Friday Q&A: 5/16/2014
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Welcome to Friday Q&A. Every week, we’ll put up a question for the staff, friends, bands, and you, the reader, to answer.
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This Week’s Q
Do you remember your first show? If so, what were your expectations or fears and how did the show end up going?
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My first metal show was Ozzfest ’99 at the PNC Arts Center in Holmdel. I came to see Rob Zombie, and was wearing make-up — red around my eyes, tears of fake blood. It was a huge year for that festival, and I saw some of ’90’s metal’s finest before they really blew up, bands like Godsmack, System Of A Down, Fear Factory, Deftones, and this young band of upstarts named Slipknot. I was getting impatient for Rob Zombie when Slayer came on. They blew my 13 year old mind — no antics, no image-worship, just four dudes and a backdrop, absolutely destroying this massive crowd. “Dead Skin Mask” was the coolest thing in the world for me. Zombie was cool — lots of pyro, lots of costumes, half-naked women go-go dancing — but Slayer stuck with me.
Funny story from that show: I’m at the merch booth. I want to buy this Rob Zombie shirt that said something like “100% Flesh-Eating Blood-Drinking Zombie Mother Fucker.” I say to my buddy Chris, “I can’t get that shirt. My parents will freak out.” And this huge dude next to me leans down and goes, “That’s the point, dude.” Bought the shirt.
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I’m quite sure you’re not looking for The Allman Brothers at The Fillmore East (yes, from the tour when they recorded the infamous live album and the Eat A Peach live material!). Not only do I have the ticket but I have a show program and a poster that they gave out at the door to all ticket holders. The poster in great condition goes for thousands of dollars, the program several hundred. I didn’t even know who the ABB were! I just went because I knew that I’d regret it if I never saw a show at The Fillmore and this was the closing weekend, June 25, 1971. Duane died just four months later. I called the ticket office the day before the show and they held two tickets for me without a credit card, payment, or questions (people were like that back then, trusting) and we paid $4.50 (no service charges!) and got 17th row seats! Concerts were much easier back then and not as embraced by popular culture as they are now. The opening bands were some unknowns from Boston called The J. Geils Band and the legendary Albert King. Seeing this show was what I refer to as “the second spark.” The first was seeing The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the third was photographing Frank Zappa & The Mothers (below) just four months later when I was only 16. Those three events changed my life and set the tone for my future like nothing else. Seems like it all happened several lifetimes ago but I remember all of them vividly.
Okay, so if you want my first hard rock/metal show here’s another tale of yesteryear. . .
Date: October 10, 1973
Venue: NYC’s legendary Academy of Music which was located near Union Square at 3rd Ave & 14th Street
Bands: Slade (on the Slayed? Tour!!) & Blue Öyster Cult (tour preceding the release of Tyranny & Mutation (!!) a mere four months later)
Most of you probably just shit your pants reading the above and will be stunned to learn that I had to be nearly dragged to see this concert. Here’s how it went down. . .
At the time I was dating an amazingly beautiful and super cool girl who was heavy into glam rock. We didn’t see eye to eye musically on anything but we tolerated the taste of the other and tried to grasp it. I was a long-haired, bearded hard rocker into anything heavy and weird; especially prog rock and jazz fusion at the time. She was way into everything glam and even had a David Bowie style haircut waaaaay ahead of all the punkers and other people of that era. For some reason I just couldn’t get my head around glam. I did love Bowie, Iggy, and T-Rex but not much more.
One day when I met up with her she announced that she had bought us two tickets in the eighth row center (!!!) to see Slade and she insisted that I go. I bitched and moaned and wanted nothing to do with seeing them especially since she was always dissing my beloved Frank Zappa and refused to go see him live with me. I reminded her of that fact but she mercilessly pushed and pushed. Then she learned that the opener was Blue Öyster Cult a band she knew that I loved. I relented and agreed to go.
