Vic Bondi: Toe-to-Toe with 1000 Years of Darkness

Vic Bondi in Seattle, August 2025 (all photos by Allan MacInnis)

Before we get to Vic Bondi -- hardcore punk singer extraordinaire, in Victoria this Friday and Vancouver on Saturday, opening for the SLIP~ons, let me just explain that my wife is a huge Alabama Shakes fan. That’s why we drove to Seattle back in August: to see her favourite band live on their reunion tour. We generally don’t think it’s a great idea for Canadians to be going south just now, but it was a special occasion. And even though our border crossing happened without incident, with ICE now flat-out murdering American citizens in some cities, we won’t be making such a journey again anytime soon.

But it sure was an interesting trip. On the way down, we stopped at a nearly abandoned Bellis Fair Mall, which would normally be buzzing with shopping Canadians. There, we went from feeling guilty about being in the USA in the first place--“visiting the evil empire”--to feeling even more sheepish about seeing how dire the effects of the informal Canuck boycott were. It was clear that businesses were hurting, that our absence was being felt. Later, a coat check guy at the Climate Pledge Arena, when he found out were down from Canada for the show, thanked us in a memorably touching way for making the trip, pleading with us (and Canadians in general), “Don’t abandon us”.

Bellis Fair Mall, at about 5pm on a Friday in August. Ouch! 

But I had designs on visiting a single Seattle resident: Vic Bondi, formerly of legendary Chicago hardcore band Articles of Faith, and also (fittingly) lyricist and vocalist of my favourite anti-Trump protest song, Dead Ending’s “IvankaWants Her Orange Back”,  a positively emasculating single that mocks “all the bald men with toupees” for their gropey, tiny-handed figurehead, whom Bondi describes as a pickpocket of the public purse.

The song was recorded during Trump’s first term in office; it would no doubt be even angrier if it were written now. Bondi said of it, when we spoke in 2022, that “That single probably is in some ways the most representative Dead Ending moment, because it is a super hardcore band and my muse tends to be pretty political, if it's not the folky melodic thing that sometimes flows in there.”

But fair warning: that song probably won’t be on Bondi’s setlist for his solo acoustic shows this coming weekend, which will largely comprise songs written for acoustic delivery, like the material off his first solo album, 1988's The Ghost Dances, which Vic and I discussed here when he was last in Vancouver. 

And while some of Bondi’s punk songs do lend themselves to acoustic re-arrangements, like “Walter Benjamin at the Border”, which he did when he opened for Bob Mould at the Rickshaw a few years ago, “Ivanka Wants Her Orange Back” probably needs a full punk band blasting behind it for maximum impact: it’s hard to get sufficiently apoplectic over an acoustic guitar, and you can’t really do the song justice without Dave Shield’s driving bass hook.

We will likely hear “What We Want is Free”, however, which Bondi played last time he was in town. He clarified in a conversation afterwards that “It’s not an Articles of Faith song when I play it by myself on acoustic guitar, it's a totally different thing.”

But those are quotes from past interviews--I have a whole new one here, in addition to a piece I've put together for the Georgia Straight, due to run in the next day or two. The following conversation took place over lunch at a cozy café in an area with a Commercial Drive vibe, the afternoon of August 16^th. It has sat patiently waiting for a gig here that I could use it to promote; I had hoped for a Redshift show, but now that that band has called it a day, I'll take an acoustic one gladly! 

Bondi is extraordinarily articulate and passionate, so we’ll present the conversation Q&A style, but with some omissions: for instance, since his surf-meets-punk band Redshift has ceased operations, it doesn’t make much sense to go into their history deeply (as mentioned in the Straight piece, his new band, Vic Bondi And His Issues, has a new EP coming out in a couple of months on Alternative Tentacles, and will be playing their first show June 6th at the Kraken in Seattle, if you’re brave enough for the trip!).

 There’s also no discussion of things like the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro, to say nothing of the war Trump and Netanyahu have started in Iran, because none of that had happened yet. The world was a saner place, just half a year ago! But you'll find he has lots to say of relevance to the present moment. 

Commence 2025 interview...

Allan (bolded): So I wanted to ask about “Walter Benjamin at the Border.” There are a couple of versions of that song--it’s the B-side to Dead Ending’s “American Virus”, but it's also on Redshift’s album Chaos As Planned...

Vic: I’ve had that song for awhile. It’s still the fastest way to silence an audience that I know of. You get done with that, people just don’t say a word. I mean, I wrote that song in the middle of the first Trump presidency and I forget what the motive was for it, but I'm really familiar with a lot of Benjamin’s work. He wrote a fantastic essay called "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in the 1930’s that is really one of the most profound philosophical works of the 20th century.

But because I studied totalitarianism and because my wife's family were killed in the Holocaust, I think a lot about how people made the decision to leave Nazi Germany. What was the turning point for them? What was the point at which they said, "You know, this is going to end really, really badly and I need to get out of here." And you know, for Benjamin, as a Jew, he's chased out of Germany, he goes to Paris [just before the Nazis take it] and then he ends up in Spain and kills himself, actually not immediately at the border; he kills himself in a hotel right next to it. But I felt one night like I kind of got where he was coming from. Like, if what you're seeing now is the beginning of a 1000 years of darkness, why would you want to go forward? And that's what that song is about. It's not really about me. I'm not a suicidal person; I don't really even get depressed. But I've certainly got to the point with Trump, and sometimes I'm still there, worrying about where we're at as a world, where I'm like, "Holy fuck, this could be it: this is the end of the Roman Empire, and we're looking at 1000 years of darkness in front of us."

You know, in terms of the immediate, visible impact of the Trump presidency, we were shocked, coming down, at how much of a graveyard Bellis Fair Mall was. I mean, it was a Friday night, and it was empty. It doesn’t seem to have effected Seattle as badly, but…

Well, Seattle is a pretty big city. But Bellingham was depending on Canadians to come down and buy stuff, and you guys aren’t doing it now. So it’s really bad for them, but I don’t think anybody really blames you for not coming over the border anymore. I mean, he comes out of the box talking annexing Canada. Are you fucking kidding me?

Right. So from an on-the-ground perspective, what have you seen of the effects of the Trump presidency in your neighbourhood? Like, there’ve been no National Guard deployments or…?

Absolutely nothing in my neighbourhood, nothing on the ground in Seattle. But we went to the No Kings march; that was really something. Probably the largest demonstration that I’ve ever walked in. It was so large that halfway through, we left the march, went into this bar, had a drink, a little food, and came back out, and we were still in the march! That was a huge march. It was like, 80,000 people there. I mean… he’s got the support of rich and powerful people, and he’s got the support of really stupid people, but above and beyond that, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of support. But I haven’t seen the affects of his policies here in Seattle.

