A Mind Besides Itself

You know, I've always enjoyed Dream Theater's "Erotomania," but I never bothered to look up what the title meant; I think I just translated the word literally and went from there. Thanks to Law & Order: SVU, I now know it refers to a romantic obsession with a celebrity. You know, like the subject of "Space Dye Vest," the song that Kevin Moore wrote, the one that only ended up on the album because the rest of the band didn't know he was leaving...the one that didn't fit. I've never seen a reference to it - not in the old Dream Theater FAQ, not on Wikipedia, not in the biography - but I have to wonder if Petrucci named the first part of "A Mind Beside Itself" (if not the whole suite) after Moore's strange obsession...after Moore left the band. There has to be more than one reason why Moore won't talk about Dream Theater fourteen years later...

Slash: Guitar Hero

While waiting in line for a beer at the Metal Master's tour this summer, I was fortunate enough to observe some of the geekery that can only happen between music fans. More specifically, drunk music fans: one drunk guy yelling at another drunk guy wearing a Guitar Hero t-shirt that "we need to make sure we teach kids how to play real instruments, or the sort of shit that's going on over there [gesturing towards the stage] won't have a future." I thought of that man and his anti-Guitar Hero crusade (I shudder to think of what he would say about the Air Guitar Championships) when reading this story from a Rolling Stone interview with Slash:

Has the huge success of Guitar Hero boosted your rep even further?
Yeah, but the flip-side of that is I met this kid who came up to me and was blown away by the fact I was the guy in the Guitar Hero game, and he kept going on about that. Ten minutes later he goes, “Do you play real guitar?”

Ouch, dude. Maybe Mr. Drunk Music Fan has a point...or maybe that kid needs to get out of the house more.

Via Kotaku

Metal Salute

Let's talk a little bit about a symbol that's probably near and dear to all of our hearts: the devil sign. The goat horns. The evil fingers. The Pommesgabel. The metal horns. The frickin' metal salute, man. They might have been invented by Gene Simmons. Maybe Dio is responsible. Wikipedia claims Jinx Dawson started the whole thing by making them on the cover of her proto-metal band Coven's first album, which would be hilariously ironic - a woman inventing one of male-dominated metal's most iconic gestures. Of course, unless I'm missing something, Dawson isn't making the gesture on the cover of that album.

In any case: you can do it one-handed, you can do it two-handed. You can even put both hands together to let the world know it's just too much metal for one hand. But for the sake of all that's holy and unholy: you don't do this with your hand, unless you're trying to tell the band someone that maybe you should work out face to face, without the amplifiers blaring. Normally I'm not one to go for false metal stuff - I listen to far too much stuff (including Manowar) to make those sort of stupid categorizations - but come on. If you're going to call yourself a metal fan, at least make an effort to pick up one of the basics of the culture.

I'm the Muthafucking Prince of Darkness!

Ozzy Osbourne fascinates me. He's metal's original anti-hero, a guy with long hair and funky glasses who somehow looks like a more decrepit version of himself from thirty years ago. He's got Black Sabbath god status, the solo career, the footage from Decline of Western Civilization II where he can't, for the life of him, pour his orange juice properly, The Osbournes, the feud between Shannon and Bruce (which always make me imagine Ozzy sitting in the background, looking confused as to what's going on), that whole speaking thing where you can't figure out what he's saying - and probably wouldn't want to anyway - and Ozzfest. Can't forget Ozzfest - the tour that launched a thousand careers.

This year Ozzfest gets a new wrinkle: it's free. According to CBC.ca, Ozzy made the announcement yesterday by spray painting FREE on a poster at a concert industry trade show in LA; confirmation is on the Ozzfest Website. The reason, according to Sharon, is to combat the rising ticket prices of summer festivals - Ozzfest sees itself to be a leader in this area and making the tour free for 2007 might reverse the trend.

From what my friend Seth tells me, Ozzfest was always pay to play for second stage and lower main stage bands; he worries that making every band play for free (except for merch sales) will kill the possibility of any major act besides Ozzy signing up to do the tour. I don't know for sure how the payment structure for Ozzfest works - whether or not being a high-profile band means you get paid instead of paying for the pleasure of touring and whether there's a scale depending on your manager/label's negotiating ability - but I think there's some validity to his point. My feeling is that either this year's tour will be Ozzy and a host of unknowns, or Ozzfest will end up paying for major acts to fill out the bill when necessary and add that as another small drop to the total revenue loss on the tour.