StRanGe giGs (1 Viewer)

Only knowing them from the Peace & War compilation I went to see the False Prophets playing at the Zeche Carl in '89 or a year earlier.
The first thing quite unusual about them was they had a female violin player, which is nothing special in crustcore nowadays.
But they didn't play crust, they combined punk with reggae, funk and rap.
At a certain point, the singer put a birdcage over his head, opened the tiny door right before his mouth and jumped off stage to do the next song.
He stood about a meter before me and I was stunned. Wildly gesticulating and with manic eyes the golden birdcage head yelled at me.
In my interpretation he tried to show how the metaphor of the encaged bird works for us.

Always a strange thing was the Toshimoto Dolls playing live, a local band that had a record out combining Detroit rock with space punk. Their singer and guitarist called himself Captain Space Sex and that's how he showed up, dressed in selfmade astronaut suits with helmets and antennas playing on that Sigue Sigue Sputnik guitar singing sweet as cough sirup. He usually got naked at the end of the gig and was sometimes all covered with body paint, just wearing a skirt that he would strip off during the gig.

wHaT stRangE giGs hAve yOu sEen?

Anyone saw Suicide?
 
I saw a gig where Van Morrison was the singer for Iron Maiden & it kind of sucked cause he was making them play Brown Eyed Girl and Moondance and stuff & it just wasn't their style. But what was really weird was the opening act was these two guys with Asian puppets and I think one of the guys was dressed like Gary Glitter and the other like Michael Jackson, and I'm going like whoa, dude but then they started haven't simulated puppet sex to the soundtrack of Flashdance and I'm going how much angel dust did I smoke before the show, you know, dude. But all and all it was an awesome show but certainly strange.
 
Hahaha. Captain Space Sex certainly was an LSD freak and the last time I saw him was years ago on the german-french tv channel arte performing bleepbleep sounds on children's toys together with a bunch of weirdos in New York.

Not a music gig, but strange was the American Dream Men shows I supported. Some ex- Chippendales made about 500 to 1000 women go crazy.They were so dumb, one of them couldn't identify a green salad. When the catering arrived, he pointed his finger at the salad and asked us:" Is this a green salad? Is this a green salad? " - Oh wait, there was a huge guy dressed as a navy soldier singing My Way. Viscious' version was fun somehow, but this one...oh my god...the ladies didn't mind his singing disabilities while he was stripping, they weren't that much focused on the voice.
 
And then Van Morrison came out during the puppet show and got all indignant with them, like what about the American Indians or some shit and someone knocked over a soda in my aisle and i look up and it's Buck Dharma the guitar player from Blue Oyster Cult and meanwhile Van has slipped into a giraffe suit and someone has set his hair on fire so I'm saying, woah, dude, this is too much I can handle what with all the mescaline that me and this dude I know from Rite Aid took so I know what you mean, dude, what a trip.
 
These stories remind me of going to see a Black Oak Arkansas concert when I was a kid. Six bands, six bucks, six hour show - I was looking forward to it. A few blocks from the arena there was a guy standing in an open door. He hissed like a snake, "ticketssssss." I said, "Huh?" And he grabbed me and pulled me into a dark little room and locked the door shut behind us.

A few stage lights came on and I could see it was a small performance space, with a stage taking up 90% of the room. There were no chairs, but before I could think about sitting down, the sound of air raid sirens pumped out at full volume through a huge PA system that occupied most of the stage.

I immediately lost control of all of my bodily functions and fell onto a pile of chicken bones. Three large dogs leapt on top of me and began licking me while a group of schoolchildren beat them with sticks. A saxophone and a tuba that had been placed onto stools on the stage burst into flames and began spinning faster and faster, throwing little blobs of molten horn metal in every direction.

The air raid sirens had stopped at some point, to be replaced by the sounds of screeching car brakes and screams. A dozen people wheeled out onto the small stage on unicycles, shooting blow darts at me through hollowed out crutches. A few of the darts hit my arms, and they felt like four pound bees stinging me.