Economically? Gas prices, egg prices…?

Well, I mean, yeah, prices of everything here are very high, and they’ve gotten higher since he became president. So that is something we do see, and I expect to see more of it. And one of the weird things is, I work with a lot of people who are Indian immigrants, or they’re on a Visa, and all of them now are walking around with their passports. They’re afraid of being arrested. So for people are colour, they’re worried about getting picked up. And people who are from Hispanic backgrounds are worried about being picked up, so they’re carrying their IDs on them. But I think it’s going to come: because during his first presidency, he did all this stuff in Portland with guys in unmarked vans where he was abducting people, and here in Seattle, he set the Proud Boys and right wing skinheads on crowds; I actually saw Proud Boys in my neighbourhood Safeway, which I’d never seen in my life. So I think that’s coming this fall or this winter, because he’s got the funding to do it now. He’ll put these goons on the street; he’ll do something super-provocative, like what he’s doing in DC right now… I mean, he’s a really hateful person, man. He really is.

So having written songs like “Ivanka Wants Her Orange Back,” given how revenge-oriented he seems, do you worry that there’s going to be some sort of targeting of you?

Bring it! Bring it. I can say whatever the hell I want. I’ve never advocated violence against these guys, so they can’t tenably accuse me of anything like that. So…

Are you upping your game onstage, speaking out more?

I’ve never really done that too much. In the solo shows, I talk a lot more than I do with the bands, because with the bands I want to get the energy going, get everybody moving. So I’ve never done the Jello Biafra/ Dave Dictor "harangue from the stage". I might do some brief introduction to a song, like if I play "Walter Benjamin at the Border", I might say, ‘This is a song about a German philosopher who killed himself because of the Nazis,’ something like that. Give them some context. But I don’t normally say very much from the stage; nobody’s coming to my show to cast a vote, and the music speaks for itself anyway; I don’t really need to say something. 

Other than “Walter Benjamin at the Border,” which I know from other versions of it, I don’t really know the newest Redshift album Chaos As Planned; are the songs also pretty political?

So one of the things with Redshift was, when I started playing with Adam [Gross] and Mike [Catts], who were the other guys in Redshift, neither one of them comes from a hardcore background. Most of my life, for my musical career, I’ve played with other guys who were from that same milieu, that same background, that same generation. But these guys actually aren’t. Mike is a jazz bassist and Adam plays R&B and rap, so I met these guys where I took this project on where I participated in a theatre orchestra band. And the other guys in the orchestra can read music; I can’t, so it was challenging for me. But that’s why I did it; I wanted to try something new, see if I could actually stretch my playing into something like that, as opposed to just being the guy that just hacks at the guitar, I’d have to play with some nuance and finesse. So I met them in that, and we hit it off; and one of the musics that we had in common, that we all liked, was surf music. So this band is [or was; I here must reiterate that as of 2026, Redshift has called it quits] kind of like a punk surf, quasi-surf kind of thing, so on this record, there are a lot of instrumentals where I’m just playing guitar, I’m not singing. And at this stage, I really like that, because if I’m playing a 60 minute or 70 minute set, I don’t have to be shouting the whole time. I can lay back and just work on the guitar, catch my breath a little bit. It puts a little more nuance and complexity into what I’m doing. All of this stuff is kind of of-a-piece with the other music that I’ve done in my career, but it gave this band kind of that surfy cast. We created this “astro-surfer” kind of brand. It’s fun. It’s very Dick-Dale-style surf music, which means it’s super-aggressive. This is not happy-happy-happy fuckin’ Beach Boys stuff!

But it’s not, like, Agent Orange surf, either.

It’s harder than Agent Orange!  But it’s of a piece with a lot of my other political stuff: ‘All Your Rich Sons’, the chorus of that is, ‘all your rich sons will burn’. "SiCbUrN" is, "aren’t you glad to know you got nothing but a sick burn", like all these guys online simping and pimping for rich people: yeah, you got a sick burn, great.

I don’t know what a sick burn is.

Ah, that’s because you must not have a 24 year old daughter that tells you the slang. A sick burn is when, you know, you insult somebody great, but it also means when you get insulted. And there’s “Starter War.”

What inspired that?

It’s just generic: let’s just start a war. There’s a reason that Netanyahu will never end the war in Gaza; it works for him. Perpetual war. So yeah.

Actually, since you’ve brought that up, I’ve been having a fight online with a Vancouver street punk singer named Bugsy Faithfull, who sings with a band called Toy Tiger. He’s very political, and he’s doing important things in Vancouver, and interesting stuff. Like, he put a stencil of [Spanish anarcho-syndicalist] Durruti’s face on the inside wall of the Cobalt. But I wouldn’t know Durruti to see him! So I was impressed. But I’ve also seen him onstage leading chants like "From the river to the sea," and even riffing on that Bob Vylan thing about the IDF. And I mean, I have Jewish friends who are getting upset in the audience, and… like, using slogans like that might bring you closer together with people who already agree with you, but I don’t think those are good movement-building slogans.

(Durruti has the red cap, to the right of the door)

Yeah, I… I was in Israel six or seven years ago. A company that I was working with got bought by an Israeli company. So I worked for about a year for an Israeli company, doing the technical hand-off between the company that they bought and the company that they had. And as part of that, I went over there and did some work. And it’s a police state. I really didn’t like it, because half the population is Arab, but they’re all subjugated and treated like second-class citizens. And they do all the work. It’s like the Mexicans here: they do the construction work, all the difficult stuff. And then the Israelis, they’re in software and whatnot. The Jews. 

And they do racial profiling as a matter of course, which sort of works: it was very interesting, going through Ben Gurion airport. You’d think the security would be super-tight, but they have this process of figuring out who is a terrorist from who isn’t; basically a guy will come and ask you three questions. And I guess they’ve learned how to do this from asking three questions of you, to decide whether you’re a potential terrorist or not. And that’s it.

(image of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill)

What three questions?

I don’t remember the questions, but I’ve gotten interrogated worse by US Customs! So it wasn’t a big thing. But the country itself, some of the people there are really lovely, and the country is very lovely.  Jerusalem is an amazing city, Tel Aviv is beautiful, Dead Sea was amazing. But the political situation there is not tenable. And they’ve normalized the catastrophe [see the upcoming Straight piece for a discussion of the Articles of Faith song "New Normal Catastrophe", which Vic is here referencing] When you’d go out to dinner with them, they’d all have a discussion of what it was like in the IDF, because everyone has to serve; it becomes formative in the lives of young people. And so they all have stories of friends that were killed, and what they learned or got out of the IDF when they were in it. So they’re routinized and mainstreamed all of these oppressive policies.