BÖC was fucking amazing! The best I ever saw them! Worth going for them alone. They were heavy into the neo-Nazi, leather biker look with three enormous Nazi flags hanging behind them with the swastikas replaced with their upside down question mark logo. They looked totally bad ass and sounded fantastic. The venue also had a PA system that was more than double the normal set up. BÖC had walls of amplifiers and were super fucking loud and when they were done the crowd was going absolutely crazy. I commented to my girlfriend, “Good luck to Slade following that! They don’t stand a chance!” and I laughed. Then the roadies changed out the stage and Slade had these tiny amplifiers and a tiny drum set and I laughed and joked, “Are The Beatles playing?” because it looked just like their extremely minimal stage set up. Then a roadie came out and stomped on the kick drum and it was so beyond fucking loud and so physical that it sat me right down in my chair and shut me up in a heartbeat. It was then that I realized that huge PA was for Slade! They were pushing EVERYTHING through those fucking enormous stacks. When they came on I started laughing again because they looked like idiots with their clam digger pants and their Bay City Rollers dressing in a dark closet look and Noddy Holder’s ridiculous mirrored top hat. To me it was so decidedly uncool looking after see the bad ass BÖC! Well, Slade launched into their set and proceeded to not only blow the venue to bits but, by the fourth song, I was up on my seat going ballistic just like the rest of the crowd. I was totally stunned how amazing they were and every song kicked ass. Suddenly I wasn’t laughing anymore and my girlfriend was because I had just become a huge Slade fan and it was all her doing. I can never thank her enough for taking me to that concert. Moral of the story. . .keep an open mind to ALL kinds of music and he who laughs last. . .
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I’ve always considered Michael Jackson at Giants Stadium on the 1984 Victory tour to be my first real concert. I was 9 and with my friend and both our parents. People stood up in front of us and blocked our view. I remember crying. More relevant to this website and to my life was one of my next concerts which was amazingly part of the Metallica “Damage, Inc” tour (aka the Master of Puppets tour). Metal Church opened the 1986 show at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ. I was 11 and with my parents (who were not into metal or Metallica’s music at all). I have no idea why they thought it was a good idea to take me to this show, but I’m thankful they did. We had a great hookup with front row seats. We were sitting next to Eerie Von who was in Samhain at the time. It was one of Jason Newsted’s first concerts with Metallica. Cliff Burton died tragically two months earlier. Not only was it my first metal show (and what would be my first of many more Metallica shows), it was my first time witnessing or even hearing about headbanging, and the sign of the horns. As far as my 11 year old self was concerned, the entire crowd was worshiping Satan and I loved every minute of it. Master of Puppets became my soundtrack at this young age and literally changed my life. It remains one of my favorite albums of all time to this day.
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My first concert experience was as frightening as it was fascinating. My older sister (five years my senior) was a month away from graduating and basically fed a story to my parents that she wanted me to tag along with her to hang out. Being 13 at the time, I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this band called Grateful Dead as I had largely been relegated to either Christian contemporary or a variance of old Motown and Creedence Clearwater.
Needless to say, the band played for nearly three hours, opening their set with “Touch of Grey” and somehow turning what’s already a pretty smokey venue (the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center) into a cloud equal parts patchouli and weed. I’d heard a few Dead songs thanks to having a bedroom right by my sister, but the live experience. . .was something else. What sticks in my mind the most was seeing this girl standing in the aisle right next to our seat just spinning around the entire time. And when I say she spun around the entire time, glowsticks in hand, I mean she spun around the entire show. Even at 13 I tried to grapple with the fact that she could do that without passing out and/or barfing all over everyone. Of course, I had not been introduced to the magic and splendor of hallucinogenics just yet so I soon found out that the acrobatics were based in something more chemical than spiritual. Sadly enough, Garcia would die just a few months after that show.
