Calcium
About a year ago an idea came to me that a great conjunction was approaching. The month, day, and year would all be numbered "6." What a perfect opportunity to put on the most Satanic concert of the millenium!
My original plan was that I should not invite anyone locally, except perhaps Demoncy. After all, no one comes to see local bands. They certainly don't come to see me, so I will need some famous fuckers to kick this thing up a notch. Rigor Mortis said no. Mortician said no. Everyone I asked said no. When I finally got around to asking Robert if Demoncy would play I had pretty much no-one lined up. Black metal is very incestuous around here, so with a little re-arranging of instruments between members the one one band was actually four. Though my intention was to book six bands, I finally wound up with seven, only one of which was not from around here.
I decided to make this show as unforgettable as possible. Explosions! Fuck yea, we need flashpots! I applied to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for several forms and two books of laws and procedures so that my friend Susanne could get certified with a Type 19 License for Proximate Explosives, and then began shopping about for two single-use electrically fired flashpots. The companies were wary of selling me anything without a letter of consent from the Fire Marshall of our district. OK, so I found the Kennesaw Fire Marshall and we talked it up. He was nice, and went over the requirements with me. I had to notify the Dept of Public Safety, and inform the Fire Department, and schedule an appointment for site inspection and draw up a form of "Content of Intent" being basically "What I Plan To Do Here." These forms I would have to first petition for from the City Council of Licensing and Permits. I went and spoke to each of these people, and their secretaries, and lost about twenty pounds sweating in traffic as I searched for these offices. Now with a lapful of papers and contracts and still being re-directed here and there I got the really terrible blow: I would need to provide documentation for a $250,000 insurance policy paid through the month.
Since I am so charming, I did squirrel out the news that this need not necessarily be MY policy, but anybody's. So I asked, hey, who has been fronting the money for the town's fourth of july gala? I got the phone numbers of several professional pyrotechnic companies and co-coordinators, and began an immense game of phone-tag with he most rude and insulting fuckers of all time.
It turns out that unless you are Cher playing new year's eve at Caesar's Palace or possibly sponsoring some sort of Superbowl Halftime show, these guys won't even look at you. They want $6,000 just to show up and look at the place, and then go home. To hire them for a night would be inconceivably expensive.
So no flashpots. Thank you, Great White, may you rot in hell.
I made a special shirt for all the bands that would play that night, with all our logos on the back, and although I got the screenprinting company to allow me to IOU on the bill for this thing, it is nonetheless a great deal more than I could afford, also. Eh, do what you gotta do.
I went to a bait shop near my mother's house and bought 6,000 live crickets which came in two cardboard boxes filled with potatoes and creeping chirping little buggies. The were noisy and sme-e-lly. i also invested in about 40 packs of "Go To Hell" cigarettes. These I would throw out into the audience. Oh, and some old biology class skeletons, mostly ribcages.
As I spread word via flyer about the upcoming event I noticed a great fear being placed against this day of days. When I put up the flyer and turn around someone has torn it down. Also in the last minutes of May it seems that many other people also began to get the idea that 6/6/6 would be cool to do something, and cobbled together shows of their own. Just to prevent anyone thinking they had the evilest act in town I printed up hundreds and hundreds of new flyers, red on black flyers that said only "666 BLACK MASS @ SWAYZE'S" with a giant pentagram in the center, and covered the city. As I was finishing up this two-day task I noticed I had misspelled the word "Swayze's".
The Day Of The Beast
After a little sex and breakfast I scooted over to meet Brann at a recording studio nearby where the soundtrack for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie is being created. This was my second time sitting in but I still felt as if I did not belong there, even though I had been asked to sing on the theme song. It certainly beat the pants off the facility where my own album was recorded. The people who work on this project are as funny in life as they are on TV and it was a great time for me. It was particularly funny to hear vocalization advice coming through the sound booth from Meatwad himself. I got to see firsthand what it is like to collaborate with Brent and, yikes, I don't envy that as a career. I love him, he cracks me up, but he also is a bad listener. I scarfed down all the free gourmet pizza I could stomach, and after marveling at the number of laptops and Blackberries that everyone except me seemed to have, I had to bail before they were ready to record a second cameo for me. I am glad to be in there at all and I can't wait to sit in a theater and try to pick out my voice from everyone else's. That will be wonderful.
