By Tom Proebsting
Moberly, MO – I was blown away last Saturday. Yeah, an old fart like me taking his 16-year-old daughter to the OzzFest in St.Louis. It was held at the UMB Bank Pavilion in the flood plains of Earth City, next to the Missouri River. This whole area was under water back in 1993, when the Great Flood hit the Midwest.
Anyway, this was the first OzzFest for me and my daughter, Amber. She is a self-proclaimed Hard-Core Punk Rocker who has a lip ring and is into Paganism. Me, I’m into beer and cigarettes when I’m not driving a truck. So I thought the fest would be a great Daddy & Daughter outing. It beats the zoo or the art museum.
By the time we got there, it was about 106 degrees–in the shade. The bands were jamming on the Second Stage, the sweat was flowing, and the scent of reefer was ever in the air. We bought some cups of ice cold water at three-fifty per and headed to the stage. In order of appearance were Bad Acid Trip, Between the Buried and Me, All That Remains, Walls of Jericho, Full Blown Chaos, The Red Chord, Strapping Young Lad, A Life Once Lost, Norma Jean, Bleeding Through, Unearth, Atreyu, and Black Label Society. The singers in these bands screamed out, rather than sang, the words. It reminded me a little of rap music, where rappers talk, not sing, the lyrics. Only with rappers, the music is a little slower. More keyboards, too.
I sipped my water as I watched Walls of Jericho, a rocking band from Detroit. I enjoyed the music and wondered how the chic singer, Candace Kucsulain, would look in a bikini. She had lots of tattoos. So did most of the other singers and musicians.
When Walls’ thirty minutes were up, New Yorkers Full Blown Chaos surged the stage and lead screamer Ray Mazzola roused the crowd. At their inciting, everyone around me formed a Mosh Pit. My ice water vanished instantly and I was shoved into Hell. I hadn’t been in a Mosh Pit since I was in the Army, stationed in Germany in the late 1980’s. It was fun.
After I managed to escape with my life and sanity, my daughter and I rushed to the very front and leaned on the fence that separated us from the stage. There was an epidemic of crowd surfing as rockers of all ages, sizes, and shapes, boys and girls, were passed overhead to the front. The kindly security guys received them safely and sent them to the side of the stage to return to the crowd. I saw one girl, a young blond cutie, pass over and the security officer grabbed her and got himself a hand full of tit. She smiled and waved at the crowd the whole time.
Some of the crowd surfers were so fat that the crowds would drop them. I saw one old turd about my age pass overhead. He was rejoicing like it was his first experience crowd surfing. Or maybe it was his last.
There was a brief contest to vote by applause the Miss OzzFest for St. Louis. It was between LeenVicious (The Winnah!) and a girl who did a good impersonation of the Wicked Witch of the West. Leen won it by a long shot. The winner showed us her tits. So did a few girls in the audience.
My daughter’s favorite Second Stage band was Atreyu. As they were setting up, Amber had to be taken to the medical station because of the extreme heat. I couldn’t leave because the music was starting and there was no way to get through the crowd when it was moshing. At the next break, I left and found Amber lying under an overhead canopy, hooked up to a nose hose. She had been hyperventilating.
I knelt down and asked her how she felt. (“Like shit!”) Someone standing just above me asked me if I was Amber’s father. I looked up, said ‘yes’, and he said he was the rhythm guitar player for Black Label Society, Nick Catanese. He was in the 2001 movie “Rock Star” (So you wanna be a rock star?) where he played Xander Cummins in the band Blood Pollution.
He said, “We’ve adopted Amber. I’ve invited her to watch the show on stage.”
And that’s what we did. Amber and I sat in the wings and watched Black Label Society rock on for thirty minutes. In between songs, I asked Nick where he was from. He pointed to the world ‘Pittsburgh’ which was emblazoned on his blue jean vest. “In two more days, I’ll be home.” He threw his hands up in the air and added, “My own bed!”
Regular guys, these hard rockers. Titillating the audience with music that the Mother Goddess would approve of and thinking of their own beds at the same time. “I don’t like living out of a suitcase,” Nick told me before he jumped back on stage. Front man, lead singer, and guitar hero Zack Wylde took front and center stage for the entire set. His playing, honed for two decades with Ozzie and band, sizzled. Their latest CD, Shot to Hell is a must-buy.