My first metal show (if we’re discounting bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Collective Soul — hopefully), was Marilyn Manson in 1996. It was right after Xmas that year, and I lied my ninth grade ass off and said I’d be going to an after-Christmas youth group event at my girlfriend’s church. A) my girlfriend didn’t go to church and B) I didn’t have a girlfriend then as mine had broken up with me right before the holiday. So, with a couple of stoner friends who were really into Deicide and Bone Thugs N’ Harmony for whatever reason at the time, we all told lies and made our way to the Boutwell Auditorium to witness the rumors of missing ribs and bible toilet tissue we’d all heard about.
I won’t lie. Manson put on a phenomenal show. It’s honestly still one of the most memorable shows I’ve ever attended. At 14, all the abject filth and theatrics were just enough to pique my interest and make me want to discover even more “extreme” stuff that would make Manson look like Karen Carpenter. It was kind of the beginning of me becoming an unofficial CD store bum just poring over records and and tapes and CDs that had the most disgusting covers. But back to the show — Manson’s half-naked performance wasn’t really shocking even then, but it definitely made me appreciate the value of showmanship and how the concert experience doesn’t always have to be an exercise in stoic stage presence. Granted, I’ve moved beyond ol’ Brian Warner now, but he certainly still holds a special place in my heart for instilling the curiosity that when faced with the seemingly darkest thing, I will inevitably dig deeper to find something even more sinister and, most importantly, more metal.
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These stories are so fun to read! My first concert was Three Dog Night in 1972, but I was too young to remember anything.
My parents said it was cheaper to take me to concerts than to pay a babysitter, so they took me to see ELO, Bob Seger, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Billy Joel, Pat Benatar, and many torturous shows such as Neil Diamond.
The first concert I went to without an adult was 1984 — Mötley Crüe (Shout at the Devil) and Ozzy Osbourne (Bark at the Moon).
I think my parents let me go alone at age 14, with a girlfriend, because my parents and I had already seen Ozzy Osbourne the year before, so they knew it wasn’t as scary as some people their age might have thought.
Mötley Crüe were in their prime, and the pyro and costumes were great. (I can’t fucking stand them now.)
I had the biggest crush on Jake E. Lee, and I went to meet him at a guitar shop at the local mall, too. It was so silly. The girl I went to the show with got so excited, during one song, she started making out with some old man in the seat next to her. There was no ecstasy back then, and I’m pretty sure she was sober. We were both in eighth grade!
They had the craziest merch. I wish I saved all that because I bought ridiculous scarves and crap.
Four months later, I went to see Ozzy with RUSH for the Grace Under Pressure tour. THAT was amazing!
Other memorable ones — Van Halen — 1984 tour; The Cult 1986 Love tour. . .
So many good shows after that, but hair metal grossed me out so bad, I started listening to a lot of new wave and goth until rediscovering extreme metal in my old age.
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My first metal-ish show was an all-ages, all-dayer at the TLA in Philly. That was back when aging punks and assorted freaks still roamed South Street, and the glory that was the Relapse record store still shone. I was 15, and my best friend at the time convinced her dad to take us to this gig. She painstakingly erected her little mohawk and wriggled into the requisite plaid pants while I waited impatiently in my tight jeans and lord knows what kind of t-shirt. That was just before I was bitten by the death metal bug but a scosche before I fully outgrew my Hot Topic phase, so I can’t pretend I was wearing an Eaten Back to Life shirt or whatever. We definitely both had way too much makeup on, but her dad, bless him, mutely deposited us outside the show and went off to find some smokes while we loitered outside, trying to look cool and, of course, failing harder than we could ever fathom at that point. It was billed as a “battle of the bands” of sorts, though in those sorts of situation no one truly ‘wins.’ The bands playing were uninspiring in the extreme; I think there was one metal-ish band playing near the end, when my friend had already found a green-haired lump to make out with and I was steadfastly looking the other way. I can’t remember what they sounded like (probably shit), but they were loud, and aggressive, and heavier than anything I’d experienced live before, so I lost my 15-year-old mind and launched my awkward frame into the ‘moshpit’ (which, like at every lame local metal show, was comprised of three big dudes and a hardcore-leaning whirlybird). That was the first time I really connected with the kind of energy and power that metal offers, and obviously, it made quite an impact.