I went home and transferred the 6000 crickets to their new home: a black waste basket. I went to LFPizza and ordered two large Pepperoni and Mushroom Pizzas with extra cheese and hurried over to WREK, where they were playing metal all day in honor of 6/6/6. The pizza was for Tim, who would be stuck there all day and unable to leave for lunch, but I guessed many people would be in there schmoozing and I was right. I popped in, dropped the pies on the table, and left. Although everyone seemed to enjoy this display of generosity, no one bothered to mention it on air, and i thought it would be gauche to complain about that.
But I did. And when I called, I was assured that they had been playing my band all day and would continue to do so all night. The I corrected them about the lineups for the concert that night, (because I had caught them mispronouncing the names on air, and forgetting the rest) and then commenced my final band practice before our big show. Something had been bothering me, a solution was suggested, no on liked it, we decided to stick to fucking up and fix the problem after tonight. I drank about two gallons of water by the time everything was loaded up into the vans and trucks.
At Swayze's I first hid my crickets behind the dumpster out back and then began the long wait until showtime, during which I drank around nine bottles of Evian and one hawaiian punch, though my throat still seemed too dry to sing. I was pissing it all back out every three minutes.
Everyone seemed very appreciative of the shirts I had made for them, which surprised me. It is no secret that we, though not shunned outright, are on the fringe of the local Atlanta Black Metal "Clique," and occasionally mocked, and five bands that night were all "in". I was certainly stunned when I handed Robert his six shirts and he said thanks with a grin. His smiles are rare indeed, and I was expecting that he would throw them on the ground or something. Well, if he had, it certainly would have been the properly evil thing to do anyway.
A great deal of my friends were there, which is cool but then again none of them like heavy metal so it is like getting polite applause from your mother, and I always wish the room was full of strangers. Well it was full of strangers actually. I'd never seen so many people come out to Swayze's before, unless it was a punk show. For once, they actually outnumbered the familiar faces.
A few people inquired as to the availability of my girlfriend. She certainly cleans up good. I was proud to smack her ass in front of the would-be suitors and assert my position. Smakkity!
There was something of a cluster fuck going on, I suspect because Alex Cox is on tour with Arsis instead of here smoothing everything out for Evan. I could be wrong. Anyway, there was no sound engineer. Our roadie, lil Corey jr, stepped up and manned the controls. He also brought recording equipment, both audio and video, to preserve the night for history. He had three cameras on tripods set up, and surprisingly no one bumped them. Also there was no one to "run the door" so I did that. It is somewhat awkward without a counter of table or anything, to simply stand there taking money and handing out change while drawing crappy lopsided pentagrams on people's hands with a sharpie.
I have never liked Ecryptus. I probably never will. I don't even like Mike that much, perhaps because he is too friendly. But I must admit, they were better than ever, and their drummer was on fucking fire. Many were outside making fun of their appearance. They do look silly. Decay The Astral Self was next, and damned if one of them wasn't wearing assless chaps. I must take a moment to say that there is little in this world that is less "metal" than to critique fashion and accessories, but it doesn't seem to keep anyone from doing it. Whether it be the capri pants and platform sandals of the girl in Ecryptus or the assless chaps of these Carolinians, some things just scream to be mentioned.
I salute you, assless chaps man, for having the balls to sport those fuckers onstage. That is truly fearless.
I didn't like their stuff live as much as I did on Myspace, but I was impressed with the degree of bloodletting they endured. It is standard for metal bands here to engage in a little bleeding from razors and such, but this fellow I was sure must be in danger of running dry. It was everywhere. Afterwards he bandaged his arm up with cotton cloth and his girlfriend drew a lil pentagram on it. That was the cutest.