And when I was there, there was a terrorist event right by my hotel. I watched it on TV; it was absolutely spectacular, because the Arab guy was just spraying bullets on the street, and this Israeli cop, absolutely dauntless, walks straight down the street, bullets flying around him, and shoots the guy dead. It was unbelievable to see.

You saw that first-person?

No, I saw it on TV, but it was right by my hotel. And the whole city went into lockdown, and they closed the borders. 

And then we went to Jerusalem during Ramadan, during this lockdown, and Jerusalem was totally empty, which kind of great if you were a tourist: you didn’t have to wait in line anywhere. But it was eerie, because the only people that were in Jerusalem that day were the Arabs that were up on the Mount of Olives, taking service, and just us, and then legions of Israeli military everywhere in the street. It’s super intimidating to walk past a cadre of eight fully-armed submachine gun people, right? 

And this is what Trump’s trying to routinize in the States now. It’s nuts. So my experience with Israel was really a mixed bag. I really liked a lot of the people I worked with, I thought they were wonderful, and obviously since my wife is part Jewish, we have a lot of Jewish friends and family. But what Israelis are doing over there is not civilized. They’re starving ch:ldren to death in Gaza. On the way over here, I was listening to the Ezra Klein show, this podcast, and he had this guy on who was a legal expert in genocide, because genocide has a legal definition in international law, and he was talking about whether what’s happening in Gaza meet the definition of genocide or not, and he’s like, "Well, I can’t give you that decision, the international court has to give you that decision. They haven’t done that yet." Which was a very legal way of framing it. But from what I’ve seen online, pictures of people starving to death, this cannot be a policy that is in any way humanitarian or justifiable… so… young people have a tendency to get super-hyperbolic, so… "From the river to the sea," "Fvck the IDF"… Bob Vylan--who I really like--he got some pushback on this, but if you listen to that man’s music, where would you think he was going to come from? Or that duo’s music.

But I don’t have anti-Israeli songs, or pro-Palestinian songs. What Hamas did on October 7^th was objectively wretched. It was abominable. But there’s got to be some modicum of proportionality here. It’s not proportional to kill 1200 Israelis and then kill 62,000 Palestinians. And keep it going! And Netanyahu’s doing it for political reasons, because… when I was there, people hated him. He’s just a dictator that’s maintaining his hold on power by destroying the lives of a minority. It’s horrible. So to me if the anti-Israeli protests tend to the hyperbolic and the intimidating, on college campuses and so forth, that actually seems proportional to me. What seems disproportional to me is to de-fund the universities because of it.  Or taking these guys and putting them in a detention facility for months and months…

That’s not happening in Canada.

Because you have adults in power up there! And the elbows up thing was great.  Or when you guys started to boo the national anthem, I was like, "That seems appropriate to me!" Fuckit, why should they cheer. 48% of the American vocal public voted for this asshole. Why would you feel comfortable about Americans in the face of that.

It’s a funny thing for a punk rocker to say, but we’re in the midst of an incredibly juvenile moment in the history of the world, where culturally, a lot of anti-adult stuff that was super-cool and fun, when it was in Repo Man, has now become the dominant modality of adults who should know better. Trump is going to have a cage match on the White House lawn on the fourth of July next year. It’s just… I’m not saying there shouldn’t be mixed martial arts or cage matches, if that’s your gig that’s fine, but I don’t think it belongs on the White House lawn, and I don’t think you should make policies like this, that are just adolescent incitements to piss people off. I don’t know if he was ever serious about annexing Canada. He couldn’t be, because there’s no legal framework for doing that. I don’t think he’s going to send the US military to fight a war against Canada, and I don’t think US servicemen would fight it.

But that’s the other thing with militarizing DC: every one of these guys that’s having to march around at 2am now in his uniform because Trump wants it to make some show is hating that guy right now. It happened in LA, too: all of those guys that got set down, that’s why it didn’t last very long: the guys, the boots on the ground, were like, "What the fuck are you doing? Just stop." It’s this kind of infantile adolescent cultural politics. Like, Hegseth… these guys are drunks, they’re not adults at all!

And I’m nobody’s censor. I’ve been playing punk rock for 45 years. It’s not like I’m not pretty well versed in sex and drugs and rock’n’ roll. But I don’t raise my daughter that way, and my music is not the same as the work I do in software. When you’re a functional adult, you behave like a functional goddamn adult, right? And these ch:ldren, these boys, really, and these ridiculous women, too, like Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi… Jesus Christ, put on your adult pants and behave properly. Like, there is a real climate crisis; we were just talking about the fires. You’re not going to solve that by ignoring it. If you don’t address it now, sooner or later you will have to, so it’s better to be proactive and adult about it, than ‘drool, baby drool.’ Everything gets reduced to a bumper sticker of stupidity…

It reminds me of how George W. Bush was allowed to get away with his war in Iraq. My thought then was, “We’re fucked. If these people can get away with these things with no consequences, then the next time they’re in power, it’s going to be worse.” It’s only going to embolden the next generation of hustlers. And here we are…

This is the thing: you’re getting a lot of conservatives now in the states arguing that Trump isn’t a true conservative. The CATO Institute is trying to back off of him now that he’s shaking down companies; he just shook down NVIDIA for 15% of their profits, right? As he gets worse and worse, the conservatives are like, ‘He’s not a real conservative.’ Yeah he is! This is what you guys created. Let’s just go back to the election of 2000. The Bushes stole that thing, and they did it through the Supreme Court, and that what you’ve been doing for the last ten years, too. If you provide legal rationales for this really wretched behaviour that doesn’t align with the concept of the consent of the governed… it’s this issue of consent; that’s at the heart of democracy, that the people who are being governed agree to the mechanisms by which they’re being governed. And participating. You take that consent away, and now you have to force people to do things. Which is where they’re going. But these guys who are in many cases rapists already, they don’t have any sense of that notion, of the consent of the governed, at all. The people who should know better, who are in the Supreme Court, who are lawyers, have ignored it, because they’re going on junkets with rich conservatives, right?

So what do you think will happen?

Well, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, you know that that’s going to happen. The real question is, when does it bottom out? When does it really get so bad that… because they have no vision of the future. The progressive vision of the future was that everybody has innate abilities and talents and the way that has a society that runs with minimal coercion and maximal result was to find those gifts and skills and diverse advantages that people have, and put them in a position to realize them, right? So the progressive concept was always that we’ll liberate the skills and talents of individuals to the best result of society. These guys that are behind Trump don’t have any vision of the future except force. So they’re going to take these detention camps and turn them into slave labour camps. They’re going back to the 19^th century. It’s only a matter of time before you’re going to read articles about how ‘well, they have a path to citizenship in Alligator Alcatraz that includes working for three to four years at slave wages in the agricultural groves of Florida.’ That is coming, because they don’t have a progressive vision. Their vision of capabilities and possibilities is rooted in an extremely negative view of human beings and their potentiality. Because they’re pretty bad people, so they’d naturally want to extend that world view out to others and assume that everybody is as bad as they are. That’s why he’s always accusing the Democrats of the things that he’s doing!

