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August 18, 2007

Tour Blog: Osaka Flue

Written by Girth McDürchstein on August 18, 2007 8:29 PM
Permalink |  Splitcock Tour -- Europe & Japan '07  | Digg It

Crucificionados who have come to see us on our recent tour of Scandinavia and Japan may have noticed that we don’t travel with roadies. We’ve received several questions asking is why, but it’s only now that this has been relevant. It dates back to the “Thunderbird” tour in the summer of 1996. We used to travel with a full, huge crew—we couldn’t afford them, but most were such big fans they’d take what we could give them, even if that meant “nothing” (it usually did). One fateful night in St. Louis changed all that.

It was the second show of two, in mid-July, and it was hot, hotter than a motherfucker. Worse than that, and I think most Missourians will agree this to be the case, we were tormented by Midwestern humidity. Sure, I grew up with it, but it had been two full years since I had left the Midwest; I didn’t remember the sheer, sweat-drenched horror of it all until we spent weeks in the area trying to fight the humidity. Somehow, and I have no explanation for it, the humidity is 100,000 times worse in Missouri than in any other Midwestern state.

The heat and humidity caused tension to flare in general, but everything was exacerbated by Little Riffs Nicky’s bad behavior on the night of the first show. We had a few female roadies, believe it or not. Most of them had dropped out of Hollywood High and were attempting in vain to be groupies. We see a fair amount of action that doesn’t involve resorting to roadies for a bit of pleasure, especially not underage roadies…

Except for Riffs’ penchant for the softest, most nubile flesh. In theory, had any of us done anything with these three girls (and I’m not saying any of us did, other than Riffs), they wouldn’t exactly have gone running to the cops. They wanted it, but we are respectful of the law and rebuffed their advances. Until, after the St. Louis show, Riffs took all three of them back to his hotel room (at the time we could afford to stay in separate rooms and put up our roadies in a half-dozen shared rooms). I never got the full explanation of what he did; I just knew that, simultaneously, all three ran from his room, naked and crying, and leaped off a second-floor balcony into the swimming pool below.

Jam and I fished them out, and two of the three seemed pretty much catatonic. The other could speak, but she couldn’t string together a coherent sentence in explanation of what happened. It was a tough situation to deal with, because already the roadies—who, remember, joined us out of respect and admiration—seemed to believe we were abusing their good nature. I think much of this strange, angry behavior can be attributed to the humidity, but it was not an easy thing to deal with.

Combine that with difficulties within the band. All of us were angry at Riffs after the incident with the roadies. When we tried to get information out of him, he’d just shrug, giggle, and walk away with his hands stuffed deep into his pocket. Adding insult to injury, Mikey and Tommy were in a blind rage for unknown reasons. They seemed to want to quit the band and move back to Florida. When I asked Mikey about it years later, he just told me they could have made a lot of money for very little work if they had just taken three weeks off, but he wouldn’t go into more details.

And then there was Jam and me. The summer of 1996 was a perfect storm of press—our notoriety had exploded in Los Angeles immediately before the tour, we had released two albums almost back-to-back, and this was a time when people in the U.S. still sort of cared about heavy metal. We did plenty of interviews, but many of them fixated on me. I saw no problem playing this up—after all, I’m the frontman, the songwriter, the producer.

Jam had a problem with it, however. He ignored the fact that I write the songs, I paid for the production costs of the first album, I founded the record label—he just decided one day that I didn’t give him enough credit as arranger. What the fuck does an arranger do? He makes suggestions about innovative ways to play songs I’ve already written by myself. Riffs, Tommy, and even Mikey were as important to that process as Jam. I mostly credited him because he took it so seriously. None of the other guys seemed bothered by me taking my due credit for making Abysmal Crucifix what it was at that time.

Keep all that in mind when I tell you what happened on Saturday, the thirteenth of July, when we took the stage. Things went well: we played a tight 15 minutes of “Thunderbird,” “Phone Sex,” and “Sexual Enforcer.” It was during the fourth song, “Transexual Relationship Highway,” that things went awry. I first noticed the half-dozen women in the front row during “Phone Sex.” For some reason, they seemed angry. I yanked my shorts up a little higher to emphasize my crotch even more, but this didn’t impress them. During “Transexual Relationship Highway,” they turned around and started to chant something I couldn’t hear. Fists raised in the air and pumping to the rhythm of their unheard chant, I noticed their bright red t-shirts said in pretty straight-laced white print: “SILENCE SEXISM!!!”

I knew then what the problem was: they had never gotten any, Girth-style. I pulled my guitar off, threw it aside, and dove into the audience right behind these women. I grabbed the first one I saw and began licking her face and rubbing my boner against her thigh. She screamed with what I assumed was ecstasy, so I tried to take off her pants. The other women surrounded me, and suddenly I found myself on the ground. What happened next is a blur of punches and kicks, with me trying in vain to grab some boobage, before finally the venue-provided security detail pulled the women off of me and crowded me as I climbed back up to the stage.

I shook my head furiously at my bandmates and they stopped, baffled. They’d been vamping the main riff to “TRH” the whole time. I grabbed the mic and said, “Well, thanks to the lame-ass security, I’m goin’ home!” I stormed off the stage, and my compatriots reluctantly followed.

