danzig

danzig
Originally uploaded by tonbabydc

OOoh boy. This one's gonna be tough.

Despite a singularly excellent debut album, I probably don't need to tell people why I was roundly mocked for liking Danzig so much. The pageantry, the macho bullshit, the cartoonish satanic imagery, the nods to bear-culture.....it's easy to forget that this guy was at one time, one of the better song-writers to come out of the punk generation, and arguably one of the single best vocalists punk rock vomited up.

Nope. Now he's just the MUUUUTHA!! guy.

Now, I don't quite remember whether this was before or after Beavis and Butthead gave Glenn their endorsement, but needless to say, even the smart kids with Misfits records thought that Danzig was a joke.

Me? Not so much, I guess. I like cartoons. I like scary stuff. I like camp. I like baritone voices. I like loud guitar rock.

And, yeah, yeah, everyone already thought that I was gay in the 90s, so I guess I'll go ahead and say that I like little short guys with big muscles and tattoos, even though I totally just thought that Danzig was just kinda cool and bad-ass, and I never actually wanted to suck his dick as bad an everyone assumed I did.

(Listen, fuck you all, ok!? I was not a particularly masculine individual and maybe I just liked to idealize men who were not as testosertonially challenged as I was. Not that anyone reads this shit, but I'm getting tired of defending myself around here).

Shocker: Ended up going to this one alone because my friend got really sick and I didn't know anyone else who wanted to go. This would be the first in a long string of concerts where I learned that if you're going to insist on having questionable tastes, you're just going to have to go see bands by your damned self.

This was the Danzig IV tour - probably his second-best album since the debut, and a fairly high point for his songcraft, I still believe.

Danzig had just fired Chuck Biscuits and I didn't much care for the new drummer. It took Glenn about one minute into the the first song (Brand New God) to leap into the crowd and start beating on a guy who threw a piece of ice at him.

Danzig is such a 'tard sometimes.

Eerie Von looked like a walking corpse (as advertised in videos and on album photos), and John Christ was stiff but had a pretty awesome guitar sound going.

I also remember that Danzig got his mic cord tangled up under the drum riser during "Long Way Back From Hell" and had a minor tantrum over that for a moment. Literally tug-of-warring the cord while his roadie ran around trying to free it up and looking like he was ready to throw a cup of water in the AC adapter.

"Snakes of Christ" and "Bringer of Death" both sounded good that night.

Type O Negative opened, and they totally delivered on all the underground hype around them. Peter Steele didn't pull and of that macho crap that Danzig was so big on (and that Steele regrettably came to embrace in a similarly homoerotic way), and yet the band was infinitely more scary and intimidating. They looked like complete dirtballs, and their music was loud and thick and layered and sludgy in a very good way (For real, it was an excellent performance, and the acoustics of the theater were very kind to their sound).

These three goth girls in the balcony with me actually shrieked during the intro to "Black # 1". You definitely got the feeling that you were tapping into an upcoming band at the right time.

Of course, I would ruin this for myself by obsessing over the band to the point that friends of mine literally stopped being their fans. More on that in future posts.