Temp: 27 degrees
YAND (Yet Another Nice Day). No leak from the shower, so I'm pretty happy about that. Got home from work and watered all the plants, then tossed a reclining deck chair out on the lawn, kicked back in the sun for an hour. It was a nice nap. Very relaxing. I woke up at 5, worried that I might have been burned to a crisp, but upon close inspection, it doesn't even look like I got any sun at all - very strange.
I BBQ'd a couple burgers for dinner, then it was off to the Pacific Colusseum to see Anthrax and Rob Zombie.
I guess I've seen White Zombie twice and Rob Zombie twice before, and there has always been an awesome stage show, so I was a little taken back by the fact that this time it was a totally stripped down show, no crazy costumes or theatrics or set - just the music.
As for Anthrax, seriously, I've lost track of how many times I've seen them - it's somewhere between 7 and 10 ... I'll have to plow through all my ticket stubs to be sure... but the crazy thing is, I've never once been to a concert where Anthrax is the headlining act - they've always just happened to be the supporting act every time I go to see a heavy band. Two possible exceptions might be the MTV Headbanger's Ball in 1988 with Exodus, Anthrax, and Helloween all being co-headliners, and then there was 1991's Clash of the Titans Tour, featuring Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax where each band traded off being the headliners on different legs of the tour. Incidentally, that show was opened by a then unknown Seattle band called "Alice in Chains", which I had actually seen a year earlier, opening for Van Halen... but I digress, back to last night's show.
I'm pretty proud of Anthrax actually. They're still going, and they're going hard. I've been listening to them since 1985, and while they've gone through upswings and downtimes in their carreer, they're still out there touring those hits and grinding out a living where many would have just packed it in. But not these guys, they rock just as hard today, as they did the first time I saw them, 19 years ago on the "Among The Living" tour. Sheesh has it really been that long? Considering that this is their 3rd performance in Vancouver in the last 10 months, I suspect their endless touring is pretty much their livelyhood now - not a bad way to make a living.
Their sound was pretty muddy last night, but there could have been many factors contributing to that. This was the 2nd last date for them on this tour, and the road does to wear down he musicians and the crew, (though there was no shortage of energy on stage during their performance), but oddly, the venue was far more than half empty - I've never seen a concert so empty ... in fact, al lthe nosebleed sections were actually tarped off - not only have I never seen the entire top half of the stadium closed, but half of the red seats were empty too - who the hell was the promoter for this show??? Rob Zombie is huge - there's no way one of his gigs should be this empty - but for some reason it was, and a half empty venue sounds a lot more washed out than a full stadium.
So, on to the Zombie. I'm not going to use the word 'disapointed' because after all, I love the music, I totally respect Rob Zombie for so many reasons, and I certainly did not leave the show feeling let down at all. But, having said that, even the best of 'em occasionally has a bad show. That's what makes the 'good' shows feel so good! Again, I think the bad was road weary. This was the end of this leg of the tour, then a 2 week break before continuing in the US.
For the first three songs, I felt a little bad for Rob - his voice sounded shot, and he was really trying to make up for it by being extra energetic, but a lot of his banter sounded mechanical and rehearsed at first, like he was just reciting his lines at couldn't wait for the show to end - at least, that's the feeling I got... even the band, while they were all playing the right notes at the right times, seemed disjointed - like the passion wasn't really there. I've been there, I know how that feels, and it's frustrating because you really want to give the fans a good show even though you got stiffed by a promoter that couldn't even half-fill a venue, or you've got the flu, or your dog just died, or whatever reasons are clogging up your brain - but thankfully, Rob seemed to push through it. By the 2nd half of the show, while his voice was still pretty raunched out, the camaraderie with the band seemed to be back, they gelled more, and the engergy was way more intense. you could tell rob felt bad that the show started a bit sour, and he was making an extra effort to make up for it.
Any time a singer reverts to what I call "The Ozzy Copout", I do feel let down... it's kinda like the last resort way to cheat yourway through a song that you're not capable of singing yourself - for whatever reason, be it "throat lock", exaustion, or otherwise - when a singer cuts short all the sustained notes, or just doesn't sing them at all, or mubles something like "let me hear ya scream" everytime the chorus comes around, or just holds the mic over the audience during the tricky refrains instead of trying to pull off the notes themselves, you know they're trying to avoid singing at all costs - and Zombie was doing the Ozzy Copout in spades last night. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing - at least he didn't cancel the show, and at least he doesn't use a backing track to fill in his vocal weak spots - getting up on stage and being REAL, with your bagged out voice from 35 shows in 40 days, that's commendable. And still having the energy to rile up the crowd too, well, good on ya.
STILL, there was a distict feeling that Rob wasn't just 'bagged' for the first half of the show, but that he REALLY just didn't want to play any of HIS songs anymore. Don't get me wrong, I love heavy cover songs more than most people I know, but doing Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love, Enter Sandman, Paranoid, Sweet Dreams, and a host of other "cover" snippets at the expense of Zombie classics like Black Sunshine or Demonoid Phenomenon did leave a few fans scratching their heads...
All said, the show really did end on a good note though. Rob made it pretty clear after the end of the 1st encore that this is where they usually end the show and that he wanted to give us a little extra, pulling out songs he "hadn't played in 5 years, so hopefully they can remember them" - though it was a little contrived, since the video screen display for Devil's Rejects was perfectly synched to the song, and all the samples for SuperBeast seemed to be all cueued up and ready to go. Still, it was good to see Rob Zombie again. Was it one of his better shows? No. But they can't all be good shows. And he DID put the extra effort into trying to make up for it.
Posted by Calvin at August 3, 2006 08:31 AM