Melvins

I showed up at the Melvins concert Saturday night at Slim’s, somewhat inappropriately, in a black cashmere sweater. Black is fine, of course; cashmere not so much. Went with my friend Dave, who was listened to the Melvins back in the day, i.e. early 90s. People were being frisked as they entered by a man and a woman. I was frisked by the woman, who felt the pencil in my pocket. “What kind of pen is that?” she asked. I took it out and said it was a pencil. “It’s a knife!” a friend of the woman’s next to me said, jokingly, as if I couldn’t possibly be carrying one; unlikely, but not unfathomable. “Ah, a ball point,” the frisker said. Inside the opening band was in the middle of playing what sounded like music. It was mostly start and stop on one riff, a bit of a joke on the audience. I said to Dave that I would like to know the name of this band so that in the future I can avoid them. Their performance had the feeling of last-minute-replacement. (Alas, the show is no longer listed on the Slim’s calendar; I won’t bother to search any further.) At Slim’s a screen comes down in front of the stage before and between sets to entertain the crowd and to allow musicians to set up without being gawked at. They were showing animations by Dalek, an unusual hip-hopper on the local Ipecac label. After a while, screen still down, Buzz Melvin appeared to the left of the screen and began playing a fuzzed-out drone, which continued on for ten or fifteen minutes. Fuzzy, not buzzy, as it were; that's a different kind of metal. The screen – which had been blank while he played – rose, revealing a drummer and a bassist. The project of the concert was to play two EPs from the early 90s, Lysol and Eggnog. Imagine a homemaker, or janitor, at Christmas-time – spray, wipe, sip; spray, wipe, sip. Either the band was missing a member, or the albums they were playing were recorded with only three people. I’m not sure at what point they switched into the albums, or between the albums for that matter, as I’d never heard them before. Buzz had a fan behind him (the cooling kind), which I imagine most of the audience was looking at enviously, as it was like a sauna on the floor. The music was, as anticipated, sludgy – loud, heavy, and chugging, though with quite a few up-tempo sections, one of which brought to mind Bon Jovi, though maybe John Cougar Mellencamp is closer to the mark; I am only half-joking. The best parts of the concert were the phases of fuzzy drone noise. Earlier in the evening at a bar called Casanova a friend told me that Mastodon had played at Slim’s some time ago. Having seen them at Pitchfork last week, I was longing for their technical sophistication, their creative hybrid of metal genres, and their energy. The concert ended without an encore; no opportunity to scream out “Bloody Witch” at Buzz as a request. Right at the end staff security took someone from the front of the stage and carried him or her outside. Perhaps s/he had been attempting to mosh or stage dive, both of which are forbidden, according to a prominent sign, high up and to the right of the stage.

On the drive to South City, our ears recovering from the show, we opted not to listen to the Weakling cd I had picked up earlier at Aquarius, tuning the radio instead to KALX and KFJC -- two excellent radio stations, particularly the latter -- both of which were playing rather boring but agreeable electro dance music.

My friend Efrain’s project Cook the Vote is holding its second dinner tonight. The candidate of the day is the “Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-Medicare” Ron Paul. Check it out!