What happened next was a nightmare. We went backstage and were sipping drinks and feeling fine when Mikey noticed a sound. “Shh,” he snapped at us and the groupies.

“What’s up, gayrod?” I asked.

“Do you hear that?”

We all quieted down and sure enough— we heard a seemingly random metal banging. After about 30 seconds, one of the roadies—a huge guy we used to call the Frito Bandito for personal reasons—ran into the VIP lounge and slammed the door behind him. The look of terror in such a huge man’s eyes instantly disconcerted us.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Guys, the crowd…they’re throwing their seats. Security’s getting hoses to spray on ‘em, but I guarantee they’re gonna rush the fucking stage. We gotta get outta here—”

“But we just—”

“Dammit, Girth, you can take the groupies with us, but we gotta run. Now!”

Run we did. I took my companions for the evening—a doughy, middle-aged mother of two calling herself Charlotte, and a twiggy college girl named Mariah—and we all followed Frito Bandito out into the backstage area, where the steel plunk of chairs hitting the rear stage wall increased as the audience’s angry roar swelled.

“What did you do, Girth?” Jam shouted over the cacophony. “What did you—”

The hoses cut him off. Their powerful spray covered all sounds, including the seats hitting the wall. I glanced around and saw, standing on the drum riser, glaring at me, a mustachioed man with a curly mullet, wearing nothing but cut-off jeans. He looked ready to run, but he was dive-bombed by a security guard. Despite that, the look in that man’s eyes haunts my worst nightmares to this day.

Frito suddenly grabbed me and dragged me away. We all ran down a long hallway. Outside, we had five buses parked—one for the band, four for the roadies. Chaos whirled around us as the roadies tried as hard as they could to get everything ready to go before the horrible moment more people than one shirtless psychopath could break past security. Frito stuck us into our bus and kept watch. We all busied ourselves with the groupies, trying to forget about what was happening outside, when we realized a deathly calm had fallen over the back parking lot. I pushed Charlotte off of me, pulled up my leather shorts, and crept out of the van.

The parking lot was empty. Even Frito Bandito had left his post. Distantly, I heard the beating of helicopter rotors. Surely that couldn’t be for us. And where were the roadies?

I’ll never forget what happened next. I pulled open the rear entrance door and found every single roadie standing, staring at the door at the other end of the long corridor, in fighting stances. Thirty-five people were willing to fight for the five of us, and that touched me—

—until the doors on the other end snapped open and a flood of angry “fans” surged through, shoving past the roadies like a geyser pushing through a small, useless clump of sod. They were headed right for me.

I ran. Cowardly, I admit, but what else could I do?

I leaped back into the bus and started the engine. I’d never driven one of those things, but I couldn’t wait for our driver to heal from the crushed ribcage that had surely befallen him in that corridor. We needed to get out of there now. I couldn’t figure out how to shift gears, so we drove to the hotel in first. I called the cops, and they said half the city’s police force had already been dispatched to Under the Universe, which lay in ruins after the riot.

I asked about the roadies.

“Most of them are in the hospital,” the 911 dispatcher said, “but one of them asked paramedics to pass along a message. ‘We fucking quit, cocksucker!’”

That, combined with the incident with Riffs and the girls, led Abysmal Crucifix to go roadie-free except when absolutely necessary (such as our live version of Girth McDürchstein’s ‘The Hedge’, which was really more of a stageplay and required a sharp technical staff rather than mere “roadies”).

Unfortunately, in Osaka, they saw it as a matter of honor to provide me with the finest roadies the city has to offer. Now, usually, because of our roadie-free performances we play relatively stripped-down shows—set up, play some tunes, call women up to stage to be fucked by pros, go home. With the promise of roadies, I saw an opportunity to give our huge Japanese fanbase something truly special—and we did.

For our opener, “Thunderbird,” I thought it would be appropriate to have some special lighting effects and pyrotechnics, something along the lines of flames and lightning, and thunder sound effects.

“You want big fire superdome?” the pyrotechnics expert asked.

“Absolutely,” I replied.

That night, we got onstage, greeted the audience, and launched into the opening chords of “Thunderbird.” The roadies launched into the pyrotechnics—

—and before I knew it, we were surrounded by a ball of flame the likes of which I’d never seen before.

“Fuckin’ awesome!” I screamed into the mic, but before I knew it we were being sprayed with some kind of white, foamy chemical. Just as I tried to force “Thunderbird” into a medley with “What’s That White Stuff?” a middle-aged man in a suit stumbled out on stage, took a different microphone, and said a lot of stuff in Japanese. The audience started to boo and shriek. The gentleman turned around and informed me in English that because of fire safety, the show could not go on.

I have to give props to Japanese audiences—they’re much more well-behaved. Only a few people used crowbars to yank their metal seats out of concrete and throw them at the stage, and those who did waited until we’d vacated. Hell, we didn’t even play one complete song and they managed not to riot. The roadies helped us pack our van, and we drove sadly—but safely—back to the motel.

“Don’t worry, Girth,” Margo whispered as she shut off the light to go to bed, “we’ll get ‘em tomorrow.”

That we will, Margo. That we will.