So they have no vision of a future, and that’s why at the end of the day, none of this will go anywhere. Because it’s so reactionary and so reactive and it’s so short sighted. There’s no fifth-dimensional chess here. These are dumb, dumb people who are doing just what they need to do to get to the next week or the next month. They don’t have philosophies. They don’t have articulate notions of anything. They’ll try out some half-baked person like Curtis Yarvin to give some of their ideas the imprimatur of legitimacy, but they have no intellectuals. They have no thoughts. They have no version of the future that will be interesting to anyone. So it’s going keep going down, and at some point it’s going to bottom out somewhere. I don’t know how much damage occurs in the process. I don’t know whether the world becomes completely uninhabitable; I have a 24-year-old daughter, and I’d like her to have a better life than I’ve had; right now it’s not looking good, right? So I don’t know how bad it gets. We can only pray that it doesn’t get to catastrophic levels of bad… but it already is for some people. It sort of creeps its way through the body politic, starting with the most vulnerable, then hitting whatever targeted group… because it can’t fix itself. What he’s doing with tariffs is wretched, and it’s not going to improve anything, until he stops doing it, but he can’t stop, because that’s his whole idea.

 What do you think will happen with Netanyahu? Because it seems to me that increasingly people are just equating “Zionism” with “Israel” and saying that Israel is invalid. And who is making that happen, right?

You already have 60,000 people dead. At some point this does become self-destructive. If the Israelis don’t get rid of him in any near term, I think they’re going to be doomed. I have a Medium article that I wrote about this when I was over there in Israel. But as for Zionism, I used to teach this class at BU; I team taught it with Benno Weiser Varon, who was an Israeli ambassador to various Latin American countries. And one of things we taught was the rise of Zionism and Theodor Herzl; Zionism is a modernist variant of the Hebraic tradition, but I think it’s always been pretty dysfunctional; the Israeli project itself, again, is very retrograde and retroactive: “We’re going to go back and colonize the land of our ancestors.” Well, you’re not the only one with ancestors that live there, you never have been, so you have no exclusive purchase on that land! And so that’s always been a pretty reactionary model, and the Israeli democracy idea, where they were making progress, where they were incorporating the Arab people and other peoples in the area as part of an Israeli democracy, that could have been a successful project, because it would embrace all the legitimacies around the historical lands, that area, and it would ask consent of all the people of all the people who are participating in that society. But if you continue to just say, I’m going to run a police state, I’m going to run an apartheid state, and I’m going to do that for a very small group of men: it’s going to fail! It will fail. You cannot--I’m sure Stephen Miller, the world’s greatest Jewish Nazi, I’m sure for him you can force people to do what you want; in his mind, and Donald Trump’s, you can make them do it. But you can’t, at the end of the day.

In my software career, when I was managing people, people would always say to me, “What is your secret to managing people,” and I’d be like, “I don’t manage anybody. I find what they’re good at and I let them do it. ” And then I don’t have to manage anybody! And writ large, that’s the concept of democracy. Writ large, that’s Charles Fourier, the Phalanx from the 18^th Century, from the Enlightenment. That concept has a lot of validity, because no one wants to do things that they don’t like, and everyone has skills that are differentiated, and if you give some leeway in society for people to try their skills in different areas, to find something they like, then you’re going to have a good, positive, functioning society. If you force people to do things they don’t want to do, then it’s not.

And nobody per se likes to collect garbage or wash dishes, but I did them when I was younger. You can do that stuff for limited periods in your life, as part of a trade-off as you’re finding your way through things. But you can’t create entire castes of people who do nothing but work for the betterment of other people. It’s absolutely inhuman, and sooner or later, the sheer inhumanity of it will come back to bite those elite classes. It always does. It’s the persistent record of history.

You're actually kind of an optimist. 

I’m a historian, I have a PhD in history, and I taught history for about a decade, and that is the persistent record of history. You run societies like this, they fail.

Vic Bondi opens for the SLIP~ons Friday at the Lucky Bar in Victoria, along with Liquid Light; and then with Liquid Light and Cascade in Vancouver at... well, see here! 

Jeffrey Lewis and the Voltage at the Fox, Vancouver, last night!!!

That was an amazing gig. Some very fulsome psych rock interspered with solo quirky antifolk. Jeffrey gave a shout out to Rob Frith and I, playing "LPs," which I had mentioned in the Straight piece (Rob had come at my suggestion, along with fellow Neptooner Keith McCafferty, who had last seen Jeffrey in Galway). He did a couple of old favourites like "Back When I Was Four," getting a hearty laugh from Kristy Lee Audette with the line about being 128; and "The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane," with vastly expanded lyrics. The four"low budget films" were the story of Champion Jim, a bio of Alan Moore (whom Jeffrey has met and who has seen Jeffrey's "movie"--he showed us photos!), a bio of Sitting Bull, and finally, the classic "Creeping Brain". Probably I danced most for "Except for the Fact That It Isn't", but there were also at least three brand-new songs in the set, one involving frogs, the other about Jeffrey's many decades of sexual failure ("Me and Sex"), and a song about being the dregs or something, which I couldn't quite catch. The sex and frog songs were especially amazing... some of his funniest, most appealing, most revealing writing... and I like both sex and frogs a ton...

It was maybe my favourite Jeffrey Lewis performance, of the six I have caught. I did shoot some vid, but I wrote the initial draft of this at a food court in a mall, having the "Breakfast of Shame," when you havent slept and dont want to keep your wife awake with your coughing and farting and restlessness, so you go to the only place you can and type a blogpost on your phone... though I am thinking I will go back home to bed for a bit, because I slept very poorly, and have a long day.

Anyhow, I am on my cellphone, so I will let you look up my other vids and such (though I will link one of openers Roundelays, who are very fun). I did a story on them too... and will have another later today on the Still Spirits gig... 

One weird note: I have been having a fair number of coincidences lately, and the pleasing/ piquant one last night was a cover of Gang of Four's "Damaged Goods", which I had listened to in full earlier in the day when it came up on my phone's shuffle feature. Only Gang of Four I have listened to in months, and then suddenly Jeffrey was playing it with the Voltage. Weird, huh? 

Photos!

I can't tell which of those are okay because, again, mall food court/ cellphone (actually I'm checking them now before I head out, having come home to nap, and they look okay enough). Photos and videos don't really cut it, though.  