I threw cigarettes out into the crowd and we fired it up with hellish force. I broke a string about ten seconds into it, and for me the energy level dropped to zero and never again got back up. I stopped the song, borrowed Dan's red flying V and we started over. Playing a strange guitar is a terrible idea. I was constantly turning the volume off by mistake, and reaching for things that weren't there. And I didn't like the sound of it either. But no one gave me indication that things were going badly, and I actually saw people singing the words back at me. How is this possible when no one buys our CDs except overseas?
I gave my speech about the dawn of the new Satanic age, to some hoots and hollers, and called ourselves the plagues of Egypt. At this point I tried to fling the 6000 crickets as far and wide into the audience as possible but sadly they mostly hit this one person, this one cerebrally palsic person, square in the face. He looked very sad and confused, but there was no time to worry about that, we played Tearing Haven Out Of The Sky and I did my best, with Carey's help, to lead the audience in a chant of 6-6-6 while shredding, and though I could hear somebody singing along that wasn't in the band, I couldn't see anything. People were throwing the crickets back at me and they crawled all over my face. The zombie contacts I wear are uncomfortable enough without cricket footprints on them, and then they got all over the microphone and I kept accidentally licking them. Arthropod entrails were smeared all over everything, and the room really took on the aroma of Hell itself. It was unbearably stinky. On top of that, despite the fact that I had spent around fifty dollars on bottled water throughout the day, i couldn't seem to really conjure up the beast the way I always do, and I was frequently out of breath and cracking.
No one wanted to believe that I was giving away skeletons so whenever I would kick one out into the crowd someone would place it back onstage. How polite.
Our closing number is En Espanol, and once again I was chagrined to see that none of the mexicans had shown up. It seems that once you dedicate a song to someone, they stop coming to see you and never get to hear it. The song is "Tambores De La Guerra" and it is an all-drum song. We beat the living hell out of those drums, it was like doomsday in there, and our roadies affectionately known as slavegrinder 1 and 2 where hammering on oil barrels with terrifying abandon. At the end of my vocalizing we get into the serious drum-solo stuff and the slavegrinders set the oil drums on fire, which was a beautiful sight in the dark room, and then crammed grinders against the steel shooting thirty foot arcs of sparkling hot flint out into the audience in time with the music. There is one final horrifying verse at the end that I was spitting out like venom, and then the closing THOOM of our final strike, and we looked out into what looked like prisoners of war on the day of their release. They were frightened, awed, and speechless.
I think it went well.
The police came of course. You can't just light fires and get away with it, especially not indoors, but all was straightened out. After we played the audience was suddenly cut down to about a quarter of what it had been. ? All these people came to see us, and then left? Who were they? Why did no one talk to us, or buy anything from us?
I staid until the bitter end. Demoncy wrapped up their final song at 3:am, with only five people left standing in front of them. I gave Robert his cut of the door and thanked him for playing, and he did that weird thing with his mouth again that on anyone else I would say was an expression of good cheer.
I still feel terrible about my behavior on tour with him, and sometimes I wonder if I ruined a good thing, but it seems not to matter in the least. I like the music of Demoncy more than any other band I've been a part of but it seems he has opted to go in the direction of unlistenable noise. It was difficult for me to recognize all but my most favorite songs that he has written, and those seemed filtered through buzz saws. But then, that it the appeal of kvlt necro, and I've never been a fan.
I gave the one band that had driven from out of town the most money, but only ten dollars more than anyone else. My own band, of course, received nothing, because its worth it to me to do that. What would we do with $30 anyway? That's not going to put a dent into the fees for all the shit we did for this show, it wouldn't even fill Corey's gas tank.
On the long drive home I suddenly had to pee. I didn't entirely make it, and pissed on the inside of my car door as I scrambled out, and then flooded Seminole avenue with what was probably still pretty drinkable Evian. Hm. And I didn't have so much as one beer tonight.
Megan, who had dressed up as a dead nun in vinyl for the concert, was already naked and truly dead when I got home. She was even too sleepy to yell at me for waking her up, which she likes to do. I ate my favorite Sam-recipe of buttered rice and peas with fish on the couch with two cats who were curious about my insecty sweaty smell, and watched a tv show about how alligators rip zebras up like strands of twizzlers until I fell asleep.
