Day 4
That damned Richard Street-Jammer! That miscreant Donald Mulligan! That bastard child of the great state of Ohio
Josiah Szekler! The gall, to simply sit
there and play video games in air-conditioned comfort while their strength
returned when we could have gone to the venue and further exhausted and debased ourselves
in record heat surrounded by the foul stench of a thousand metal sausageheads
whilst watching obscure hardcore bands!
Again, the kill instinct took over, but now I had to hold my fists even
tighter, for the luck of the Irish was on the side of Dr. Dick-Jam and Don
whilst Szekler was so tough that he had once gone to Flint, Michigan with the
intent of going to Flint, Michigan.
They’d kill me instantly, Dr. Dick-Jam taking my skull to fashion into a
crude goblet from which to drink IPAs out of while listening constantly to the
dulcet tones of Twisted Tower Dire, Mulligan using my intestines as stage
props, and Szekler selling my kidneys on the Toledo black market to augment his
status as DMSDSU Crew Crime King of Toledo Ta Life (feat. Lord Ezec). I could have tried calling Black Kat Killian
to convince her to come over to dispatch the miscreants with a single glance,
but chances were she was busy popping Dom Perignon with Wino and Liz Buckingham
and thus hadn’t the inclination to bother to help out a single puny mortal such
as myself from such a dire predicament. I
could only sit in anger as they squandered my time doing foolish things like
relaxing and enjoying themselves and being sociable. No exit, no escape. Still, we made it in time for Disma thanks
for once to Dicky’s errant street-jamming, and Szekler had the foresight to
wear his polka-dotted party pants that made him look like a Zouave in the Metal
Legions (no amateur at the art of partying he).
It was a good gesture of reconciliation, and I forgave him as much as I
could. That Szekler’s a charming
sociopath, all smiles and manipulation behind that handsome stubble. Beware of him, o ye who find his slyly
smiling Latin mug in your path, for he will lead thee down the road of
temptation and with it desolation in emptiness.
Disma was hot.
Fucking hot. Have you ever
stepped into a room dominated by a brick oven, perhaps in an adobe dwelling in
the Southwest? Maybe you’ve tried cleaning the engine on a ’54 Chevy in
the dead dog days of August. This was
hotter. I could feel waves of
perspiration flooding across my person: no remorse, no escape. There was no safety here, just heat and more
heat. As much from the band as from the
cruel Baltimorean suns or the languid asphalt: Disma is not a small group. Perhaps a wrestling match should be arranged
between them and Crowbar in the ancient Japanese style of sumo. Skill counts for nothing, only heft and
gumption and the willingness to crush one’s enemies, see them driven before
you, and hear the lamentations of their women.
This is not to say Disma lacked skill, however: three songs in and, in
spite of the heat gently roasting upon my back, I was crawling along the
slow-motion pit like a sandcrawler, a violent moshpit champion slowed by the
sheer brutality of the merciless sun.
Perhaps we were a clade of modern-day Sufists, swaying methodically,
meditatively in a virtually Anatolian sun to the paced rumblings of the band
set before us. Revolving around in a
circle pit is only a single world removed from the singular spinnings of the
mystics of Islam; perhaps Jung was right about his archetypes, all the same the
world over, just bastardized to various degrees by the tyrannies of culture
forced by the hand of geography. The
Sufist metaphor would likely not appeal to Craig Pillard, however. Many have argued that he’s left his Nazi days
behind him, which I can safely reported is not true in the slightest. A Sig rune on your elbow, an Iron Cross worn
proudly about your neck, and camouflaged trousers are not the garb worn by one
attempting to dispel allegations of Nazism, especially when such allegations
have not been officially refuted. That
said, at least Pillard’s one of the nice fascists: “Stay cool everybody, stay
hydrated!” he announced pleasantly, a nice smile on his face like a master-race
Little League coach. These were his
fans, his team, and he wanted them to play well but ultimately have fun (except
for the ones that weren’t white, but maybe he was too hot to split racial hairs). What a nice guy.
And still the idiots mosh.
Saint Vitus: a band universally known for its slow, Sativan plod, its
almost gentle waves of fuzz loosening your muscles as Wino turns the good trip
bad with his dire proclamations of addiction and loathing. It’s not a moshing band. You can’t dance to it. You can only nod your head in approval,
moving rhythmically in time to each chord from Dave Chandler’s axe like a
marionette who finds himself trapped in a Jan Svankmajer nightmare. And yet the troglodytes don’t get it. They begin simply, aping that fat fucker
Messiah Marcolin in doing a wide-gaited “doom dance.” This is acceptable. Trying to begin to mosh at that speed is
not. It’s moronic. It reeks of degeneracy. And these were goddamn degenerates, make no
mistake: it was if all the scum of Maryland Deathfest had floated to the top of
the crowd like a soup set to full boil.
