A Reluctant Landser in the Slaytanic Wermacht Posted: July 19, 2004 I went to Ozzfest at the PNC Arts Center with my wife last Friday night. The tickets were a birthday gift I'd been lobbying for ever since I noticed this spring that Dave Lombardo, Slayer's original drummer and the guy whose 90 second double bass drum roll at the start of "Silent Scream" used to substitute for coffee when I made the morning drive in to work, was back jamming with the group. Tracy took the hints, shelled out the $190 for two tickets (way, way overvalued, BTW...If it wasn't for Lombardo's return, I'd say this was a $30 show at best), bought the sandwiches and got off early enough to get down to the Jersey Shore ahead of the rush hour crunch. My first observation: Metal fans do not age well. Between the 40 year old potbellied guys with t-shirts bellowing "Eat.Fuck.Kill" and the 40 year-old chicks with spiraling tattoos under their sagging C cups, it was a sobering reminder that "lifestyle" is a joke the young like to play on the old. Not that I was too impressed by the younger fans, mind you. At some point in the eight years since I last attended a metal concert, a masochistic meme seems to have infected the younger portions of the metal community. I'm not just talking about the kids who carve "Slayer" into their forearms with razorblades -- an old trick. I'm talking about the pincushion-faced Marilyn Manson fans, the Gimp-masked Slipknot crowd, and the general even-the-trench-coat-mafia-hates-me attitude of the post-Nirvana metal fan. Not to sound like a purist, but one of the things that converted me from a guy who smirked whenever a metal song came on the radio to a guy who actively attended concerts in the late 1980s was speed metal's survival-of-the-fittest mentality. Let the dorm lounge Sartres debate the relative merits of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., I was off converting new Metallica fans (or getting converted myself in the case of Slayer) with a well-aimed forearm. In the environmental confines of the mosh pit, wearing a lip ring, clown makeup or a "Loser" t-shirt is the Darwinian equivalent of jumping into a shark tank coated in sea lion blubber. How today's kids keep their faces from getting torn off is a mystery to me. Fans aside, the concert was a treat. Black Sabbath was the headliner, which meant I got to see Tony Iommi play live for the first time. Listening to the riffs that launched a thousand stale imitators was a little like seeing a famous painting up close. At first you're stunned, then you notice the flaws, then you're stunned by how the flaws actually bolster the quality of the work. Then you get tired and want to move on to the next piece. Unfortunately, moving on to the next piece was never Black Sabbath's strong suit. One thing the concert environment made apparent was how many of their songs fall apart at the end. I think it goes back to their roots as a blues jam band. Where later metal bands turned the every-instrument-at-once double note ending into a heavy metal cliche, Sabbath seems to follow the Sixties live music convention of letting each instrument die a natural death at the end of the song. Witness the ending to various classics like "Black Sabbath," "Children of the Grave," and of course the speed-the-tape gimmick that ends "Sweet Leaf." Anyway, Sabbath was only the icing on the cake. The real draw, for me, was Slayer. Now, I have to admit. Slayer's music doesn't appeal to me as much as it did in the 1990s. Maybe it's because that deep well of 20-something anger has turned into a shallower well of 30-something fatalism. Whatever it is, I find it hard to listen to the music in the same focused intensity as I when I used to listen to one side of "South of Heaven" on the way to AIN Plastics in the morning and the other side of "South of Heaven" on the way home at night. That said, the band still rocks. One thing I love about Slayer is how they hold the crowd at a distance. No pandering. No "Let me hear you make some noise!" call and response bullshit. You might be lucky to get one or two inquiries from Tom Araya as to whether the set sounds good out in the cheap seats followed by a quick spoken-word intro to the next song. This...this is a song about the ultimate sacrifice.... This is a song called....MANDATORY (pause) SUICIDE! Then, of course, the guitar and drums kick in and we're off and running for the next three songs. Love or hate the music, all bands could take a lesson on stage presence from Slayer. Unfortunately, most lead singers turn into David Lee Roth as soon as they notice a live microphone and a cornered audience. I say this as a guy who used to ramble on the mic myself whenever my bandmates made the mistake of letting me sing. After a while, you realize that its a whole lot less embarrassing both to yourself and the six fans listening in the audience if you just shut up