My original plan was that I should not invite anyone locally, except perhaps Demoncy. After all, no one comes to see local bands. They certainly don't come to see me, so I will need some famous fuckers to kick this thing up a notch. Rigor Mortis said no. Mortician said no. Everyone I asked said no. When I finally got around to asking Robert if Demoncy would play I had pretty much no-one lined up. Black metal is very incestuous around here, so with a little re-arranging of instruments between members the one one band was actually four. Though my intention was to book six bands, I finally wound up with seven, only one of which was not from around here.
I decided to make this show as unforgettable as possible. Explosions! Fuck yea, we need flashpots! I applied to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms for several forms and two books of laws and procedures so that my friend Susanne could get certified with a Type 19 License for Proximate Explosives, and then began shopping about for two single-use electrically fired flashpots. The companies were wary of selling me anything without a letter of consent from the Fire Marshall of our district. OK, so I found the Kennesaw Fire Marshall and we talked it up. He was nice, and went over the requirements with me. I had to notify the Dept of Public Safety, and inform the Fire Department, and schedule an appointment for site inspection and draw up a form of "Content of Intent" being basically "What I Plan To Do Here." These forms I would have to first petition for from the City Council of Licensing and Permits. I went and spoke to each of these people, and their secretaries, and lost about twenty pounds sweating in traffic as I searched for these offices. Now with a lapful of papers and contracts and still being re-directed here and there I got the really terrible blow: I would need to provide documentation for a $250,000 insurance policy paid through the month.
Since I am so charming, I did squirrel out the news that this need not necessarily be MY policy, but anybody's. So I asked, hey, who has been fronting the money for the town's fourth of july gala? I got the phone numbers of several professional pyrotechnic companies and co-coordinators, and began an immense game of phone-tag with he most rude and insulting fuckers of all time.
It turns out that unless you are Cher playing new year's eve at Caesar's Palace or possibly sponsoring some sort of Superbowl Halftime show, these guys won't even look at you. They want $6,000 just to show up and look at the place, and then go home. To hire them for a night would be inconceivably expensive.
So no flashpots. Thank you, Great White, may you rot in hell.
I made a special shirt for all the bands that would play that night, with all our logos on the back, and although I got the screenprinting company to allow me to IOU on the bill for this thing, it is nonetheless a great deal more than I could afford, also. Eh, do what you gotta do.
I went to a bait shop near my mother's house and bought 6,000 live crickets which came in two cardboard boxes filled with potatoes and creeping chirping little buggies. The were noisy and sme-e-lly. i also invested in about 40 packs of "Go To Hell" cigarettes. These I would throw out into the audience. Oh, and some old biology class skeletons, mostly ribcages.
As I spread word via flyer about the upcoming event I noticed a great fear being placed against this day of days. When I put up the flyer and turn around someone has torn it down. Also in the last minutes of May it seems that many other people also began to get the idea that 6/6/6 would be cool to do something, and cobbled together shows of their own. Just to prevent anyone thinking they had the evilest act in town I printed up hundreds and hundreds of new flyers, red on black flyers that said only "666 BLACK MASS @ SWAYZE'S" with a giant pentagram in the center, and covered the city. As I was finishing up this two-day task I noticed I had misspelled the word "Swayze's".
The Day Of The Beast
After a little sex and breakfast I scooted over to meet Brann at a recording studio nearby where the soundtrack for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie is being created. This was my second time sitting in but I still felt as if I did not belong there, even though I had been asked to sing on the theme song. It certainly beat the pants off the facility where my own album was recorded. The people who work on this project are as funny in life as they are on TV and it was a great time for me. It was particularly funny to hear vocalization advice coming through the sound booth from Meatwad himself. I got to see firsthand what it is like to collaborate with Brent and, yikes, I don't envy that as a career. I love him, he cracks me up, but he also is a bad listener. I scarfed down all the free gourmet pizza I could stomach, and after marveling at the number of laptops and Blackberries that everyone except me seemed to have, I had to bail before they were ready to record a second cameo for me. I am glad to be in there at all and I can't wait to sit in a theater and try to pick out my voice from everyone else's. That will be wonderful.