After the set, Amber and I thanked Nick and headed for the Main Stage. She confided in me, “That’s the most fun I’ve ever had in my whole life-sitting on the stage watching Black Label Society. I want their latest CD. Also, I want a tattoo of their logo.”
For the Main Stage, the line-up, in order of appearance was: Dragonforce, Lacuna Coil (hard rockers from Italy), Hatebreed, Avenged Sevenfold, Disturbed, and System of a Down.
Dragonforce, featuring guitarist Herman Li, took the stage first. I was in line getting drinks for me and Amber the whole time they were jamming, so all I heard was the music from a long distance. Plus a lot of boring weather comments.
I got back to Amber, sat down next to her on a grassy hillside, drank water, gulped soda, and smoked Kools. We were too far back to see the enclosed stage so we watched the bands on a super-sized screen.
Lacuna Coil was a crowd-pleaser, but I’m not into European metal. Hatebreed came on next, playing great metal music and promoting their new CD, Supremacy.
Avenged Sevenfold then made their appearance and they were a band I knew. Their tune “Bat Country” from their CD “City of Evil” was written for Hunter S. Thompson, the late great writer and author of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Guitarist Synyster Gates must have been inspired by the Muses when he soloed at the end of “Sidewinder.” He was SMOKIN’! When he finished playing, I said, “Eddie Van Who?”
Politics reached a crescendo when Disturbed hit the stage. There were no dogs in their play list. The highlight for me was when they covered Genesis’ 1986 tune “Land of Confusion.” I knew the words and could sing along.
Singer David Draiman is nothing if not charismatic. If he had told the crowd to do handstands, they would have done handstands. The band hails from the Windy City and they became the Social Conscience of the day.
Some of my favorite lines from Draiman during his impromptu ramblings: I don’t know about you, but it disturbs me when I care more about the life of our soldiers than the president of the United States does.
Another zinger when Draiman introduced a song for victims of child abuse: Let’s not send child abusers to jail; let’s send them to HEEEEEELL!!! That line got the crowd pumped up.
Here’s my personal favorite: It’s Africa-fucking hot in here!
Their cover of Pantera’s “Walk” was another highlight. May Dimebag Darrell rest in peace. When I saw “Dawn of the Dead” a year or so ago, I enjoyed Disturbed’s featured tune “Down with the Sickness” and even more so live that night.
Finally the band everyone was waiting for appeared: System of a Down. These high-energy rockers are products of Armenia and they are very political. They played my favorite song, BYOB second. It’s the only song I know all the lyrics to. One of my favorite lines from a short speech by guitarist Daron Malakian: Jesus didn’t work for a corporation and neither do we!
The rest of the evening we sang, danced, held up our fists, applauded, and held up the sign of the devil’s horns as the music flowed.
The concert ended on a high note and everybody got their money’s worth. We stayed for over fourteen hours of heavy metal music, crazy fans, intense heat, cotton mouth, all-day fasting (I swallowed half a dozen White Castles on the way home), politics, the bliss of musical brotherhood, and the chance to be a kid once again.
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Tom Proebsting is a writer and blogger in Missouri. Tom Proebsting, 823 N. Ault St. Moberly, MO 65270
e-mail: truthprobe777@yahoo.com
Proebsting invites comments. Reply to: http://truthprobe.blogspot.com
GUEST COLUMN: Early Summer
Posted by kinchendavid on July 19, 2006
By Perry Mann
Hinton, WV – The days are long, filled with light and twilight from dawn to dusk. The sun comes early and leaves late. Noon is a golden queen whose writ runs farthermost now. The night’s reign is imperceptibly truncated until the Summer Solstice. Then, with little notice, minute by minute, night extends itself until by September it contends equally for sovereignty of the northern heavens.
Summer with it green and warmth is the matured promise of spring, full freedom from the white and ice of winter. One walks with his face to the sky’s horizon charmed by the infinite blue mottled with great puffs of soaring cotton clouds and thinks how rare the days really are in June. And this June has had more than its share of rare days.
