Day 2
Donald Mulligan is an excitable little man, a bellicose
leprechaun (leprechose?) with a beard as red as his temper, a knack for good beer, and a face made for covering with the dye of woad. Flair for the colloquial and a pub-born belligerence
seals the deal; had he walked off of the set of "Braveheart" and into the brave heart of Baltimore itself? “As we say in New York,
you'll ‘get swole up’ sure as the rakes of Kildare scrape upon the Stone of Blarney, by Faith and Begorrah” he chuckled insanely to himself as we discussed our
relative fitness routines in a vain attempt to out-masculine each other. “Get ‘swole’?
Don’t you mean ‘swollen’? What in the ancient name of the sacred harp of Brian Boru are you talking about, man?” I thundered good-naturedly into his mischevious Celtic face. Here was yet another insane Irishman, the last
glories of Michael Collins and Padraig O’Keefe evolved (or perhaps de-volved) into one
irate New Yorker, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge into Williamsburg and took
his sanity with him. He and Dr. Dick-Jam thus formed an unholy two-man band of
Hiberninsanity that my beloved great-grandpappy, the late Michael Na Burca
of Galway, would have felt at home with (was I the third leg of a triptych? Perhaps so.
Ethnicity has an annoying way of sneaking up on you like Varg Vikernes on Euronymous in 1993). Still, Donald had upon his pint-of-Guinness-sized person a bootleg Nihilist shirt, and for this we can all thank him. Boyd Rice once claimed never to trust anyone
who hadn’t been either arrested or tasted alcohol; I can’t trust anyone who
doesn’t drink or listen to Gothenburg HM-2 metal, and Don passed both of these criterion ably and without fanfare. Call it an ethnic weakness. Anyway, the fetching of our Mad Mulligan
necessitated another break-neck, break-face drive in the Little Red Sharklet
(my peevish diminutive for the Street-Jammer Cobalt) from Linthicum to the
Sonar, showing up just in time to see Castevet.
For me, anyway; Don’s lack of attending the first day meant he had to endure a torturous wait in line with the other Plebeians whilst I coasted on through. Tragic yes, and a profound look at the
failures of American capitalism: pay us first, get in without hassle. First to cross the money line wins. Still, the line as it was seemed fairly
egalitarian: filthy crusties with dogs clearly raised on malt ‘40s mingled with
well-groomed tech deathers, a class cross-section of the metal idiom like an
evolutionary diagram from an ancient issue of National Geographic. It
would have been interesting to observe, but then as now, I had more important
matters of the flesh and the mind to attend to.
Ghoul are a profoundly American band, in much the same manner as GWAR before them. Instant gratification aligns with unbridled aggression and bloody machismo to create a gargantuan mess of a group. Like Americans, they are faceless, burlap sacks breeding anonymity. Like Americans, they are sanguine, their live show but a mere pretense to shower their slavish fans with mock blood. And like Americans, they offer convenience and consumability: shortish, fast songs with great big old mosh parts to appeal to a wide cross-section of metal fans, heavy enough to sustain interest and moshing with the added cheap theatricality of the liquids issuing forth from the stage area. It’s the bastard child of punk rock, or as a blog whose name I am simply too strung out to remember the name of once posited, “what happens when punks play metal.” This, plus the added décor of the Grand Guignol blood that makes salmon-colored shirts out of white ones. Do it yourself, America, you country that rots like pretty much every character on every goddamn piece of Ghoul merchandise. Briefly entering the pit during “Graveyard Mosh” secured my attachment to this band, in all of its quick, cheap, whorishly ghoulish glory. I had done my cheap thrills for the fest, and I lacked shame: you can’t have shame in a pit or at a show, because something that turns your world upside down will happen. You will be sprayed with a copious shower of cheap domestic beer, blood will get thrown at you, perhaps even semen will issue forth from the syphilitic member of the portly hairball rotundly moshing about beside you and affix itself to thy hair. This is a longshot, but stranger events have occurred. More importantly, you may be beaten badly by a man much more fit than you, thus taking the biggest blow to the ego. Ergo, to salve the ego, it is imperative that you enter a pit with no ego and that the band does not seek to start it with one. And, quite frankly, when a band wears burlap sacks on its collective heads, it cannot be readily argued to have an ego (or, as Don Mulligan would put it, rambling full tilt in his Goidelically New Yorker voice, they are part of “the Fun Club”).
