Why I hate concerts – part IV

(Gonzo and Boris at Szene Wien, 18^th of June 2007)

First off, the new non-smoking policy in the stage room of the Szene Wien is a pleasure. I didn’t even mind the few people puffing away peacefully and not caring about the people around them. Looks like if only one dumb fucker in twenty five would be a smoker everyone would get along just fine. Well, no of course, they wouldn’t, because people just never get along just fine, as I will find some place to enhance on later on. (see below). And as long as there are people, there probably will be a substantial part of them being stupid assholes. Some things will never change. But at least I didn’t reek like a smoked salmon when I came home and that is something, isn’t it?

The appeal of a band loosely thrown into the Japan Noise bunch as well as the drone / doom bunch drew an interesting mixture of people, though I am inclined to loosely throw them all into the skinny, white boy with body movement challenges and lack of social intercourse bunch. There were a lot of skinny, white boy students, probably outnumbering the skinny white metal dudes by 5 to 1, outnumbering the people with steady jobs 10 to 1 and outnumbering women of any kind at all 20 to 1 at least. Fascinatingly, there were about eight women in a crowd of a hundred and half of them were tagging along with their stupid boyfriends. What kind of band is Boris, when the female member of a trio is able to raise the number of YY-chromosomes in the room by more than ten percent? Well, maybe I am just complaining because I don’t like to wear short trousers. I am convinced it just does not befit a man to wear kid’s trousers, not even if they are cut off army trousers. Except for drummers or at sports. Well, the whole crowd seemed to be the nightmare of any male beauty products product manager, and I am talking about basics like razors, combs and soap. For 90 % of the attending crowd male grooming and hygiene seemed to consist of getting up in the morning and checking if the t-shirt from yesterday was still “okay”. Believe me, most of the time, their judgement was wrong. At the bar asking for apple juice the guy next to me reeked as if the word “shower” hadn’t crossed his mind for at least two weeks.

After this initial set up here is my main story about the show: it was the night a young sociology student, let’s call him goo-nose, decided to come for no reason at all. Couldn’t be the music, because he was more interested in jokingly pushing his girlfriend, blonde sociology dumbnut student from a small village in upper Austria, for about fifteen minutes. Ha ha ha, we have our own moshpit. Growing a beard to hide your disformed visage doesn’t give you the air of being grown up or older if you behave like a retarded six year old. Slinky, the leptosome, retarded friend of goo-nose with the focal teeth, decided to bum along, because girlfriend sometimes touches him when having fun with goo-nose. Other than that his evening’s pleasure consisted of pushing his hands into the pockets of his jeans, spastically banging his head for ten seconds every five minutes or so and always out of sync with the rhythm of the song being played. Thinking about it, I don’t think goo-nose and girlfriend really get it on. Why would he take the sorry accuse of pushing her around to get to touch her, if they had satisfaction in the sack? Well, the fun went on for a quarter of an hour, when goo-nose and girlfriend decide to make it to the stage, and so – all in the running behavioral scheme of the last fifteen minutes – goo-nose pushes girlfriend not to the left or right as before but in the direction of the stage.

Where metal-man is standing. Metal-Man of course has long hair and a beard, a cool Blue Oyster Cult shirt, short trowsers and flip-flops. As goo-nose and girlfriend push by him he scowls. As they push back through the crowd of people metal-man gives goo-nose a little shove. They look at each other while goo-nose trots off and he gives metal-man a thumbs up. Then the three of them settle next to me and start yakking about metal-man. Like little girls they shittalk him. Slinks offers that he is gay. Then goo-nose says: “if I hit him he’ll bleed right.” I start to wonder about the self-delusions of some people. Goo-nose weighs probably 130 pounds and his only kind of training in the last two years was probably turning on his computer and carrying light-yoghurt home from the supermarket. Slinky looks as if he already had been broken in half by a few people and his parents liked to call him “boney maccaroni”. Nevertheless, he offers to take on the guy standing next to metal man. Yeah, right.

On my left side there are three relatively clean cut student boys, who had been talking about their project works, colleagues and spending the summer at rock festivals, who overhear the shittalking of the goo-nose posse. And they find this even more amusing. The biggest of them feigns a few kickboxing-moves to show what he would do with them, which to me looks as if he tries to rub a rubber patch into the wall with his right knee or dance some weird irish folk dance with him, but at least his hands are up to his chin and he is able to form a fist properly. Fortunately, everything calms down after some time, goo-nose explains to girlfriend what he wants to do to metal-man and she says “ooo-ieeh.” So they turn to some more shoving, foot-stomping and other things you do if you never laid hands on a woman in a sensual way.

Finally, it turns out that metal-man is part of a rather large crowd of people, amongst them the three student boys and one guy even I know. Does that mean that if a fight ensues I would have to be on his side? I probably would be anyway, because Blue Oyster Cult is cool. Anyway, goo-posse retreat to the other side of the hall where I can spot Slinky doing his spastic moves every once in a while.

After all, some peace to enjoy the music. During the longer and more psychedelic parts the drummer of Boris doesn’t do his Tommy Lee-routines which is a relief. The guitarist/bassist of Boris, Takeshi, is hyperactiv and poses his way off, but then he also produces some unbelievable noise. But the guitarist Wata is the coolest. She stands almost motionless, leans back a little in the same pose that Ted Nugent likes to use on the covers of his live records, but because she is a five foot tall japanese girl makes the whole thing appealing as hell. I almost fell in love, especially when she threw down some technically inebriate but soundwise destroying and hammering solos. Solos? Yes, you heard right, they do play real solos.

Gonzo don’t play solos and they were the highlight of the evening, even though they are only support. DDKern (the drummer of Bulbul and Metalycee and some other exciting bands and projects) sits in the middle and screeches his cymbals, while the dude on the guitar drones some reckless noise and the slim bass guy does nothing but tap the back of the nack of his bass once in a while. But oh the noise that makes? The wonderful, layered, deep bass drone that takes twenty minutes to turn into the slowest and heaviest of Melvins-riffs (the kind the Melvins only managed to top by including a second drummer) but mixed with a wall of noise that pertains for the next fifty minutes during which Gonzo flow through what could have been three or six songs. Gonzo should have record coming out on Dilemma records, whenever Dilemma record finally starts for real. (see, throwing side-punches isn’t all that hard...) All in all a great night. Will I start to enjoy concerts in my old age?

Georg Cracked, June 2007