H.G.T.

Slipknot: A Concert review.

 

A buddy and I went to see the Slipknot/Fear Factory show at the Fillmore East in Denver a few days ago. Being as it is the place to start, I shall start at the beginning: We bought tickets in advance over the internet and booked a hotel room with Expedia. ‘Cause we’re a little geeky, even as we rock.

 

The car trip down, we listened to the new Necromantix album (“Dead Girls Don’t Cry”), Blood for Blood, some other stuff. I read a book. It was my pal’s car and he didn’t want to run the air conditioner at first because it was ‘bad for the mileage’ . . . so I started fantasizing out loud about how bad we were going to smell after five hours in an 80+ degree car, using words like “chum,” “3 day old tuna,” “Hobo balls,” “lukewarm pork milkshake stain,” and “That brown stuff that forms on the surface of a cucumber if you leave it in the fridge wrapped in bacon to long.” He relented.

 

We got to Denver, and we headed up Colfax Av. looking for the turnoff to our hotel. The day had cooled a bit and we had the windows down. We were talking about chicks, making fun of pedestrians (although not doing so loudly out of the window as though our car made us supermen – that’s one of my pet peeves and I won’t allow it in a car I’m riding in, unless the person would be willing to say such things if walking next to the victim). We were having an OK roadtrip experience, considering we weren’t drunk yet.

 

We start to drive east into downtown Denver. I begin to elucidate (although, it should be noted, not particularly lucidly) certain theories I hold about the urban center as an entity, the odd transient nature of certain urban byproduct spaces, the nature of graphitti as a parallel to computer code – a thing with a great sense of art, but also structure, purpose, communication potential . . . and my pal josh is looking at me like I’ve lost it. I am only really half paying attention to things in the car, thinking more about the things I would do if I lived in a bigger city, particularly photography, that I don’t do in Happy Nothing Fun Town Casper. I love large cities for their own sake and become a bit strange when in one.  

 

Josh can’t find our hotel and keeps asking me how to get to it. I’ve been to Denver about 10 times in my life, and almost universally, I took the interstate to the airport and flew somewhere else.

 

We’re getting pretty far east (In Denver, the sterotype runs, the east end of Colfax is where the ‘bad’ part of town is).

Josh looks at me and says, “In another couple blocks, I’m going to roll up the windows and lock the car.”

 

“Why?” I ask.

 

“Well, we’re kind of getting into the bad part of town.”

 

I laugh, and lean out the window to ask a neighboring car for directions.

 

He yanks me back.

 

“Dude, don’t talk to people here!”

 

It should be explained at this point. . . Josh is what you would call . . . a prisoner of bourgeois thinking at times.

 

“Dude,” I say to him, “You have to remember something about where poor people live – Poor people *live* there. You think if you got shot every time you said something wrong like in some dumbass Hughes brothers movie anybody would still live here?”

 

He looks at me like I’ve grown another head.

”I don’t want to get carjacked.”

 

“Well, let me just point out something – there’s two of us, we’re guys, and we’re in an inside lane. Also, has it ever occurred to you that someone could just walk up to the car, put a bullet through the window, and carjack you anyway?”

 

He’s now looking around like nothing is safe. I don’t think he ever had thought of that, and the thought seems to trouble him.

By the time he finds our hotel and we check in, we’re running late, and we miss the opener, but other then that, the concert rocks. Fear Factory plays a great set, mostly off of Obsolete, their best album in my opinion. During “Break of the Edge Crusher,” I decide to screw with a random person and throw my arm around a shirtless, muscular giant who had just stepped out of a prodigious mosh pit to wash the small people out of his boot-treads.

”I was listening to this fucking song when I broke into the CIA’s computers,” I yell over the music, face three inches from his, while doing my best imitation of a schitzoid hobo’s body language.

”I know who killed Kennedy because of this fucking song, man. You got any PCP?”

 

It’s always fun to make a guy the size of a gorilla run for the bouncer.

 

I love a good, loud, show. The fillmore was sold out, and most of the crowd was one giant, protean mass on the floor. The crowd was a conscious exercise in urban tribalism, black and leather and chrome interrupted only by skin and tattoos. I went up to the balcony at one point, looking down from the steps as small pockets of moshing and slamdancing opened and closed all over the floor like mouths. The noise, the crowd, they silenced thought and magnified Zen, and I lost myself in them, just another Freak in the Freak Circus.

 

Between FF and Slipknot, there was a long pause. The crowd got bored, and an impromptu bout of sport broke out. The contest of the day seemed to be competitive holding a girl on your shoulders while she took her top off, and that’s always a hoot.

 

Slipknot themselves impressed me as showmen, even though they aren’t a personal favorite. In the pit during their set, someone fell and grabbed randomly at something to keep from falling . . . he caught my thumb, and his weight yanked it out of socket. I swore. He looked fearful. I popped my thumb back into the socket in front of him. He blanched. I grabbed him by the front of the shirt and he closed his eyes. I tossed him back into the pit and he opened them again.

Some other highlights:

Slipknot, during their encore, had the entire venue sit down and be quiet for a while. Then they got the entire place to get up and dance. I have seen similar concert antics before, but I haven’t seen them actually work on several thousand people before . . . for thirty or forty seconds, the entire venue was one big pit.

 

Also, at one point I saw a girl outside smoking. She was black and gothic, a rare combo, and she had a pair of those zombie eye contacts. I struck up a conversation with a random guy within earshot of her: “You see that girl with the corset?” “Yeah.” “She’s got the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen. She reminds me of my mom.”

 

I don’t know for certain that the goth girl heard me, but she found another place to be, quick, which disappointed me. . . I was kind of hoping for a sense of humor.

 

Also, in the screwing with people dept:

I used the line, “I’d suck your dick if you pulled it out,”  on a dare to “use your worst pickup line on that hot girl in the rubber pants.” We made out unitl her boyfriend saw us.

 

I ran up to a guy after the show and demanded to know where my friend was. He asked me what my friend looked like.

 

“He’s . . . Shorter then me… (I’m 6’4”) . . . he’s littler then me (I’m about 290#). . . and he’s, um. . . got black hair and he’s wearing black. He was supposed to meet me here. . . have you seen him?”

 

I watched the guy process. It looked like it bothered him. “He’s in there somewhere, man. Is there anything specific you can tell me about him?”

 

“He’s angry. He’s very angry and bitter.”

 

He goggled.

The punchline came later when I walked by with Josh. . . Josh being one of three Asians I saw at the show. (One of whom was an extemely hot, albeit rather snooty looking, girl. . . so really one of two applicable asians at the show.) The guy looked like he was going to have a nosebleed.