I went home and transferred the 6000 crickets to their new home: a black waste basket. I went to LFPizza and ordered two large Pepperoni and Mushroom Pizzas with extra cheese and hurried over to WREK, where they were playing metal all day in honor of 6/6/6. The pizza was for Tim, who would be stuck there all day and unable to leave for lunch, but I guessed many people would be in there schmoozing and I was right. I popped in, dropped the pies on the table, and left. Although everyone seemed to enjoy this display of generosity, no one bothered to mention it on air, and i thought it would be gauche to complain about that.
But I did. And when I called, I was assured that they had been playing my band all day and would continue to do so all night. The I corrected them about the lineups for the concert that night, (because I had caught them mispronouncing the names on air, and forgetting the rest) and then commenced my final band practice before our big show. Something had been bothering me, a solution was suggested, no on liked it, we decided to stick to fucking up and fix the problem after tonight. I drank about two gallons of water by the time everything was loaded up into the vans and trucks.
At Swayze's I first hid my crickets behind the dumpster out back and then began the long wait until showtime, during which I drank around nine bottles of Evian and one hawaiian punch, though my throat still seemed too dry to sing. I was pissing it all back out every three minutes.
Everyone seemed very appreciative of the shirts I had made for them, which surprised me. It is no secret that we, though not shunned outright, are on the fringe of the local Atlanta Black Metal "Clique," and occasionally mocked, and five bands that night were all "in". I was certainly stunned when I handed Robert his six shirts and he said thanks with a grin. His smiles are rare indeed, and I was expecting that he would throw them on the ground or something. Well, if he had, it certainly would have been the properly evil thing to do anyway.
A great deal of my friends were there, which is cool but then again none of them like heavy metal so it is like getting polite applause from your mother, and I always wish the room was full of strangers. Well it was full of strangers actually. I'd never seen so many people come out to Swayze's before, unless it was a punk show. For once, they actually outnumbered the familiar faces.
A few people inquired as to the availability of my girlfriend. She certainly cleans up good. I was proud to smack her ass in front of the would-be suitors and assert my position. Smakkity!
There was something of a cluster fuck going on, I suspect because Alex Cox is on tour with Arsis instead of here smoothing everything out for Evan. I could be wrong. Anyway, there was no sound engineer. Our roadie, lil Corey jr, stepped up and manned the controls. He also brought recording equipment, both audio and video, to preserve the night for history. He had three cameras on tripods set up, and surprisingly no one bumped them. Also there was no one to "run the door" so I did that. It is somewhat awkward without a counter of table or anything, to simply stand there taking money and handing out change while drawing crappy lopsided pentagrams on people's hands with a sharpie.
I have never liked Ecryptus. I probably never will. I don't even like Mike that much, perhaps because he is too friendly. But I must admit, they were better than ever, and their drummer was on fucking fire. Many were outside making fun of their appearance. They do look silly. Decay The Astral Self was next, and damned if one of them wasn't wearing assless chaps. I must take a moment to say that there is little in this world that is less "metal" than to critique fashion and accessories, but it doesn't seem to keep anyone from doing it. Whether it be the capri pants and platform sandals of the girl in Ecryptus or the assless chaps of these Carolinians, some things just scream to be mentioned.
I salute you, assless chaps man, for having the balls to sport those fuckers onstage. That is truly fearless.
I didn't like their stuff live as much as I did on Myspace, but I was impressed with the degree of bloodletting they endured. It is standard for metal bands here to engage in a little bleeding from razors and such, but this fellow I was sure must be in danger of running dry. It was everywhere. Afterwards he bandaged his arm up with cotton cloth and his girlfriend drew a lil pentagram on it. That was the cutest.