Oh, another minor coincidence: Mike Usinger had mentioned a favourite song by Jeffrey, the one about eating at restaurants when you are alone (like me, sorta, now) and I was bummed because I thought it was a great song and I don't have that album... then I bought a live-in-studio "bootleg" CDr off Jeffrey's merch table, without even checking the songs on it, and there it was!

Apparently Bellingham will have EVEN MORE merch options... Jeffrey Lewis and the Voltage play again tonight...! 

Two gigs one night: Chris Corsano and John Brennan vs the punks around the corner at Red Gate!

So that was a fun night, which started all of a block from the Hargrove, where I was on the guest list for the John Brennan/ Chris Corsano show (which I wrote about here). I had an hour to kill and was having a fast biryani at Chai Wagon -- a yummy and affordable Indian street food place on the corner of Main and 2nd -- when Noelle Chaos came in and asked me if I'm going to Red Gate, another half-block up the street. "Nope, I'm going to the Hargrove. What's happening at Red Gate?" 

Turns out Jesse LeBourdais was playing with his band the Long Winter. Jesse is a terrific, under-sung singer songwriter, unique and passionate and real, but though I've seen him a half-dozen times, I've never before tonight seen him with a full band (including Elliot of Freak Dream et alia, who I enjoyed chatting with before the show). I wasn't able to see their whole set but I happen to have caught video of their newly-dropped single. Having time to kill anyhow, I paid $20 and spent my evening hanging out at Red Gate when things weren't happening at the Hargrove, then zipping back to the Hargrove when there was a lull at Red Gate (literally a two minute walk). There were other bands at Red Gate that I don't know -- Night Mirrors, who make music that, I dunno, struck me as the Evil Twin of the Cure's Faith album; a Calgary band called Julius Sumner Miller, who are weirdly  named after a scientist and TV personality that I know nothing about (but see here); and a band named Dead End Drive-In, after a pretty good Ozploitation dystopian movie that I happen to have seen, who make music that suggests (Brock Pytel, who I ran into at the venue, said) Paul Westerberg meets Weezer, but who reminded me more of Titus Andronicus, though I could hear what Brock meant! 

I caught a bit of each act, and 40 minutes of the second set by Brennan-Corsano. The punks were much easier to take in, less demanding comfort food -- a cheeseburger with bacon by comparision with the epicurean pleasures and unfamiliar flavours offered by Brennan and Corsano, who created something very intense and propulsive, but also at times very subtle, making sounds that often did sound (for obvious reasons) like two virtuoso drummers playing with maximum focus and intensity, but also occasionally sounded like there were stringed instruments involved (were cymbals bowed, maybe?) and once or twice even like there were wind instruments in the mix (which may or may not have had something to do with a dangly tube hanging out of Chris Corsano's mouth for part of the set? I was seated at the back and couldn't always see what was making what sound!). 

On one of my pop-ins, between Brennan/ Corsano sets, I scooped up a bunch of EarthBall records and one other project by Brennan, and got my one Orcutt-Corsano record signed by Chris, but (sorry!) I dodged buying the Corsano-Brennan album itself: while it's fascinating and rewarding music to hear made live (and really piquant that it's come out on Mint Records!), I simply don't have the headspace for music that requires such an intense concentration in my daily listening (in contrast to the magical mudbaths of EarthBall, which I can just wallow in, reveling in the organic decadence). Still, it was something to see! (And, you know, my friends who are all over Stomu Yamashta and such would probably dig the album intensely; I confess to being a failed aesthete, these days, am at least 75% vulgarian in my sonic diet, have lost all pretentions of being an athelete of perception. But see the video for "Dim," off Buzzing With Rumors, here; Kim Alpert provided live video art with the performance tonight, as well). 

Oh, and I found more Moloch! tags in the Red Gate bathrooms (I had previously seen them at Alf House). I'll be looking for them everywhere now! Very glad I ran into Noelle: two gigs tonight were better than one (and I'll be writing more about Jesse in a couple months...). 

I don't think I'll be doing much else writing-wise for the blog for a bit. Lots of other things going on, and mostly they're going to be for the Straight... 

Night of the Living Dead 1990 Tom Savini version: theatrical vs uncut comparison and notes

I always liked the Savini-directed Night of the Living Dead, which I saw first run theatrically in 1990, then on VHS, then on DVD. Here's a few reasons why (numbered 1-4; skip them to the next numbered list, below, if you're impatient to get to the "comparison" section, but rest assured, I'm just long winded; there are no ads on this blog, so it's not like I'm trying to draw you into scrolling past them; this is actual writing about the film, not just filler!). 

Note: I don't have a 4K player so all of this is based on the blu-ray in the package, which contrary to some early reports, does have both versions of the film. 

Reasons to Love the Savini NOTLD:

1. The incongruity of "colourful daytime zombies" is pleasing; for much of the film's runtime, the palette is the warmest, brightest, and most cheerful of any zombie movie ever. I gather there was a blu-ray release awhile back that tried to darken it up but this, obviously, was a mistake. The new steelbook edition retains the original palette. The colours are bright and pleasing. A pleasure to see.  

2. I am a fan of Patricia Tallman, who is familiar, I gather, to Star Trek nerds, but who for me will ever be the daughter of the "fat slob jerk" in Knightriders, which is a Romero I adore (fans of Stephen King should note, he has an early cameo as Hoagie Man; fans of Ed Harris should note, it's a great early role; and fans of Tom Savini should note, it's his meatiest role as an actor, as the hero's friend/ nemesis). While I like Knightriders better than NOTLD 1990, I think NOTLD has a stronger role for Tallman. While the Barbara of the original NOTLD is a screaming, annoying mess, Tallman brings a power and dignity to this role, and accomplishes brilliant things with her facial features even during the scenes where her character is the most traumatized and least able to speak. Ben asks her if she knows who any of the people in the house are, early on, and she shudders, blinks and grimaces in a way that speaks volumes, wordlessly communicating that, "No, I don't know who these people are or what's wrong with them or what the fuck is going on and I can't believe any of this is happening and now I have to answer your demanding, shouted questions and could someone just make this all STOP?" Which is a lot to communicate with a shudder, blink and grimace; it's right up there with some of Howard Sherman/ Sherman Howard's work as Bub in Day of the Dead (AKA "the most expressive/ emotive zombie in zombie history"). Much of her best work in NOTLD 1990 is done without dialogue (see also: the despair in the way she blinks when Ben tells her his truck is out of gas). Her transformation into a fighter I suspect is a precursor for the transformation of Carol in The Walking Dead.  Tallman runs some sort of life coaching/ self-improvement program now; I wonder if any of her classes involve self-improvement through surviving a zombie attack?

The way she scoffs at the idiot rednecks in the film at the end is terrific, too. One of my favourite female characters in horror movie history!  