Then, a woman dressed in white, flowing robes slowly rose from the center of the stage on some sort of mechanical device and shouted, "Stop!" Everything stopped. It was Janis Ian, and she began to sing "At Seventeen" a capella. It wasn't an unpleasant song, but I still wanted to get out of there, because the opening act had totally freaked me out.

I stood smiling toward the stage, but slowly edging my way backward. I felt around for the door, found it, and stumbled out onto the sidewalk. The guy who had pulled me into the room was out there, still saying, "Ticketssssss...." and he followed me all the way to the BOA concert, with his chin resting on my left shoulder.

I don't know if that was really a "gig," and I didn't go to it voluntarily, but it was strange. And all that without a puppet or fringe oicoreska or 8 bit band anywhere in sight. So I'm quite sure our experiences are not related.
 
I went out to see Harmonizer last night and they rocked the house. Still listen to the ringing in my ears. But the band playing after them was strange. They covered 80's metal songs and I just don't like coverbands, no matter what genre. Even worse if there are three guys on guitar but it sounds like only one half of a guitar...plus they seemed to have a strange message being all dressed in german army clothes and one of their maybe ten diehard fans wore a shirt with a Desert Storm print. When they finished a glorious version of Metallica's "Seek and Destroy" or Sodom's "Agent Orange" the diehards screamed Bomb Babylon in a choir.
I finished my drink thinking about their genius and freedom of expression for every idiot when suddenly the room warped before my eyes and I flipped back in time through a multicoloured caleidoscope back onto another stage when I was a roadie for the Shaolin Monks of China.
One of them couldn't throw the needle through the piece of glass and tried over and over again, heavily bleeding. His master who was a tiny dwarf with a long grey beard told him to stop but he wouldn't listen, pulling the needle out of the glass gave him more cuts. This disobedience and attempt to live suicide made his master very angry.
He chanted a fourthousand year old magical speech he learned when he was only threehundretsixteen years himself. Within seconds he transformed into a giant red dragon and punished his devotee with fire to be a waiter for the candlelight dinner Buddha had dated with Shiva that evening.
I climbed up onto the dragon's back and he spat fire to wreck the ceiling. We flew into the sky, out of the earth's atmosphere, behind the sun, straight into the yawning mouth of the dark universe.

....opi8...
 
Yeah, that was a heavy trip I just returned from. Tonight I'm going out to see REO Speeddealer gig with the Gay City Rollers.
 
No strange gigs for my part, but a strange after-gig. It happened in july 2007, after a Living Colour concert.
 
Been to a ton of strange gigs... koRn playing at a rodeo in Santa Barbara. Also on the bill were No Doubt, 311, God Lives Underwater and X. The mosh pits kept kicking up so much dirt no one could see and we were all spitting up black grime from our mouths and noses..including the bands. That was back in 94? But more recently Airborne Toxic Event was playing for free at Knotts Berry Farm, we happned to have passes to Knotts this year for some reason, so we went. They're one of my favorite new bands, and to see a pretty rocking band at Knotts in front of the Calico Saloon with all the kids and random Knott's visitors was to quote the singer..."Strange."

See pic below.

air.JPG
 
No he was trying to do some sort of Iggy Pop move with the crowd in his black blazer. The keyboard player, who you can see in the picture holding a tambourine, did actually leap from the stage into the crowd at one point...not sure how the Knott's security guards felt about that one..they looked a little stressed out when the singer would climb the barricade.
 
I don't like barricades though I built up a few dozens when I worked at the Bizarre festival in 2001. On the bill were the Prodigy, Tricky, Foo Fighters, International Noise Conspiracy, Vandals, Ignite, Apocalyptica and so many others.
Man, when it was about time to dismantle the stages at the third night, all the campers went crazy and gathered the garbage together onto HUGE piles and set it on fire. There were stinking black smoke clouds in the air and I felt like in an endtime movie walking alongside FIRE and the drugged crowd sitting on top of the garbage containers banging onto them with all they could find in one rhythm. The police were safe in their vans behind the fences, waiting. That was unpredictable, no joke involved here.
 
Sorry, I've changed my mind and don't want to tell my story here anymore.

(wir warten = nous attendons ;) )
 
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