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My first proper heavy metal concert was Metallica at the Target Center in Minneapolis, January 2000. I’d been to other arena shows before (U2, Aerosmith, etc.), so I knew generally what to expect. Still, the fact that my friend and I had to camp out in a grocery store parking lot before dawn in order to queue for tickets, and that I had been full-on obsessed with Metallica for four or five years prior, meant that this was my first ‘big deal’ show. I don’t remember all that much specifically about the show (I’ve seen them since, so it blends together), except that Kid Rock was an atrocious opener (if appropriate for much of the beer-sodden masses), and that I was blown away by how absolutely visceral the band’s performance was, even at such a great, artificial distance.
The two club shows that really rocketed me to heavy metal devotionalism happened not that long after. I saw the totally bizarre line-up of Cradle of Filth, Nile, and God Forbid at Mpls’s First Ave in July 2001. I was already a big fan of Cradle of Filth, but Nile was new to me, and I was almost struck dumb by how immense and monolithic their music was, despite its lightning precision. The title track to Black Seeds of Vengeance is the sort of song that’s perfectly calculated to throw hundreds of people into the same irresistible, unavoidable, bodily lurch. In November of the same year I went to see Converge with The Hope Conspiracy, American Nightmare, and Thrice. Although that show was my first (but not, sadly, last) exposure to idiots doing kung fu moves in hardcore pits, my principal memory is hearing Converge play “Jane Doe.” The album was still just a few months old at that point. My only previous experience with the band was with When Forever Comes Crashing, and as I watched them rip through an explosively emotional version of that title track, it really, truly felt transformative.
(Side note: That Converge gig was held in a temporary location of the Whole Music Club on the Saint Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, since the student union that typically housed the club on the Minneapolis campus was under major renovations. The only show I ever saw in that space when it reopened was the RX Bandits, with this great little band called The Format, who had just released their debut EP. I like to think back to that show, in the dimly lit space next to an impeccably new bowling alley on the basement level of a Midwestern college campus student union, every time I hear “We Are Young” by fun., the band that eventually emerged out of The Format’s dissolution.)
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August, 2005. Bottom of the Hill. San Francisco, CA. Red Sparowes, Big Business, and Pelican. The first two coming off lauded debuts, the latter having just dropped the career-defining The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw. I had graduated high school that spring and my buddy and musical partner in crime Josh and I had been checking out a few local gigs featuring bands whose names I can’t even remember (hence why this is not about any of them). Neither of us had left the city on our own, and to a bar in the seedy industrial area of The City, no less. My mom, the responsible, worried parent she is, called the venue to double, triple check we could get in being under 21. We piled into Josh’s Dodge Avenger, stopped for some KFC and jetted on I-80 from Sac to the Bay, blasting Opeth and The Mars Volta through the giant subs in Josh’s trunk.
The venue itself was even gnarlier than we anticipated. If my parents had been there it would have been a quick, “Oh hell no,” and back in the car. Looking back, I’m not surprised the crowd was rad, but back then we — clearly two of the youngest at the show — stood around like goofs gawking at the too-cool beardos shooting the shit about genres we hadn’t even heard of yet.
Red Sparowes launched into their spiraling, pedal steel-driven cinematic rock, soundracking the apocalyptic black and white footage projected on the wall behind them. The skyward bass hook of “Buildings Began to Stretch Wide Across the Sky, And the Air Filled with a Reddish Glow” marked the first time live music has ever given me goosebumps.
Big Business broke the mood with irreverent, scuzzy punk. Then still a two-piece (yes, 2005 was a long time ago), the dudes flew through a half hour set with all the grace of a drunken defensive end rushing a quarterback. At one point Jarred Warren busted his E string, and with a shrug that suggested this was a fairly common occurrence, he wandered behind his stack of cabs for a replacement while Coady Willis flowed into a drum solo until the new string found its rightful place, the band seamlessly picking up the song where they left off. Josh (a huge Foo Fighters fan) approached Willis after the set to tell him his drumming reminded him of Dave Grohl. Willis said that was the best compliment he had received in a long time.