May was all rain. But rain brings grass and grass is hay, when mowed, baled and barned. And the sight of a new mown field is arresting and causes one to gaze upon its newly shorn and uniform appearance. Today hay-making is relatively a sweatless task, done by tractor and machines that cut the grass and pack it into either bales or rolls. There is no need for a pitchfork, a tool that was as indispensable as a hoe and an ax in my grandfather’s day, when horses pulled a mowing machine that cut it and a rake that windrowed it for hands that followed with pitchforks to shock it, load it on a wagon and pitch it into the barn loft. The use of a pitchfork in June at noon under the sun in a hay field broke sweat from brow and body and gave exceeding value to a dipper of spring water and to the table fare the women prepared.
All the rain has greened the hillsides and meadows with emerald shades not unlike an Irish landscape. The temperatures have been mild, the days warm and the nights cool. The streams have a look of life and health, not that sickly, septic, emaciated look that comes with drought. The oak in the back and the maple in the front lawn are oases of shade and breeze. And the birds are everywhere.
The phoebes raised two families on one of the porch posts, preempting my use of the swing most of the summer. Then after the phoebes had left, a barn swallow dabbed a nest atop what the phoebes had built and as of yesterday there were five swallows’ heads vying in a frenzy for what mother carried in. The grace, glide and manoeuverability of a barn swallow is a show I never tire watching. A ballerina is an ox in comparison. I have watched through the door glass a parent streak across the porch and light like a feather at the edge of the nest. A marvel of aeronautics and aesthetics.
A humming bird came through an open screen door into a screened-in porch and exhausted itself against the screen and ceiling until it fell to the floor apparently dead. I picked it up and held it in my hand with its underside up. Its wee feet were entangled with spider webs, which I pulled away. I noticed some life and after a minute or so it moved, turned over and took to the air and away. A jewel of a creature. An incredible creation. I thought while holding it of lines from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a Heaven in a wild flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour. “
I have been introduced to another creature this summer, a creature marvelously adapted and fashioned to prosper. But its prosperity is my garden’s poverty. It is a short-tailed shrew, an animal I have had no acquaintance with until this summer. Its occupation of my garden was first noticed when a luxuriant row of pea vines produced no peas. Something, I discovered, had eaten all of them. Then the beets when pulled had large cavities hollowed out and the same with the potatoes and the cucumbers, and the half-runners disappeared. I began to see the furtive flight under cover of vegetation of a strange critter and found many holes in the rows of everything that was near the ground. Although the shrew is a another marvel of nature it does not stand in my estimation equally with the hummingbird. In fact, I am devising ways to rid my garden of shrews, whatever it takes short of destroying the garden in my efforts.
Sitting on the porch fanned by a sweet breeze, I thought of the disparity of my attitude toward the birds and the shrew. Both have a place in nature and both are miracles of creation but the former I smile upon and the latter I frown upon and would dispatch with a hoe if I could aim well enough and were fast enough. I concluded tentatively, always tentatively, that man’s ethics and morality encompasses and extends only to man and not any other form of life, nor does it encompass or extend to men of other tribes in times of hostilities with them. Man can bait a barbed hook and lure the unsuspecting to the frying pan. He can set traps and use decoys to kill. He can sit quietly at dawn in a tree stand and assassinate animals doing nothing but having their breakfast. And he can bomb cities destroying infrastructure and killing the young and the aged indiscriminately and then pin medals upon the chests of those who kill with the most efficiency. Man’s morality apparently has little to do with the morality of God, who created the swallow as well of the shrew. Man’s moral perspective, save the radicalism of some eccentrics, is basically limited to homo sapiens and to that species only if it is of the right nationality.
Sitting there with a rare day in July all about, looking on the shaded lawn and watching the swallows come and go, I thought of more of nature’s manifestations: The movement of the winds, the flow of the waters, the sail of the clouds, the rise and set of the sun and moon, the leap of a deer, the patience of brutes, the green of summer and the yellow of fall, the tears at a grave, the tithe to a cause, and others displays that fills man’s days, nights and seasons.
I put out of my mind the other prescriptions of nature, those unfavorable to man’s welfare from his perspective but propitious to other species, such species as fleas, bedbugs, spiders, snakes, crows and shrews.
Summer is when the living is easy. But its very beginning is the beginning of its end, just as birth is accompanied by death, which tags along until its time. For man and shrew it has been a good summer so far. But I have in mind, I confess, making the remainder of summer not so good for the shrew.
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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville and Huntington News Network. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton and on a farm in Forest Hill, Summers County, WV.
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