3. But the rest of the cast is great, too. Everyone's good, but the names deserve their stature within the genre: there's Tony Todd of Candyman, Tom Towles of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Bill Moseley (of several Rob Zombie films, but also Chop Top in Texas Chainsaw Massacre II. My only complaint with his role in this film is, it's too small!). William Butler who plays Tom went on to a long career as a director, but I don't know many of his films (Madhouse and Demonic Toys are titles that are familiar to me but I haven't seen them. There's a horror series based around a character called Baby Oopsie? What?).  

4. Tom Towles, the king of the basement, offers a great portrait of The American Asshole. American Assholism is in full swing of late, so his final scene in the film should please everyone. There is clearly some sort of revisitation of race relations, dealt with in the original, in the remake, but I'd argue that it is subordinated to the male/ female dynamic and the feminist aspects of the film (see point 2 above); stuff about race was no longer as pressing in 1990, maybe? I'll leave it to others to compare and analyze these elements--race relations and feminism in  NOTLD 1990--but they're not incidental to the pleasures of the film. 

Sad to read that we lost Tom Towles to a stroke ten years ago -- didn't realize he was dead until I was writing this (or else noted it at the time then forgot). Apparently (like Lance Henriksen) he got his start in Dog Day Afternoon, though his part is smaller and he is uncredited. RIP, sir. 

5. There's a fun retro score that brings in elements of the scores to other films in the Romeroverse, most notably when we see the Emergency Broadcast System warnings and things get all Goblinesque, referring to the music that oozes through the scenes in the panicked TV station in Dawn of the Dead. That's a nice bit intertextuality! 

There are also non-musical cross-references, too, like the newscaster being played by actual Pittsburgh TV personality Bill Cardille, whose daughter, Lori, stars in Day of the Dead. Didn't know that until today, either! 

There were also limitations to the film, obviously, mostly due to censorship. The version that screened theatrically in 1990 was weirdly without much gore for a movie directed by Tom Savini; if I gather correctly, scenes were cut to secure an MPAA R-Rating, so the film could play in mainstream theatres (which it did; I saw it in one). There are a couple of other minor quibbles (especially noticeable in the blu ray, you can see the Uncle Regis zombie breathing as he lies inert against the couch), but the lack of gore was the main detraction, so to speak.  Now that the there is an expensive steelbook 4k/ blu-ray reinstating 12 seconds (!) of that gore to the film, it seems worthwhile to put a clear post into the world saying WHAT has been reinstated and where. The differences between cuts:

1. While both the theatrical version and the uncut version begin in black and white, for the shot of the moon seen through trees, the black and white in the uncut cut persists to the first zombie attack in the cemetery. The sudden shift to colour is jarring, which both contributes to the jump-scare and the element of distraction. TBH I think it's unnecessary -- the theatrical cut is fine for this; we get so little of Bill Moseley in the film that I want to see him in colour. But whatever! 

2. The first gore re-addition to the film, I think, occurs when Barbara takes down Uncle Regis with a fireplace poker. After he crumples, there is a shot of his face as Tallman struggles to remove the hook of the poker from where it is caught in his skin. It's only about a second, but a worthy addition! 

3. In the "You shot Mr. Magruder" scene, about 51:35 into the film, where Tallman dispatches a zombie who looks a bit like Jim Jarmusch, a shot has been reinstated of the bullet hitting the back of his head and the splat of blood on the floor. Very brief! 

4. Just after the 52 minute mark, there's that bald/ half-naked zombie that Tallman shoots several times to illustrate that the shots are having no effect: "Is he dead?" BLAM. "Is he dead?" BLAM. "Is he dead?" The final shot is the headshot, and Savini was not allowed to show the exit in the theatrical version, which involves a rather large spray of gore. Not quite sure how they censored it -- the scene seems to play at the same length, the splat is just not there. Did he have to do a re-shoot? Did he somehow just remove that element? We're not talking CGI here, so I'm not entirely sure, but the uncut edition has a noticeably wet headshot. It is more, shall we say, Savini-like?

[Note: I have now watched some of the DVD commentary mentioned below--not the blu-ray commentary-- and can report the answer: they actually prepared two versions of the scene, anticipating that the MPAA might object to the planned splat. So when the MPAA did object, they just used the alternate version].

5. This is the biggie. Around the 1:03 mark, there's a scene where Tom is in the back of the pickup, about to head out on the ill-fated run to the gas pumps, when a zombie approaches. In the theatrical cut, we see that zombie approach, and Tom stands in the bed of the truck and takes aim and fires his shotgun. Then we move on. In the uncut version, again, we see the whole effect of the shot: the zombie's head disappears in a large dark splat. You might argue that the scene was gratuitous, but I'd disagree: it illustrates for people who don't know their guns that Tom is using a shotgun, not a rifle, which is relevant to why his trying to shoot the lock off the gas pump, a few minutes later, is CLEARLY A BAD IDEA. 

We figure that out anyhow, though. 

One note: as far as shotgun-blast-to-the-head special effects go, this particular one has nothing on Savini's work in Maniac, and isn't as potent as that very brief one in Dawn of the Dead, even if its better-realized, because that Dawn of the Dead splat was historical, right up there with Scanners. It is his third best shotgun splat, maybe? It's not like the one in Maniac, where the person whose head he obliterates is his OWN. That's the you-gotta-see-this effect in Savini's body of work -- no?

In sum, it's really not much that has been reinstated -- no other differences that I spotted, though there might be another extended splat or two. [Edit: it's a spoiler, so skip the rest of this line if you haven't seen the film, but there's a Tom Towles headsplat too that is much bloodier, at the film's climax; I missed it when first writing this. There are other headsplat exit wounds in the uncut]. I'll leave it up to the reader to form their own conclusion if it's worth the pricetag (was actually cheaper on Amazon than in-store; sorry, stores!). The movie looks great, and it's one I've always loved, so I'm happy to have bought it, even though it's only a handful of scenes that play differently. 

It is, however, worth noting that some confusion has spread online about runtimes, with IMDB and other websites giving the theatrical cut a 95 minute runtime, while the allegedly uncut version is just slightly over 88 minutes long -- which is also the length of the theatrical version on the blu-ray set. So where is this 95 minute version? This isn't a Coen brothers movie, so how do you get a director's cut that's shorter than the original? But I think that what's being reported online is just an error: I broke out my DVD to check the runtime of that, and it is also slightly over 88 minutes long. I doubt a 95-minute long cut ever existed for human consumption.  If it did, it is none of these.

One good thing came of my putting the DVD into my player, though. I double-checked the commentary by Savini and it's completely different from the commentary track on the blu-ray, which means I guess I gotta keep the DVD (which is a bitch because my Romero shelf is pretty crowded and now I hafta fit two discs on it, not just swap, but I'll figure out something). It sounds like a fun commentary track on said DVD, having just Savini on it (which I prefer to these chattier, podcast-like multi-person tracks, which seems to be what you get on the blu). He's soft-spoken and appealing, as ever, and we learn, for example, on the DVD commentary that the "Is he dead?" zombie is actually a Pittsburgh cab driver. Don't you want to know stuff like that? I do! 