Now, by the time of Nasum, I was again
thoroughly exhausted. Unlike last night,
however, there’d been a running train of desirable bands for me to stand and
see (Negura Bunget, Napalm Death, Godflesh, et al; hell, even Macabre, which is
saying much by saying little because any band whose frontman chooses to wear
denim overalls astage, even ironically, should automatically raise in the
listener’s head that age-old nagging of “My God, maybe I really do enjoy shit music) so by this time my
calves were barking at me like the Hounds of Tindalos and my lower back
screamed in agitation “No more, you son-of-a-bitch! What the fuck is wrong with you? No back should ever be forced to bear this
strain! Cease and desist lest I secede
from thy spinal column!” But a strong
man will proceed with his metal viewing, regardless of the extent to which his
lower back may protest. After all, a
firm backbone is needed to fully appreciate metal: all the lyrics about
will-to-power, all the pseudo-fascist cajoling into maximizing one’s energy
towards complete dominion, all the shameless teenage aping of LaVeyan
philosophy, all serve to fortify the listener with an iron constitution that
bodily harm is often at a loss to override.
Ergo, moshing, and to a more extreme extent the self-mutilation employed
as shock by second-tier black metal bands (Horna would later provide a gruesome
example of the lengths which bands will endure to get their point across). Nasum were further testament to this need for
will: it was an uphill battle either way all hour to claim my spot. But I am the Rock of Chickamauga, the Altar
of Sacrifice, and I move for no man. My
legs may be spindly but my God they can keep me in one place, stiffer than a
tree. Learn this well, o scion, for one
day it will come back to help you: suffer no fool to take thy place in show,
least of all when it is Nasum’s 20th reunion show (yes, there wasn’t
Mieszko, but we can’t bring the dead back!
That’s blasphemy! Let the poor man rest in peace, dammit, and leave his
memory alone you usurers.) I was slick
with sweat coming out, born from the brick-and-mortar uterus of the Sonar, a
grindcore baby in the womb of sonic warfare.
Donald Mulligan, on the other hand, fared better, and spent the better
part of the evening in a fruitless attempt to always be standing downwind from
me.Ghoul are a profoundly American band, in much the same manner as GWAR before them. Instant gratification aligns with unbridled aggression and bloody machismo to create a gargantuan mess of a group. Like Americans, they are faceless, burlap sacks breeding anonymity. Like Americans, they are sanguine, their live show but a mere pretense to shower their slavish fans with mock blood. And like Americans, they offer convenience and consumability: shortish, fast songs with great big old mosh parts to appeal to a wide cross-section of metal fans, heavy enough to sustain interest and moshing with the added cheap theatricality of the liquids issuing forth from the stage area. It’s the bastard child of punk rock, or as a blog whose name I am simply too strung out to remember the name of once posited, “what happens when punks play metal.” This, plus the added décor of the Grand Guignol blood that makes salmon-colored shirts out of white ones. Do it yourself, America, you country that rots like pretty much every character on every goddamn piece of Ghoul merchandise. Briefly entering the pit during “Graveyard Mosh” secured my attachment to this band, in all of its quick, cheap, whorishly ghoulish glory. I had done my cheap thrills for the fest, and I lacked shame: you can’t have shame in a pit or at a show, because something that turns your world upside down will happen. You will be sprayed with a copious shower of cheap domestic beer, blood will get thrown at you, perhaps even semen will issue forth from the syphilitic member of the portly hairball rotundly moshing about beside you and affix itself to thy hair. This is a longshot, but stranger events have occurred. More importantly, you may be beaten badly by a man much more fit than you, thus taking the biggest blow to the ego. Ergo, to salve the ego, it is imperative that you enter a pit with no ego and that the band does not seek to start it with one. And, quite frankly, when a band wears burlap sacks on its collective heads, it cannot be readily argued to have an ego (or, as Don Mulligan would put it, rambling full tilt in his Goidelically New Yorker voice, they are part of “the Fun Club”).
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