ordinarily she’d take one look at the situation and slay us instantly for being the insufferable nerds we are, leaving our carcasses to be roadside attractions for fat tourists and wannabe black metal bands, but for now she was placated by the soft thrum of the car engine and the bottle of Jack Daniels making its rounds throughout her Valkyrian bloodstream.  How she could sit as patiently as she did through that morass, however, escapes my wildest thoughts, for Street-Jammer drives like a maniac, all muscle and fury in his emasculating red Cobalt.  His is the American metal dream: too nerdy to live, too kvlt to die.  Brake hard, brake late, break faces.  “Good God, man, slow it down!” I growled irritably as Dick-Jam nearly neatly plowed his bumper into the monstrous obscenity of a Mack truck that scoured the blacktop before us.  “Haven’t you ever gone this fast before?  It’s the point of living, for I am the Street-Jammer!” Dicky cackled maniacally.  I could see by the wild eyes that popped out from behind his glasses that he meant business: men who wear that expression are not to be trusted, especially while driving an innocuous red two-passenger sedan that nonetheless bears the name of the greatest metal band of 2009.  I’d have to do something here, but what?  I couldn’t arrange for him to be killed in the pit at the first night of the show: his combat skills were probably too well honed from a lifetime spent mimicking the moves of Mortal Kombat that he played constantly.  No self-respecting neander-teutonic mosher could ever expect to get the better of Madman Dick-Jam.  My god, it would be a goddamn bloodbath: limbs and patches of the most obscure metal bands flying every which way in a miasma of whirling death!  No, if he was to stop driving like this, I’d have to kill him myself.  But how do you kill a man who fears nothing?

Arriving at the venue around four, I scouted first for a good place to sit down.  Any music journalist worth his weight in salt and ice knows that, to really think about music, one must sit frequently to focus one’s thoughts and give one’s calves a break.  After all, I do have delicate calves.  Extermination Angel’s vocalist looked like a cartoon character as he shuddered spasmodically on stage like some epileptic dunce suffering from a gunshot wound in a Cormac McCarthy novel.  The rest of the band was adequate.  By the time Absu took the stage, however, I was ready to sit down.  But could I?  I am an Absu fan above the average Absu fan, and I could not allow myself to sit down, not least of all when Proscriptor McGovern took the stage in balls-tight leather pants, sleeves that failed to connect at the shoulder like a decent human’s would, and a spangled tiara from which dangled precariously the mic into which he expressed his esoteric lyricism.  It was certainly a sight to behold, but the damn fools behind me moshed too hard for me to enjoy it.  At one point the swirling mass of chaos that was the pit even slammed me cock-first into a pretty girl who’d been holding her ground athwart me: one evil stare from her cold blue eyes told me that, yes, it was my fault that this rabble of unwashed ruffians, their beards a malevolent shade of black and eyes like fires from wicked mountaintops had lifted me unceremoniously from my pedestal and brought me down through the ages of the Earth to disgrace her back jean pocket with the impact of my crotch. Her red hair warned me like a beacon that I had a few less teeth in my immediate future, but the gods of luck and fortitude are on my side, for I narrowly escaped the situation with my life.   You can never tell with the Irish (which I am assuming she was, for as the scion of the clans Burke, Miller, and Houlihan I can smell a fellow potato-eater from a full fathom five).  Which is precisely the reason that I had found myself attempting to stave off the urge to murder Richard Street-Jammer earlier that day: he can’t admit it because he works in the highest echelon of the American murder-industrial complex, but his real name is more Irish than James Joyce drinking a stout on Grafton Street with Gerry Adams and a damn leprechaun.  And to just wait until that sorry sack of Hibernian horseshit Donald Mulligan blustered into town.  To which I also think: where the hell was Primordial this show around? 

The night slipped on as one would have expected it to: eyehategod showed up drunk and lolling gloriously.  Agalloch transcended mortal words, save that the idiots who had moshed to every other band previous still insisted on moshing to Agalloch.  You can’t mosh to Agalloch, you bastards!  The music simply does not allow it: there are no convenient breakdowns or single-note half-time riffs for you metal mongoloids to slam into.  Leave me my breathing room and get the hell out of my face, you fascist mosh-thugs!  Still, “I am the Wooden Doors” was a revelation, and for that the author expressed his gratitude.  Autopsy was last and took too long to set up.  This would come back to bite them right on their soft, finely aged SoCal buttocks when, around 2 am, security promptly shut the show down with police assistance.  I bit my lip in that queer mixture of apprehension and glorious anticipation: on the one hand, a riot of filthy, unwashed cretins seemed imminent, and that meant potential bodily harm to me.  On the other hand, a riot of filthy, unwashed cretins seemed imminent, a slap in the face to the donut-munchers of the Baltimore PD and an unwelcome blight upon the sanitized face of the city closest to our nation’s capital.  It was electric, real and true, a beacon of freaks in this world of duplicity and industrial lies. Someday we should all be so lucky to look back and say “I was there when the forces of metal nearly succeeded in turning the tables on all the foul men of this earth” to my grandson upon my knee in a new kvlt world.  Of course, nearly wasn’t good enough, Autopsy played a quickie, and the show ignominiously ended. I was dejected but not out; a weekend in Baltimore surely has more surprises than the Revolution failing to take hold.  That said, I did require a ride back from Dr. Street-Jammer, and it was 2:30 am in Downtown Baltimore.  How can I report on the coming age if I get shot tonight?  Or crippled in a car crash?  After all, was that gunfire or fireworks two blocks over from the venue?  And was that maniac Dick-Jam sober?  There are some times in one’s life when having a gun seems a good idea, and now was one of them.