I'm home sick with COVID, so I think I'm going to watch that commentary now, and then if I have time, I'll watch the other one. I'm pretty happy with this package. There are extras, too -- featurettes and such -- but I'll have to get to those later...  hope this post helped someone!

What a world

So COVID found me again, probably at the Mummies show. 

Day two of symptoms: sweaty, pluggy nose, sore throat, and weirdly hungry. Mild fatigue. Ears feel a bit plugged. Sense of taste and smell unaffected (though I can't get a very deep breath through my nose). Sleep isn't great because my breathing isn't great but I'm going back to bed soon. 

Meantime, everywhere there's bad news. Been watching Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich on Netflix, which if you haven't done, you should; it provides a lot of context. Things were way worse than I'd realized. Show is not just about sexual abuse, it's about patriarchal capitalism itself; Epstein becomes a symbol of everything that's wrong with the world. And they get people talking who, abused by Epstein, were also seduced, and turned into procurers/ recruiters for him, bringing him more victims.  

It's unsettling as hell.

There's also the events that unfolded yesterday in BC; of course, there are journalists who have dug and relatives who have spoken, so if you're looking online, the identity of the person in question is easily findable, as is the reason why the Canadian media/ authorities are being very very quiet about this. There is a lot to unpack and there's a vulnerable community who will be impacted. 

I dunno, folks, if you're part of a small, struggling minority, you just can't exercise the option this person did. The people you're really hurting will be members of your own small struggling minority. 

Truth be known, I had my own antisocial fantasies when I was a teenager in Maple Ridge. Going to the shopping mall and "showing them all" how I felt. I didn't do it. I didn't come close to doing it. But I did think it occasionally. I really enjoyed a certain Bachman book, too. Think I read that one three times? Kind of glad King has pulled it. 

Anyhow, this plus COVID is a lot to deal with and I'm going back to bed real soon. Maybe I'll get some writing done? I don't have much energy for it, truth be known.

Guhh.

 

Astoria Metal Night: Savage Master, High Spirits, and Oxygen Destroyer, plus two bands I did not see!

Savage Master at the Astoria (by me)

What are the odds that, by no design at all, I'd see two bands in two nights who perform masked? First the Mummies, then Savage Master..,!

Except for Stacey Savage, mind you. She doesn't wear a mask, but she does wear a costume, kinda Hammer-horror-y. Her presentation was noticeably different once she got onstage from the Ramones shirt she had sported when setting up. While it pleased me to see a metal singer in a Ramones t-shirt, it feels more respectful to post photos of her fully done-up.

I actually didn't see a whole lot of Savage Master's set last night, but I made up for it by buying two of their albums, Those Who Hunt at Night and Dark and Dangerous. And I shot their opening number. They were the band that inspired my recent post on Facebook about the scene in The Wrestler where Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei are talking about how great 80s metal was before "that pussy Cobain fucked everything up."

As Rowan Lipkovitz commented on that post, whatever went wrong with heavy metal probably wasn't grunge's fault. I'm not sure it was hip hop's either, which was his suggestion. All I know is, Rourke's character is right: popular just isn't what it was back then. I'm in fact a child of the 1990s, musically, but as I was growing up in the early 80s, there was tons of terrific, tuneful metal on the radio, from Maiden to Priest to Ozzy to G'nR to lesser (but still kind of fun) stuff like Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, and the band Rourke dances to in that scene, Ratt (remember "Round and Round"? Heavy rotation on CFOX and Much Music back in 1984...). 

Actually, the approach to metal in that Ratt song was the first thing that Savage Master's "The Edge of Evil" brought to mind. Mostly I think they credit for inspiration, or at least get associated with, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (Priest, Maiden, Saxon, that sorta thing). And horror movies, of course. I would like to have a Hammer-off with Adam and Stacey (they're a couple) to see who has more blu-rays of Hammer movies in their collection (and what their faves are -- speaing for myself, I'm going for The Reptile, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and Twins of Evil) But there's clearly a bit of 80's American metal in what they do, too. I wish I'd gotten to interview the band -- they got my messages too late! -- because I'd love to know what American metal acts and specific horror movies inspired them...! (Adam did, when pressed, credit The Night of the Hunter as his favourite movie. I'm more a Night of the Demon guy; was even wearing the t-shirt--but I wouldn't say it's my favourite film). 

To be honest, being on the other side of a tribal division between punks and headbangers back in those pre-crossover years -- which saw people like us (the punks) randomly beaten and insulted by headbangers in Camaros and such -- I grew pretty snobbish about metal, back in the 1980s; plus I didn't really respect the meat-headedness and misogyny of a lot of metal lyrics. Even Iron Maiden, who have some amazing riffs, also have some extremely daft lyrics ("I needed time to think to get the memories from my mind?" 'Scuse me? You're going to think away your memories, from a mind that you have already told us is blank? What the fuck are you talkin' bout, here, Steve?). But I always enjoyed the music. Before I ever heard "Bodies" (the ground zero explosion that brought punk screaming into my life as a young teen) I was in love with Let There Be Rock, you know? Saw arena-rock tours for Maiden (Piece of Mind tour), saw Priest (Screaming for Vengeance) and Van Halen (The "Lock Up Your Sheep" tour) and opening acts like Saxon and Fastway and Kickaxe (okay, Kickaxe weren't so great). I only found out about punk a bit later... it came slow to the suburbs, and my parents were into Charley Pride... 

But within a couple of years of my walking away from it, metal disappeared from mainstream rotation on CFOX. Even songs that had been in heavy rotation ("Run to the Hills," "You've Got Another Thing Comin'") became mysteriously unplayable, like the genre had been unofficially blacklisted; unlike all the other recycled culture from the 1980s, you NEVER hear that stuff now. And once metal was pushed back into the darkness, stuffed into its niche with pitchforks and torches, you had the rise of thrash metal and death metal and later black metal and all sorts of intense, evil varieties of metal that never had a hope of radio attention. Metallica shook that up a little with And Justice for All, I guess -- that DID get a bit of radio attention, as did the next album -- but they seem pretty anomalous. And compare "One" with Ozzy, for example... it's such a heavy, downbeat song compared to the joyousness of "Crazy Train."

So why did metal go underground, and how and why did metal become so joyless, so humourless, so SERIOUS? Maybe it was the PMRC? All I know is, the only metal I have any craving for these days dates from the 1960s to the 1980s. Just hearing "death" or "black" in the genre description of a metal band will put me off (there is actually stuff in both categories I really like but 9 out of 10 times, I don't...). 

