You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave

Some people - older people, like Gene Simmons in an interview with Henry Rollins where Simmons completely shocked Rollins into awkward silence - have complained that we've lost the concept of the rock star in the twenty-year triumph of indie music. I'm not entirely sure that I agree (although perhaps one could argue that Guitar Hero and Rock Band are symptomatic of what Counting Crows said about us wanting to be big, big stars), but props to Iron Maiden for attempting to put the separate, higher-realm creature element back into the mix with their London hotel for rock stars. Of course, because this hotel is a business venture, they don't want their future rock star guests to wreck the place in the best rock star style - no Led Zeppelin shark episodes here - but at least you have to be a well-known musician to get in. No doubt they'll be doing lines of coke off the speaker-shaped mini bars in no time.

WWIII, or How I Learned to Practice Safe Rock

As I'm pretty sure I've admitted on these pages in the past - yup, there it is - I've been listening to my mp3/AAC collection chronologically. Because I have a 20 gig iPod and far more than 20 gigs of music in my collection (damn, when did that happen?), I've broken things up by decade - right now I'm on the 2000s. This morning's first selection on the way to work was the title track from KMFDM's WWIII, a song that always blows me away with its sheer power; it's the sonic equivalent of getting punched in the gut, then getting angry about it. Every time I hear "WWIII," though, I think about the last time I saw KMFDM live.

Boston, November 1, 2003. I had just returned to the city, caravan style, from Middlebury, VT after a journey of almost epic proportions: driving up to Woodstock from Boston on Friday to spend Halloween with my buddy Steve, going with him over the border to New Hampshire (Hanover, I believe) for a costume contest that we lost for reasons that still boggle the mind, driving back to Woodstock in disgust, then deciding to drive up to Middlebury in the middle of the night to visit friends at Middlebury College with the express intent of drinking heavily and running a radio show at 3 AM. All four hours I spent sleeping that night were on a floor, so it was probably a miracle I made it back to Boston, but made it back I had and - pounding, sleep-deprived headache aside - it was time to rock.

That night was one of the few concerts where I've viscerally regretted not bringing earplugs. Intellectually, I know I'm doing irreparable damage to my ears every time I go to a concert and don't (as Chris Cornell once put it) practice safe rock, but this particular show burned the message into my consciousness with the fury and precision of six-inch tall letters of fire burned into the inside of my skull.

After the opening band cleared the stage, I made my way to what turned out to be the acoustic centerpoint of the club, watched KMFDM take their positions, heard the countrified opening of "WWIII"...then felt my skull compress and my jaw drop as the machine-gunned guitar and heavy, thumping bassline crushed my eardrums into oblivion with volume I could not have thought possible, while the lighting rig went into an epileptic strobe, dazzling me with the sort of shock and awe then popular in Iraq. It was the beginning of the most physically possessing concert I've ever been to, one where the waves of sound were such a physical presence they felt tangible - something I've never encountered since. It also left a ringing in my ears that lasted for enough days afterwards I thought I was slowly going deaf, like Beethoven but without the composing ability. 'Point taken,' I thought afterwards, when my hearing returned to normal. 'Ear plugs from now on.'

Wooo! Drugs!

I was listening Skid Row's Slave to the Grind to start off this fine workday and had one of those epiphany moments I do so enjoy because they're a quick way to feel clever: "Aha!" I said. "'Monkey Business' is almost definitely about a drug habit!" Then I checked the lyrics and saw it was really more the bridge that's about heroin, fitting into a song addressing the darker side of society from the perspective of the darker side of society, but it made me think of all of those great songs from the metal catalog about drugs.

My three favorite examples are all by Black Sabbath: "Hand of Doom," "Snowblind" and "Sweet Leaf," although I think I noticed "Hand of Doom" first. Not long afterwards, my sister was doing a project for school where she had to report on drugs in popular culture and - for some reason - she came to me. I wasn't a druggie, so I like to think it was my superior knowledge as the elder sibling that led her to seek me out. In any case, I saved the day with an instant answer: "Check out Black Sabbath," I said. "'Hand of Doom' is all about heroin. Makes a perfect example for your report." And, because I knew she enjoyed creeping out her classmates as much as I did, I added, "Plus, it's Black Sabbath, so it's very metal in a way the kids in your class won't get." I think she ended up getting an A.

Experimentation

I was reading Blabbermouth today and came across an interview with Kreator frontman Mille Petrozza, where he talks about the backlash Kreator withstood in the 1990s when they attempted to diversify their sound beyond their thrash roots. The discussion go me thinking about these controversial experiments and how frequently they fail, usually with accusations by the loyal fan base that the band has sold out. Selling out has its place, but I think the real problem runs a little deeper.

Let's break things down: in general, most bands will change their sound over the course of their careers, because they get bored putting out the same old album time after time. Change and experimentation are pars for the course of human nature, especially for artists, who are expected to delve into the mutable aspects of the human soul on a daily basis. However - and here's the critical point - the desire to experiment doesn't equal ability to do so; many bands enter an experimental period and either feel the sting of critical backlash because they've either moved so far away from their original sound that they lack the experience to make a cohesive album, or because they don't have the musical ability to play anything but the sound that made them work as a band in the first place.

Case in point: even though I've developed a fondness for Load over the past twelve years, I think Metallica's conversion from thrash to what they've been playing since has been a failure - not because they don't put albums that sound exactly Master of Puppets any more, but because Reload, S & M and St. Anger weren't particularly good albums, lacking in the creative drive that still makes Master of Puppets so incredible 20+ years later. Metallica can experiment all they want to; it's their prerogative as artists and as people who have their own lives to lead, but they have yet to demonstrate the ability to create those experiments and do so with the same ability that they had as an edgy thrash band.

D.A.R.E.

Another month, another show. It's a hard life, I tell you. Let's talk about drugs and concerts.

My first drugs and concerts experience came secondhand: my friend Alan told me about his trip to a Grateful Dead concert as a young lad, where a fellow concert-goer, somehow (somehow, indeed) ignored his youth and inexperience and offered him a hit off a joint. Alan was young enough to be freaked out.

Much, much later I had my own concert-going drug-taking experience: a time in college when a friend brought a pipe and a free ticket to see Phish in Albany and I partook of both. I remember a lot of long songs and two guys jumping in synchronized fashion on trampolines on stage, so it must have been a good show. However, I had yet to have the quintessential drugs-in-the-crowd show experience - the one that doesn't involve doing coke off a stripper's backside - until about two weeks ago.

There I was, crowded into a corner of the Roseland Ballroom, the venue's acoustics-destroying balcony hanging over my head and the heads of hundreds of others squeezed to the fringes by the moshers and the capacity crowd. Machine Head was on, rocking my socks off, while I clutched my camera to my chest, trying to watch the stage, not get knocked down by a crowd surge and avoid damaging my precious photograph-taking instrument. Then the raggedly-looking man in front of me turned around and offered me the rapidly shrinking joint burning in his hand. He might have told me to take it, or I think he did; it was pretty loud, so he might have been firmly gesturing in an effort to give his thoughts about the weather over the noise. In any case, I took him up on his offer, not pausing to think of the possibility of anything laced and enjoyed a few moments of the glorious community of metal. Booyah.