I threw cigarettes out into the crowd and we fired it up with hellish force. I broke a string about ten seconds into it, and for me the energy level dropped to zero and never again got back up. I stopped the song, borrowed Dan's red flying V and we started over. Playing a strange guitar is a terrible idea. I was constantly turning the volume off by mistake, and reaching for things that weren't there. And I didn't like the sound of it either. But no one gave me indication that things were going badly, and I actually saw people singing the words back at me. How is this possible when no one buys our CDs except overseas?
I gave my speech about the dawn of the new Satanic age, to some hoots and hollers, and called ourselves the plagues of Egypt. At this point I tried to fling the 6000 crickets as far and wide into the audience as possible but sadly they mostly hit this one person, this one cerebrally palsic person, square in the face. He looked very sad and confused, but there was no time to worry about that, we played Tearing Haven Out Of The Sky and I did my best, with Carey's help, to lead the audience in a chant of 6-6-6 while shredding, and though I could hear somebody singing along that wasn't in the band, I couldn't see anything. People were throwing the crickets back at me and they crawled all over my face. The zombie contacts I wear are uncomfortable enough without cricket footprints on them, and then they got all over the microphone and I kept accidentally licking them. Arthropod entrails were smeared all over everything, and the room really took on the aroma of Hell itself. It was unbearably stinky. On top of that, despite the fact that I had spent around fifty dollars on bottled water throughout the day, i couldn't seem to really conjure up the beast the way I always do, and I was frequently out of breath and cracking.
No one wanted to believe that I was giving away skeletons so whenever I would kick one out into the crowd someone would place it back onstage. How polite.
Our closing number is En Espanol, and once again I was chagrined to see that none of the mexicans had shown up. It seems that once you dedicate a song to someone, they stop coming to see you and never get to hear it. The song is "Tambores De La Guerra" and it is an all-drum song. We beat the living hell out of those drums, it was like doomsday in there, and our roadies affectionately known as slavegrinder 1 and 2 where hammering on oil barrels with terrifying abandon. At the end of my vocalizing we get into the serious drum-solo stuff and the slavegrinders set the oil drums on fire, which was a beautiful sight in the dark room, and then crammed grinders against the steel shooting thirty foot arcs of sparkling hot flint out into the audience in time with the music. There is one final horrifying verse at the end that I was spitting out like venom, and then the closing THOOM of our final strike, and we looked out into what looked like prisoners of war on the day of their release. They were frightened, awed, and speechless.
I think it went well.
The police came of course. You can't just light fires and get away with it, especially not indoors, but all was straightened out. After we played the audience was suddenly cut down to about a quarter of what it had been. ? All these people came to see us, and then left? Who were they? Why did no one talk to us, or buy anything from us?
I staid until the bitter end. Demoncy wrapped up their final song at 3:am, with only five people left standing in front of them. I gave Robert his cut of the door and thanked him for playing, and he did that weird thing with his mouth again that on anyone else I would say was an expression of good cheer.
I still feel terrible about my behavior on tour with him, and sometimes I wonder if I ruined a good thing, but it seems not to matter in the least. I like the music of Demoncy more than any other band I've been a part of but it seems he has opted to go in the direction of unlistenable noise. It was difficult for me to recognize all but my most favorite songs that he has written, and those seemed filtered through buzz saws. But then, that it the appeal of kvlt necro, and I've never been a fan.
I gave the one band that had driven from out of town the most money, but only ten dollars more than anyone else. My own band, of course, received nothing, because its worth it to me to do that. What would we do with $30 anyway? That's not going to put a dent into the fees for all the shit we did for this show, it wouldn't even fill Corey's gas tank.
On the long drive home I suddenly had to pee. I didn't entirely make it, and pissed on the inside of my car door as I scrambled out, and then flooded Seminole avenue with what was probably still pretty drinkable Evian. Hm. And I didn't have so much as one beer tonight.
Megan, who had dressed up as a dead nun in vinyl for the concert, was already naked and truly dead when I got home. She was even too sleepy to yell at me for waking her up, which she likes to do. I ate my favorite Sam-recipe of buttered rice and peas with fish on the couch with two cats who were curious about my insecty sweaty smell, and watched a tv show about how alligators rip zebras up like strands of twizzlers until I fell asleep.