Anyhow, I wrote some of that in question form for Savage Master, who bring that 80s joyfulness back in full force, albeit with ample occult/ horror trappings, as with "Devil Rock." But menacing they are not; it presents like occult LARPing, is more Alice Cooper than Mayhem, and it's really hard to imagine anyone but the stiffest-collared Mormon getting the moral fears from this music these days. And I bet, unlike, say, that dude from Deicide, if you challenged them about not being "real Satanists," they would laugh and say, "Of course we're not!  Who would want that?"

I might be wrong, there, but... that's my suspicion, anyhow. My hope? The whole eviler-than-thou thing in metal is destructive juvenile bullshit.  

But it wasn't a great night for me to be out, to be honest. I had come in exhausted to the Astoria, having slept poorly, my ears still ringing from the Mummies. I was shocked how different it all felt since I was last there. Is the neon sign new? I didn't remember it being this colourful, with the different colours... that's a real pretty sign! 

I missed, more or less, both opening bands. Tuff Duzt (who I have seen before) must have gone on at 7:15 or something. I am not sure how a five-band bill makes money, TBH: the more slices in the pie, the smaller each one is, such that surely someone must have played for next-to-nothing--but the show was definitely efficient in its presentation. Hellslaught was playing as I came in but I was preoccupied with getting merch squared away. There was an amusing moment afterwards with Bruce Stayloose, the man who had pointed me at this gig, where we were looking at Hellslaught's font and trying to read it, so he could tell me who had just played. He knew that they had been called Kommand -- with a K -- at some point but had to change their name when someone else laid stake to it, but he had forgotten their new name and neither of us could figure it out, another thing about metal that kind of puzzles me. It's just this side of looking like actual letters, unlike many of the black metal fonts, say, but it's still stylized just far enough that I had to look it up later. I've read things in my alphabet soup with more ease. 

Bruce knows Adam and Stacey of Savage Master and made introductions, bringing me over with my records to get them signed. The Astoria has changed since I was last there, when Flipper gigged there with David Yow on vocals. More plants, possibly fake. They made for an odd framing device for the first band I got to see. Oxygen Destroyer, dry ice, and fronds. 

I think the angle of the pool tables has been shifted, too. I remember how delighted the punks that night there were to shoot pool with Flipper. I wonder if it's still free?

The dry ice was a bit out of control last night, in fact, but you only realized just how out of control it was if you went to the washroom, where it was hanging out ("Smoking in the Boys Room," ha -- that was on classic rock radio too, back in the day). 

I did not immediately twig to the the reference with the name Oxygen Destroyer, until they say in introducing themselves that they "manifest the power of the kaiju." But of course! ...it's a concept adapted from the first Godzilla movie. If you've never seen it -- the original black and white Toho movie -- the scientists in the film beat Godzilla by imploding (?) a device underwater that sucks all the oxygen out of the water and basically suffocates him. It's by far the best Godzilla movie ever made, if you've somehow missed it -- it's deadly serious and poetic and is as much about heroic sacrifice and love (and atomic radiation) as it is about a giant monster (here's an Oxygen Destroyer song inspired by that movie with a little blurb by the band, for more). It was all I could do not to buy one of the band's t-shirts. I sorely wanted to, but my t-shirt collection is pretty out of control. In another life, with a larger closet, I would have gotten all three. Here's the design for Bestial Manifestations of Malevolence and Death:  

You will note that the "Godzilla-looking" creature in the image has horns. It is INSPIRED by Godzilla, the singer would explain to me later; it is NOT GODZILLA. Thus have they survived the scrutiny (so far) of the litigious, protective Toho (and long may they do so). Something about the band made me very happy, though see above re: death metal; I haven't craved this kind of music since my father was dying back in 2009 and I was taking the West Coast Express every day to my dayjob listening to Deicide and Cannibal Corpse. Turns out I can enjoy death metal a lot more if there are kaiju involved.

The next band -- and the only one I really watch, sitting up front by the deejays -- is High Spirits, who have been together for 17 years, the singer explains, but have never before been to Vancouver; they did a quick run of West Coast shows and then drove back to Seattle to catch a 7am flight home. But they're obviously committed! If Savage Master draw from 1980s metal and horror movies, High Spirits are rooted in 1970s hard rock: Rainbow meets Thin Lizzy meets... I ain't sure (Nick Jones says they sound like The Hellacopters) but they were propulsive and positive and got the audience singing along (and hugging each other!) so songs with choruses like "Thank you for being my friend." They dress all in black and white, white pants and black t-shirts with nothing else on them, no logos, nothing, just black and white. 

Bassist Darren (the sole member with a personalized flourish, a headband that perfectly suited his curly mane) explained to me outside the Astoria as I made my way out that the clothing choice was Chris's. I presume Chris is the singer? Best Darren could explain it, it was about cutting away distraction, getting people to focus on the message, which was one of inspiration, rather than having them reading what other band shirts people were wearing and such. Which is kind of cool, but in fact, in practice, actually distracted me a smidgen once I noticed it: "Why are they all wearing the same uniform? Is this some sort of cult?"  

But they were very very fun, very very committed, if a bit shockingly wholesome for a sorta-metal band (they're really more 70s hard rock, I think -- they would have been maybe called heavy metal in 1973, but things have changed a bit). I shot two songs: "In the Moonlight," which is a very Thin-Lizzy-ish title, and "Restless." Check out their bandcamp here. I wasn't totally sold on buying any High Spirits merch this time out -- I mean, I barely even listen to Rainbow or Thin Lizzy these days, am broke, and had already bought two Savage Master records -- but one thing I can say: if they come back, I'll be there. 

And it was particularly nice to see Adam and Stacey of Savage Master come right to the front to catch the band, Stacey even recording them on her phone. (There was a fun bit of business where a super-tall skinny guy who had been blocking my view realized it was HER behind him and he hugged her and got out of her way. Pretty positive crowd last night, really).

Oh: and when their drummer started making little compulsive biting gestures as he played, baring his teeth, I suddenly flashed on Dennis Hopper and couldn't stop thinking about how cool it would have been for Dennis Hopper to play a heavy metal drummer. He would have looked just like this:

That's about all I've got. It was just fun to be out at a metal show, even if it was too much, after being at the Rickshaw the night before. It was fun watching the stage hands drag a coffin out onto the tiny stage (next to another floral accoutrement).  

And it was fun reading people's patches. Tons of bands I don't know, some I did, almost all metal. Is there really a band called Ersatz Revolt? 

...Nope, it's a song by a Polish black metal band called Mgla, that happened to feature on the back of a guy's shirt. 

I'm mildly disappointed. 

All photos by Allan MacInnis