Ah-boo-ah-boo-ah-boo-ah-(high-pitched squeal)

[Just Some Girl]

Dad's still in hospital, fevered again all day, no results yet from the two CT scans and two sets of xrays. The not-knowing really really sucks.

Understatement alert.

[Just Some Girl]

I'm sorry I keep bringing it all up. I'm not a good phone talker w/ my peeps so they're all getting email updates, too. I'm better with writing stuff that's bothering me than conversing, I guess.

Anyway, just dropped by for some Sunday night chuckles. But maybe I should go do something productive, like read the script I've had sitting on my nightstand for weeks now. sigh.

[Bizarro]

Hank III is an experience. His country set as "Hank III and The Damn Band" is a really tight, well-played set that you could call old school country western... if so many of the songs weren't about drugs or how much he despises country radio. It's a fiddle player, a guy plucking the standing bass, a banjo player, a lap steel player, and a third-generation C&W singer with a high & lonesome voice performing in front of a mosh pit.

That was the part that made it hard to enjoy: the drunk, no-account mother fuckers. Hank III's crowd is, in a sense, the most diverse one you could ever see, composed as he described us, of "Hillbillies, metalheads in the black fucking t-shirts, older folks, punks, and just average everyday ordinary motherfuckers." In another sense, they're overwhelmingly the same: scurrilous white folks with a shared enthusiasm for raising hell. That makes for a lot of drunk lunkheads shoving their way around all the time.

I made up a new word, by the way: assholibrium. Assholibrium is the point during a general admission show after which most of the really rude assholes have already forced their way up front, ending or at least minimizing the constant shoving and pushing.

For the first half hour of Hank III's set, a giant Cro-Magnon who was double fisting tallboy cans of Busch was in front of me. He wedged himself into a spot in front of me that was nowhere big enough to contain him, then ended up with his back pressed up against my chest. Later a couple did the same shit. While they were there, some girls decided to try and shove me forward to give themselves more space. When I held my ground (I could barely tolerate having this couple pressed directly against me... I wasn't going to start pumping my crotch into them to move them forward, one of the girls started swearing into the back of my neck. Then there was this one asshole who kept cutting past with football-style shoulder slams. I literally kicked his ass. Literally... I got sick of his shit, so I let him get about two steps ahead of me, turned my head to make it unclear who was doing it, then kicked him hard, right in the ass. It made me feel a lot better.

Try to imagine the miserable lot in life of the house security, assigned to rein in the madness of a motley assortment of rednecks, metalheads, hardcore punks, and the like. Yikes.

The second set, the "Hellbilly" set was a bit like watching a Misfits/Minor Threat knockoff band with fiddle, banjo, and lap steel. The final set, "Assjack" was a lurching, scattershot mess of all of the various kinds of metal Hank III apparently likes--most of which involve rapid-fire kick drumming and Pantera-style shouted vocals.

The whole thing was fun, but odd--a whole intersection of music and music fans that hardly ever see the light of day.

The opening act was Those Poor Bastards, who are sort of like a southern gothic White Stripes.

http://www.myspace.com/thosepoorbastards

[Bizarro]

We had dinner at Kuma's Corner before the show. It's the death metal burger joint. An hour and a half wait for tables, but we lucked out and got seats at the bar in half an hour. I had a "Lair of the Minotaur" burger, which was a 10 oz. burger on a pretzel roll, topped with caramelized onions, pancetta, brie, and bourbon-soaked pears. It was otherworldly. Jonathan had the Slayer, which the menu describes as a "pile of fries topped with a ½ lb. burger, chili, cherry peppers, andouille, onions, jack cheese, and Anger."

This is now a required stop on any Chicago meat-eater's itinerary. Holy shit, it was good. And all of this while being served by heavily tattooed staff (many wearing shirts that say "Bovine Genocide") under B&W S&M pinup art while the likes of Emperor and Dying Fetus rock the speakers. There's nothing like it.

[Tripp]

Thats why I don't go to super-packed shows anymore.

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

Those Poor Bastards Souls

[Bizarro]

My expectations for crowd behavior at a general admission show are forever unrealistic, due to most of the first 20-30 shows I saw in my life being hardcore shows in the South. You combine Southern manners with the obsessive morality of straight-edge kids and you end up with shows where people constantly say, "Excuse me" and "sorry" while moving between people, violating people's personal space (even by smoking) is patently uncool, and even the pits are marked by manners, with the whole thing regularly coming to a stop to make sure fallen moshers are okay. (And once they are, they get thrown back in and hit again.)

I'm not saying everyone at those shows was Judith Martin or anything, but there was a prevailing sense of community and trying to keep things decent that usually made even crowded shows not so stressful.

Add that to the last fifteen years of my life spent at indie rock shows mostly full of harmless nerds like us, and I have a real hard time with drunken, shoving, pandemonium. Before last night, the last show I'd seen like that was the Strokes on their first tour, at the Aragon Ballroom. That was just 90 minutes of human sardines. The only guy I saw actually getting aggressive was actually with my group, sadly. He got thrown out and had to meet up with us after the show.

Funny, quick story on that: the dude who got thrown out was my friend Paul's roommate, who was so drunk he got thrown out for moshing to the house music. Paul went out to look for him and wasn't allowed back in. Paul's girlfriend Inna and I watched the show then tried to hunt them down later. We wanted to check the Green Mile, but there was a HUGE line and a $20 cover that had just started half an hour before. The bouncer--a humongous biker dude--told Inna she could certainly go look for her friends inside... for five minutes. after which point, he was going to beat me to death.