Roky and Roll: A Review of the Roky Erickson show at the Beachland Ballroom March 6, 2010

Sorry I haven't been updating this blog much recently.  The last month has been kind of crazy.  I meant to have this review up sooner, but this is the first time I've really had to sit down and blog in a while.  Anyway, enough with my whining.




This concert was part of the Beachland Ballroom's 10th anniversary weekend, and what better way to celebrate than with a rare live performance by Texas rock legend Roky Erickson?  The show started off with local band Living Stereo, a band that straddles garage rock and eightes power pop.  The songs were catchy and the band was tight, but they just didn't have enough grit for my tastes.


Next up was The Alarm Clocks, a sixties garage rock band from the Cleveland area who have reunited to play the occasional show in the past few years.  I'll be honest, before they started to play I was a bit worried.  I thought to myself that the bass player looked like half the home improvement salesmen I used to work with.  But as soon as these guys started playing, all doubts vanished.  There's a certain attitude any good garage rock band has to have that just can't be faked, and these guys have it.  There sound was sort of a cross between the raw fury of The Sonics and the more sophisticated garage rock of Them.  Very good stuff, and I will definitely be picking up whatever recordings I can find from these guys.

Then it was time for Roky.  If you know Roky's personal history, it's a miracle that he's back on stage playing at all, so I had my expectations set a little low.  And I'm not gonna' lie, there were definitely some rough spots in the show where Roky seemed to get a little lost.  Fortunately he had a good backing band who were able to go with the flow and get things back on track whenever that happened.  Roky stuck mainly to his hard rocking horror-themed material from the eighties.  He opened the set with "Cold Night For Alligators" and continued on with a rousing "Creature With the Atom Brain".    I don't remember the exact order, but Roky and his band went on to play "Don't Shake Me Lucifer", "Night of the Vampire", "Stand for the Fire Demon", "The Wind and More", "The Beast" and "Bloody Hammer".  "Starry Eyes" was the only song representative of Roky's quieter side.  It would have been nice to hear at least one more ballad in the set, but I'm not going to complain.  As expected, Roky also played his best known hit from his days as singer for The 13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna' Miss Me".  Considering how many times he must have performed this song, it was kind of surprising when this one went off the rails and almost fell apart.  Luckily the final song of the night, "Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)" came off much better.

All in all it was a pretty damn good show.  Roky's voice has gotten a bit rougher with age, but still sounds pretty good.  As a fan, I was more than happy with the performance.  Here's hoping he comes back again after his new album, True Love Cast Out All Evil, is released in April.

Would You Like Entrails With Your Beverage?

The revolution will not only be televised, it will be sponsored by stimulant laced sugar water (Rockstar), licorice flavored booze (Jagermeister), and a trendy mall "lifestyle" store (Hot Topic) that has pretty much done its best to reduce a once meaningful underground music scene to just another commodity. That's the Rockstar Mayhem Festival in a nutshell. I never thought the day would come when bands like Slayer and Cannibal Corpse would be seen as viable elements in a corporate marketing campaign, but that's the world we live in now. Okay, enough editorializing. On with my review of the show, which I caught at Pittsburgh's Post Gazette Pavillion this past Saturday, August 1st 2009.




The show started at 2:15, but my wife and I didn’t get there until about 4:30, so we missed the first 4 bands playing on the small side stages. We did get to see metalcore bands Black Dahlia Murder and Trivium. Both groups played with passion and ferocity and displayed considerable musicianship. Since these bands just aren’t my cup of tea stylistically, to review them any further wouldn’t be fair to the bands.



The last band to play on the side stages was death metal icon Cannibal Corpse. I’m not a huge fan of these guys, but they have a few songs I like and there’s no denying their brutality and musicianship. Corpse opened up with the title track from their latest album Evisceration Plague before dipping into their back catalog of family friendly numbers like “F@#$ed With a Knife” and “Make Them Suffer”. The band closed out their set with the crowd pleasers “Hammer Smashed Face” and “Stripped Raped and Strangled”. Wonder which song Rockstar will use for their next commercial?



Things moved over to the main stage after that for Cleveland’s Mushroomhead. These guys have been around since 1993, releasing three albums independently before finally gaining national attention in the early part of this decade. To my ears they’ve always sounded heavily influenced by Angel Dust era Faith No More, with a bit of metal, rap and industrial thrown in for good measure. They’ve got an excellent singer and front man in co-vocalist Jeffrey Nothing, who I used to see in the mid eighties when he was still singing for Cleveland metal band Purgatory under the name Jeff Hatrix. The guy’s still got the pipes, and while I’m not going to race out and buy any Mushroomhead albums tomorrow, the band put on a really good show.



Next up on the main stage were Massachusetts based Killswitch Engage, another metalcore band, or so their Wikipedia page describes them. Whatever, sounds like metal to me. Anyway, these guys were really good. I found their playing perhaps a little too precise for my tastes, but their songs were catchy and lead vocalist Howard Jones (no, not the eighties new wave guy) was excellent. They got a really good crowd response, and gave props to the metal gods with a fine rendition of Dio’s “Holy Diver”. Again, I probably wouldn’t buy one of their albums, but I liked these guys more than I expected to.



Finally, as night began to fall, Slayer hit the stage. Despite pushing fifty, these guys still play with all the fire and intensity of a young band with something to prove. The only downside to their show was they only had an hour long set, so what we got was essentially a “greatest hits” show, with the new song “Psychopathy Red” thrown in for good measure. Nothing from the first album, but the band did pull out “Chemical Warfare” and “Hell Awaits” from the early days. And of course they found room for classics like “Angel of Death”, “War Ensemble”, “Dead Skin Mask”, and “South of Heaven” in their 13 song set. Vocalist Tom Araya missed a few lines of “Angel”, but otherwise it was a flawless performance that really got the crowd pumped up.