A huge Nazi in a Marduk shirt swung his arms wildly, clearly trying to
injure as was his philosophical mandate and taking his shirt off that anyone
unlucky enough to stand in his way would be party to the foul sweat from that
unholy space betwixt his man-breasts and his beer hall gut. A complete burnout with a cornrow skullet and
prison tattoos on his face moved along the pit, clearly unaware of where he was
and with the thousand-mile-stare of a lifelong tweaker; touching him could give
you herpes. It was a madhouse, I tell
you, and one which kept me from my adoration of the good Saint by virtue of not
wanting to catch a right-hook in the eye from a syphilitic obese Nazi. A pox on their inbred families! To the dust may you fascist Philistines make
a swift return, and leave me to partake of my doom in peace! I was stuck.
At least these chuckleheads would be kept far in the back during
Electric Wizard through the grace of the two-stage system.
Electric Wizard is a band that shakes to the core. It’s a monstrosity, a goddamned aberration, a
walking, shuddering church from some quaint, dark village with a name like
Bromley Moor. Loud, too. Louder than Jesus and hairier than that
Jewish prophet too. You watch them and
feel almost a sense of jealousy at the mastery of their abominatory craft. Who the Hell do these British wankers think
they’re fooling with their repetition and fuzz? A lot of static is what it is, by God. But they do their part. We all do our part in metal, don’t we? Go to
a show, stand patiently for a band to spend thirty goddamn minutes setting up,
and then rage to each band even if it makes us profoundly uncomfortable
(physically, that is) because such is our duty.
We as metalheads really are legion: like the Marines, our oath is to the
organization first and foremost and ourselves second. You think only of the –core, maggot. One two three four you love metal and
hardcore. Now drop your head and give me
fifty! You want to be near that stage,
you need to be near that stage! What is
your major malfunction, shithead? But
Electric Wizard are not Drill Sergeants.
They are benevolent generals, marshaling the support of their fanatics
through acceptance and patient manipulation underscored by the pretext of copious
cannabis consumption. It’s a shockwave
of cycling riffs through a crowd-sea of nodding heads, a hive-mind if one could
ever exist. After 15 minutes, you break
through into Nirvana, ascending beyond yourself, rocking back and forth on your
feet like an Unholy Roller.
Transcendence is the only option.
And you realize just why they play on the last day: it’s a climactic
event, the kvltmination of a three-day journey, like the Celtic mystics of
old. You have made it through, you have
borne the brunt of the heaviest music the world can offer, and now you are at
one with nothing on the day that everything became nothing.
No reason to stay further. Who could try
to hold a candle to Electric Wizard?
Bethlehem could try, but unless they played “Dark Metal” in its
entirety, that wasn’t happening. And who
the Hell is Mortuary Drape? Nothing more
for me. Nothing more for us, really: a
mass exodus to the gate following the Wizard’s set, exit music courtesy of
Sargeist. Joe Szekler and I making our
way along the dimly lit streets of Baltimore, heading to rendezvous with Dr.
Dick-Jam at the Inner Harbor superfund site, speaking in exuberant reverence as
to the spectacle just witnessed. Like
the speech of two men who have just emerged from battle, the first American
soldiers who made it off the beaches of Normandy, the 300 Spartans after the
first day at Thermopylae, the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, Richie
Havens coming off the stage at Woodstock.
There was no sense that this was the best it could ever be, just that
this was a peak in a life full of them.
We had been raised up, born anew, given a passion for existence that
would sustain for a good long while. We
could have stepped off of the sidewalk and into the air, feet lifted above the
ground like a pair of hyper-literate, considerably-less-malevolent-though-out-of-no-lack-of-trying
Randall Flaggs. Transfigured like a kvlt
Buddha, replete in their unholy Nirvana.
And to top it off, dangerous Dr. Dick-Jam didn’t even drive us
back. Nothing could puncture a hole in
our balloon. It was a high without
intoxication, a feeling of completion and placidity. You couldn’t know if you weren’t there: no
one ever could. We’d go back of course,
and this would pass, but that didn’t matter.
For now, I was a monster reincarnation of Glen Benton himself: a metal
man on the metal move, and just metal enough to be totally confident of the kvltness
of his existence.
