Apr 22, 2008
The Trouble
Chaos continues as Dark Meat says goodbye to Monotonix.
Alright ya'll, sorry it's been awhile. We’ve been contending with some serious shit.
First off, I’ll talk about what’s right: the shows have been killer. Playing with Monotonix has been amazing on every level; our shows have been insane, compacted affairs. We’ve been touring, nominally, as their support act, and, thusly, we’ve opened every night; in short, we don’t have the masturbatory luxury we typically afford ourselves at, say, the 40 Watt. We sound like a gnarly punkrock band right now, which is fine by me. Arrangements of new jams have come clear, our tempos are settling, specific musical identities, song-by-song, are emerging. Plus, knowing that the hairy Israeli apocalypse is eminent puts the burn on you big time – you gotta shred or you’ll look like some dead-assed chumps. The dynamics have been impressive, I must say: our squalling, wide-eyed insanity burning the crowd to bits, and then Yonatan, Ami and Gever explode out to twist and shout expansively on the ashes – scream ferociously in the gritty wind.
We’ve grown really close with them. The last show in NYC was a blowout – the Cake Shop was imperiled, for sure. There’s a cool review on the Village Voice blog, dig it: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2008/04/live_dark_meat.php. We knew it was to be the last time we’d hang with them for a good bit, and the tears were flowing on both sides. Amid the melancholy festivities, I had one of my meta-moments there on the sidewalk and realized how funny it must’ve looked to the passersby: a bunch of facepainted, shirtless maniacs clustered around a huge green bus screaming and hollering and wiping tears and hanging on the necks of three sweatstained, hirsute Israeli freakos.
My oldest friend Wright Daniel from Reidsville, NC was there, too, and a whole bunch of old buddies in NYC showed up, and I had an amazing night.
One insane thing happened, though, that will dovetail nicely into The Trouble.
Driving to my friends’ house in Long Island City on the Queensboro Bridge, we had a massive scare. The clearance signs for a portion of the bridge were severely underestimated, and had it been correct, it would’ve sheared our bus open like a sardine can. We slammed the breaks on IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING QUEENSBORO BRIDGE! Stalled out clear in the middle land. Curtis jumped from the bus to inspect the trouble, and it was black chaos all around. Cars were whizzing around the bus, and he was dancing in the tumult, screaming down the tunnel. We were fucking freaked, and, due to some people’s, uh, choice in chemical entertainment that night, there was a seriously insane reaction. We managed to corral Curtis, bless his heart, back to the bus, and decided against calling the cops to escort us from the situation. After we inspected the bridge for a while - from the relative safety of the bus, with our guts curling into sad laps inside us - we decided, fuck it, lets just see what happens. Made it – no harm no foul.
So now we’re in Buffalo, where we’ve had a warm welcome. Half my family lives here – my dad’s side – so I was expecting some love. But we’ve been treated like kings here, and our show was great. However, because we’re still getting our sea-legs with maintaining the bus, it needs to go to a shop today, and as you may expect, only seasoned specialists qualify for the beast. We don’t know if we can make the show tonight in Pittsburgh, which would be disastrous. Everyone’s anxiously awaiting the verdict, though it doesn’t look good. May just have to drive straight to Cleveland tomorrow. Uggh.
The bus has been great so far in terms of our emotional health, but we’ve had to pull over for hours at a time to work on it. This is to be expected, I suppose, but it is extremely stressful for Curtis and Forrest, the two primary mechanics in our band. It’s a bit of an albatross, but we’re getting better at it, and we’ll have to make it happen regardless of what goes on.
My favorite shows so far have been Philly and Baltimore. We played in a killer warehouse space in West Philly, which was right-on after playing so many bars. Right up in people’s grills and loving it, and a bunch of old Athens cronies were there.
Baltimore, the people flipped the fuck out, and the promoter at the Talking Head was a sweetheart. I busted my nose during the last song, and dove into the crowd shirtless, stained purple polka-dotted from the wet confetti, with blood streaming from my face. The crowd went completely apeshit. Felt great. Then The Monotonix completed their set by moving their drumkit and the audience INTO THE STREET!!! Yonaton was on top of a Ford Econoline shredding his Fender while Ami paraded around inciting people into his special sort of riot. It was fucking amazing, and sounded killer cuz we were basically in an alley – a huge echo chamber.
Well it’s about time we figured some shit out. Onward!
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