Pelican played for what seemed like ages, which is the highest praise I can give in this context. Their tectonic instru-metal made the already tiny venue seem like a phone booth. Suffocating guitars propelled by towering stacks blasted us into the stratosphere. Like a dork, I brought the liner notes from At the Soundless Dawn and The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw and approached each band member with all the nervous awe of a comic nerd asking Stan Lee to sign his vintage issue of Spider-Man. Every single one of the guys obliged, enforcing the idea very early in my journey through heavy music that — despite what black metal would attempt to convince me a bit later on — these were not nameless, faceless immortals conjuring sounds from the abyss, but regular people with jobs who are flattered when an awkward kid tells them their music means something to him.
Years later, I sold most of my CDs to start a vinyl collection, saving a precious few with sentimental value. My signed copies of Red Sparowes and Pelican made the cut, along with Isis’ Panopticon signed by Aaron Turner in Morse Code. But that’s a story for a different time.
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My brother was in a hardcore band when he was in high school and I went to a few local Annapolis, Maryland, shows with him when I was in my early teens and younger. The first show that really made a mark, though, was Opeth and Amorphis outside of Washington, D.C. in 2001. I made/begged my Dad to take me (school night, too young to drive), so it was a big deal. I had gotten into Amorphis after hearing “Weeper on the Shore” off Elegy on a Relapse Records sampler called Spectrum Fest, which is actually a pretty great little comp with Neurosis, Bastard Noise, Abscess, and more. The show was at Jaxx, which a quick Google search reveals has since closed. That’s probably for the better. I was blown away by Opeth’s starts and stops and cymbal grabs, and I nerded out pretty hard for Amorphis. The tour was for Opeth’s Blackwater Park, so it was before both bands embarked on their since meandering careers. Thanks for the solid, Dad. m/.
Another memorable show was Misery Index, E-Town Concrete, Zao and God Forbid at Ottobar in Baltimore in 2003. What a lineup. I was there with a few older friends. Throughout the show there was some pretty active dancing, but shit really hit the fan when E-Town Concrete came on. I was hugging the wall to stay as far away from what seemed like a bunch of grown-ass men throwing punches at random. There was this one little guy in a camo hoodie with his hood up (duh) who was windmilling around like more of a maniac than anyone else, doing the punch-into-the-other-hand dance, and so on. Out of nowhere, he pinballs across the room and grabs me by the shirt to pull me in. One of my older friends, who was huge, intervened, sending the guy back into the thick of it to punch someone other than me. Good times.
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I grew up in the ’80s in a town about an hour outside of Washington, D.C. that was just transitioning to a bedroom professional community. Some of the cooler kids I knew trekked to the city to the 9:30 Club (the original location on F Street) to see bands like 7 Seconds and The Slickee Boys but my parents weren’t having it. My father had already repossessed my record collection about a year earlier. Local hardcore legends and Dischord standouts Government Issue — one of the high points on the original harDCore sampler Flex Your Head — played a show at nearby Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland in the spring of ’87. I was allowed to go. It was a year of uncertainty and change; the year of my first girlfriend, who decorated her walls with Duran Duran posters, smelled eternally of flowers, and talked about becoming an astronaut. I don’t remember what songs GI played or the set list. I do remember when John Stabb took the stage the small crowd started slam dancing (moshing wasn’t the preferred term yet). I was tossed into a twister of human bodies and felt more alive than ever. What I remember more was the sense that this was a true collection of outsiders: kids who didn’t fit in; people with leather jackets and mohawks and combat boots; kids who hated school and were going to bomb the SATs — the kids your parents, teachers, and priests warned you about. I felt a lot like Luke when he enters the cantina in Star Wars. It wasn’t as much a concert as it was a portal to another world.