Then Marilyn Manson came on and sucked all the energy out of the venue. Look, I actually like a lot of Manson’s stuff, especially from the first 3 or 4 albums. But even older songs like “Irresponsible Hate Anthem” and “Disposable Teens” were performed lethargically by the band, and Manson’s vocals were just awful. It was embarrassing, and after about 30 minutes of it I decided to cut my losses and leave. A good portion of the crowd had the same idea, and even those die-hards who stuck around didn’t seem that into it. The crowd that had been slamming and screaming during Killswitch Engage and Slayer were just standing or sitting there, trying in vain to find something to get excited about. I may not have liked all the other bands on the bill, but every one of them put on a tight and energetic show. Manson just looked like he was going through the motions. Time to hang it up, dude.

Blown Away by the Metal Masters

There are five bands that I personally consider to be the greatest pure, classic heavy metal bands of all time. 3 of those bands were on the bill when the aptly named “Metal Masters” tour made a stop at the Post Gazette Pavillion in Burgettstown, PA this past Saturday: Judas Priest, Black Sabbath (billing themselves as Heaven and Hell for legal reasons), and Motorhead.* But before that trio of titans, early arriving fans were treated to a thirty minute set from eighties thrashers Testament.

Testament may not be quite in the same league as the other three bands on this bill, but they’ve certainly earned themselves a respectable place in the history of metal. They gave a brief refresher course in that history with the first three songs of their set: “Over the Wall”, “The New Order”, and “Practice What You Preach”. The band then proved they’re still relevant and rocking with three tracks from their new album, The Formation of Damnation. The venue was only about a third full for Testament’s set, but near as I could tell everyone there greeted Testament’s set with enthusiasm, and every time vocalist Chuck Billy asked for the crowd to show their “metal hands” the air was filled with Devil’s horn salutes.

Here's Testament doing "The New Order" (or at least most of it):



A few more bodies had filtered into the arena by 7pm when Motorhead began their auditory assault. Bassist/vocalist Lemmy is a true living legend, 63 years old and still meaner, faster, and louder than anyone else. The band touched on all period’s of their 30 plus year career, opening with “Dr. Rock” from 1985’s Orgasmatron album. I was pleased to hear “Metropolis” and “Stay Clean”, two of my personal favorites from the band’s early days, but newer songs like “Killers” and “In the Name of Tragedy” were just as effective. And yes, the did “Ace of Spades”, but considering how many other great songs this band has it’s kind of sad that’s the only song most people know by them.

Here's Motorhead doing "Killed by Death":



It was finally getting dark when the stagehands began setting up a massive iron gate flanked by two stone gargoyles for Heaven and Hell’s set. Definitely cool, and a nice way to build the anticipation of the crowd, which by now was pretty close to capacity. Finally the lights guitarist Tony Iommi took the stage and played the last few notes, leading into “The Mob Rules”. The mix was a bit off at first, with Tony’s guitar and Geezer Butler’s bass buried and Ronnie James Dio’s vocals a bit too loud. But by the second song, “Children of the Sea”, the kinks were worked out. My only criticism of the band came during this second song, which I think Dio oversang just a bit. Other than that, Ronnie’s vocal performance was nothing short of amazing, especially for a guy who just turned 66.

The best thing about Heaven and Hell’s set to me was the interplay between the band members. Almost nothing was done in a rote “just like the album” manner, as all the band members really jammed out on the instrumental sections. Every once in a while a group of musicians gets together and there’s a certain magic that exists above and beyond musical talent. This group of musicians has that kind of vibe. If you’ve seen any of the recent Black Sabbath reunion shows where Iommi and Butler played with founding band members Ozzy Osbourne and Bill Ward, you can really see the difference in the energy level. The band played for an hour and fifteen minutes, with highlights for me being “Die Young”, “Sign of the Southern Cross”, “I”, and an epic extended version of “Heaven and Hell”. Just an amazing set.

Here's Heaven and Hell doing "Die Young":



I knew Heaven and Hell would be a tough act to follow, but I figured if anyone could do it, it would be Judas Priest. Priest opened with “Dawn of Creation/Prophecy” from their new concept album Nostradamus. I fully expected to hear at least a couple more tunes from that release, but nope. The rest of the set was pulled from past efforts, in particular the Painkiller and Screaming For Vengeance albums, from which the band pulled 3 songs a piece. I appreciated the fact that the set avoided a lot of obvious choices (no “Living After Midnight” this time around), and it was nice to hear rarities like “Eat Me Alive” and “Dissident Aggressor”.

Overall the band sounded extremely tight and polished, but something was missing. Maybe it was Halford’s stage presence, or lack thereof. In the past this guy was easily in the top 5 of front men. Tonight, however, he seemed rooted in place and frequently hunched over. I could swear I heard a news story about him having an Alzheimer’s like condition that made it difficult for him to remember lyrics, thus forcing him to rely more on a teleprompter. I couldn’t find anything to back up that memory, though, so I don’t know if that’s true or not. Regardless, Halford’s stage presence on this night was pretty weak, and it sapped a lot of energy from the show for me. Everything sounded good, but I just didn’t get any feeling of passion from the band. Priest live is still head and shoulders above most bands, but compared to past shows of theirs I’ve been to this was kind of lackluster.

Here's Priest doing "Breaking the Law":


*The other two bands are Iron Maiden, who did their own tour this summer, and Metallica (even though they've pretty much sucked since Load, I have hope their new album will be a return to form). And Slayer deserves at least an honorable mention.