Recent Events Dictate : Places I’ve Been, Things I’ve Seen

|October 21, 2015 | Found Images, Recent Events Dictate, White Zombie

I was fucking around on the internet the other day when this flyer popped up, and I was like, “oh, hey, hello, I was at that show”. This was when WZ had freshly arrived from NYC. In my memory of the gig, I’m the only person there, although that can’t be exactly true. I do remember what was going on at that time, the musical climate, and there would have been very little interest in these groups. Nobody from my band went, nor did anyone I’d met yet in Los Angeles. 

Hole was the early version, the noisy, screamy stuff (you know, this), which I liked okay on record. I wasn’t a fan of their later, commercial sound at all, and I’ve certainly never been a fan of CL’s (I’ve had conversations with her exactly twice, and both times there was a voice inside my head, repeating “she’s crazy, get away from her”), but, I have to say that they sounded so good, it was, I don’t know, transportive? She was a very good performer, yelling her guts out to that empty club.

Vitus (who I was actually there to see) were in their wilderness years (this). Their association with Black Flag and SST would have been useless at this point, and there sure as shit wasn’t any such thing as a metal-hipster in those days. (Ha ha, I just had a little reverie about good-looking, well-heeled kids with ivy league degrees and Pentagram back-patches, doing their stoned thing in Williamsburg, or, shit, in 2015 it’d be Nashville) They had that weird singer they had for, whatever, one album. He was Swedish, I think? They sounded good, but it doesn’t matter how much rock energy you dish out if there’s no crowd to cycle it back to you. I’m thinking hard about this, and I believe I was actually alone, in front of the stage, audience of one, watching them.

Spoon. This was not the popular group from Austin, and darned if I can remember (Jesus, should I say that in a Mr.Magoo voice?) who they were, although I feel like I saw them more than once. Probably some of that alternative, noisy stuff. Absolutely un-google-able. Oh well.