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My first show for underground music was high school, 1999, in this kid’s basement, which was grandiosely named The Cafeteria. It was the only punk/hxc “club” in the area at the time. It was 3-4 local bands whose names I can’t remember, plus some emo/pop-punk band from Florida. The Florida band had vintage style microphones, which we found really pretentious. They closed and had just finished their set when the cops showed up and wrote one of the dozens of noise ordinance violation tickets that the owner-kid received during The Cafeteria’s lifespan. The show was probably $5-$10. When my mother found out I was going she told me I was going to fry my hearing and go deaf early in life. I spent more time at the show thinking this was a bad way to lose my hearing than I did paying attention to the bands. I think I bought a copy of the emo band’s EP. . .the CD is probably lying around somewhere covered in a decade and a half’s worth of dust.
I looked up my first metal show online, which was Hypocrisy, Children of Bodom, and Nevermore opening for Dimmu Borgir on Dec. 11th, 2003 at the 9:30 club in Washington, D.C. Hypocrisy’s guitars were a washed-out sheet of white noise. CoB put on a great show and were surprisingly tight considering that they were drinking on-stage. Nevermore were supposed to be touring for Enemies of Reality, but didn’t play much from it. They did an extended version of the main solo in “The River Dragon Has Come.” Dimmu live sounded exactly like they did on Supreme Puritanical Misanthropia. They were so spot-on that I still wonder if they were playing to pre-recorded guitar and keyboard tracks.
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Technically the first show I saw was Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. My dad took me when I was a child so if I did have any expectations I don’t remember them. My only memories of it are that we missed the opener because my dad said they suck anyway. Years later, I learned the opener was Dream Theater (so he was right!), and my other memory is that I fell asleep during Deep Purple.
The first show I went to because I chose to go was Green Day, and I didn’t really have any expectations besides being really, really excited. It was definitely a huge arena rock spectacle and the entire car ride home I just wouldn’t shut up about how all of it amazed me (“They brought a fan on stage to play guitar!” “Everyone pumped their fists in unison!” “They played their Operation Ivy cover!”).
But my first “aggressive” show was that same year as Green Day. It was also a local punk (or post-hardcore really) gig at a VFW hall. Same thing where I didn’t have expectations really, but there were more surprises for me at this one. I guess the arena show was kind of how I assumed a concert would be, but seeing the band play on the same floor kids were standing on, kids yelling into the singer’s mic, grabbing him, and him grabbing them back, etc. — that stuff was really new and eye-opening. I was SUPER shy at the show, wasn’t immediately like, “Yes! these are my people!” or anything, but I also definitely loved it.
So that was sort of three answers, hopefully at least one of them actually answers your question!
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My first concert was Billy Idol at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in August 1984, just a month after my 13th birthday. (I still have the ticket stub!) I hadn’t been to any concerts before that so I really had no expectations and didn’t know what it would be like at all. I had an older, cooler friend in middle school who had given me a tape of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen so I was already paying attention to punk rock on a small level and I was obsessed with Billy Idol’s sneering attitude. My family, surprisingly, let me go with an older cousin who drove us the four hours to Biloxi, Mississippi from our home in Pensacola, Florida. We went as close to the stage on the floor as the crowd would allow, and I felt safe because I was with my 22-year-old cousin. I remember that he very kindly let me sit on his shoulders as much as he could bear it through the whole concert. The lights, the spectacle, the music, Steve Stevens and Billy Idol together on stage doing their thing was amazing to me. I already loved music and I quickly came to understand how much I loved seeing music played live in person.
That was a great year of concerts for me because our town built a civic center and the first non-country band to play there the week it opened was Rush on the Grace Under Pressure Tour. Then a few months later Kiss on the Animalize tour played there. After those three shows and beginning to find my way into our local hardcore, punk, and skate rock scene thanks to my friends who were skaters, I knew that I was hooked on the thrill of seeing bands play live. It didn’t matter to me if it was an arena show or a basement punk show, I started going to as many shows as I could, and luckily Pensacola had a ton of them. My first big metal show was Slayer in 1988 on the South of Heaven tour, an experience which I recounted a little bit for the Jeff Hanneman tribute on the site. By then, I was fully initiated into the dark side.