and play. One thing I wasn't happy to note was the racist talk in our section just before Slayer came on. At first, I chalked it up to pre-show energy. The psychology of a Slayer concert is weird. It's kind of like the mood before a big wrestling match in high school. I would say the mood before a football game, but I never played football so I don't know for sure. All I know is that in the seconds before a Slayer show starts, it's one of the rare moments in life when a 90 lbs. weakling can walk up to a 250 lbs. behemoth and call him a pussy for not being amped enough. Momentary nostalgic aside: Once, when I saw a gig at Arco Arena, two guys got in a fistfight as soon as they passed through the turnstyles. Later, when the band surprised the whole building, by launching into "Reign in Blood" two seconds after the lights cut out, I remember rushing to the stage, turning back and looking upon what can only be described as a full scale riot behind me. The entire floor -- ARCO is a basketball arena for the Kings when it isn't hosting heavy metal concerts -- was a giant mosh pit. Only instead of people slam dancing into one another, they were throwing punches, knocking each other to the floor and going at it like a thousand howler monkeys jacked up on PCP. Things settled down after 30 seconds or so, but that one sight remains etched in my memory, a permanent lesson on how a little emotion and a well-timed trigger can turn any crowd into the Mongol horde for at least a few seconds. At this show, I didn't see any punching or body slamming, but I did encounter a trio of guys with shaved heads and Kerry King-style beards immediately glom onto one another in the minutes before the show started. They crowded into my section, so I got to hear the full conversation. It started with the war in Iraq and how anybody who didn't vote for Bush was a pussy, veered to illegal Mexican immigrants and how we "need to build a wall around the fuckin' country" and got worse from there. About the only thing missing was a line about the Jews stabbing the German people in the back at the end of World War I. I'm sure if you gave them another 20 minutes, though, that chestnut would have surfaced. I know Slayer's always had that dark side following. I mean, when you call your fan base the Slaytanic Wehrmact -- a nickname California's BAM Magazine once described as "about as playful as tossing around the old pigskin with Beelzebub himself"-- you're going to attract the knucklehead contingent. I myself have always laughed off such gimmicks the way a person might laugh off a Hells Angel wearing a spiked German biker helmet or a professional wrestler dressed up like an Arab terrorist. It's not meant to be taken 100 percent seriously and anyone who does take it 100 percent seriously only confirms their eternal squareness. Still, when the guy next to you starts quoting lyrics from "Angel of Death," lyrics like destroying without mercy, to benefit the Aryan race, with a smile on his face, you can't help but wonder if all fans are approaching the band with proper level of ironic detachment. And yet...once the show started, I didn't give a damn. The band rocked. The lyrics, while disturbing, perfectly complimented the guitars. When my favorite tune "Mandatory Suicide" kicked in, I shouted the classic "Buuuuuuurrnnnnnnn!" line into the right ear of one of the aforementioned knuckleheads and got the expected response: a big smile and nodding agreement. Too bad there wasn't a pit. I probably could have punched him as well. I guess you could say the concert was a lesson in what the philosophers and pyschologists call cognitive dissonance. I find myself repulsed by Slayer, repulsed by its increasingly hackneyed lyrics and the Rush Limbaugh-meets-Rudolf Hess fanbase. And yet, I still love the group for what it pulls off onstage. I love it for not compromising, for playing old favorites show after show after show. Most of all, I love it for the ambiguity, for refusing to offer a single hint as to which group -- the shaved knuckleheads, the pierced "I'm a loser" contingent, or the ironically detached college boys like me -- is interpreting the lyrics in proper, orthodox fashion. It's the same cruel ambiguity that sits at the heart of rock 'n' roll, a musical artform that encourages you to drink, do drugs, and "live in the moment" while waiting around to laugh at you when you become old, decrepit and fat. It is the cruel ambiguity that sits at the heart of life, really. In retrospect, attending a Slayer concert was, I believe, a pretty good birthday gift in that it made me realize that the 20-something headbanger in me was long gone and, truth be told, not very missed. Now, I as I relisten to my entire Slayer collection with fresh ears and a fresh perspective, I find myself looking forward to the next show, preferably in a small venue and a mosh pit for the occasional sucker punch.