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I have told this story on the site before, but my first metal show was Nightwish on the Planet Hell tour. I had to be. . .14? I went with my very first girlfriend, whose older sister was a die hard power metal freak. She drove us to Cleveland, and on the way introduced me to some fucking band called Dream Theater? They sounded pretty cool, but I thought the singer sucked. Anyway, we spent the day at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and then high-tailed it to the House of Blues just in time to squeeze to the very front and catch Lullacry, whose discography I later bought off Amazon — still got those fuckers somewhere.
Anyway, Nightwish was the shit. This was their last tour with Tarja and I believe their only full headlining US tour with her. They sounded tight as hell and ON-POINT. I spent most of the time gripping my gal from behind, which was awkward because at that point she was much, much taller than me, so I’d be bobbing left and right to see who I wanted to see. I had to annoy the living shit out of her, I still feel bad about it. Hormones. Shortness. Gross. Anyway, the band played a bunch of good shit (although not enough off Oceanborn, STILL their best fucking album) and covered “Symphony of Destruction.” That’s how I got hooked for life.
END NOTES: NIGHTWISH WAS THE SHIT. NIGHTWISH IS STILL THE SHIT. AS I WRITE THIS I AM SLAMMING BLACK COFFEE AND JAMMING TO WITHIN TEMPTATION. WUSSY FEM-POWER METAL UNTIL I DIE. UNTIL. I. DIE.
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First show overall: Crescent Hill Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky. A bunch of local hardcore acts, primarily. My most vivid memory of the night was this local edge band coming on and singing about pizza. During their set I watched this little shaved-head edge warrior get kicked in the ribs and go flying across the pit, which I responded to by launching myself in and elbow-dropping the kicker in the back. I didn’t wait around to see if he was angry at me for that because I ducked out immediately after bringing him down. It was rad!
First metal show: played a show with my ninth grade metalcore band (Heaven at War) at a shitty little community space downtown. The first two bands were well-established local hardcore acts, and so by the time we came on (third, because we organized the show but weren’t good enough to play last), no one was left to watch us. Which was merciful, because we SUCKED.
First “big” metal show: Sounds of the Underground 2007. GWAR, Lamb of God, Hatebreed, Chimaira, Job for a Cowboy, Behemoth, The Acacia Strain. It was fucking rad: they had it outside of the Waverly Hills Sanatorium (allegedly one of the most haunted sites in the US) and I remember, vividly, Nergal whipping out a bible and quipping, “See this? Book of lies,” before ripping a bunch of pages out and throwing them into the crowd. I also remember GWAR bringing out Cho Seung-Hui, this being four months after the Virginia Tech shootings. They decapitated him before crushing him with a huge crack rock. RIP Oderus.
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My first-ever concert was Sting, and my first-ever “metal” concert was Winger and Mr. Big, both of which I’ll skip describing in favor of sharing another early metal-show memory. I saw Death Angel at the River Theater in Guerneville just before Christmas in 1990. Like Justin’s parents, mine were pretty protective; I wasn’t allowed to go to most shows in San Francisco, even though it was only an hour away, and my mom almost didn’t let me go to this Death Angel show (with my dad driving) because it was extremely foggy and she kept saying it wasn’t worth the risk of an accident. But she finally let me go. It was so much fun; Death Angel have always put on a really warm, engaging live show, and this was back when they were still in their teens and early 20s with even more energy onstage. Because it was almost Christmas, everyone in the band wore Santa hats, and for some reason several members of the bands’ Filipino families were there, including some of their grandparents. They looked really intent on showing their support, but were also covering their ears and wincing at how loud and bracing the music was. It was pretty adorable.
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You’ve read ours, now what’s yours? Let us know below and enjoy your weekend.
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