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Well over a decade ago, i showed up to the venue early and it was locked, so i pissed behind the building next door. Flash forward an hour and the owner of this shitty buger bar comes out, walks up to me shouting about me peeingand starts pushing/hitting me. I am a teenager. We play the show, shitdude comes in and tells people running the show he called the cops and we get told please never play here again.

D.o.S. wrote:I have some run of the mill stories like this but Om getting kicked out of the Middle East upstairs for refusing to stop playing (the sound people allegedly had to go onstage and kill the amps to cut their set) is a personal favorite.

When Sleep played here the first time it was headlining an ATP. The stage manager came on stage being all like 'one more song' and so they started playing Dopesmoker. About fifteen minutes in dude comes back on stage and starts yelling at Al. Al stands like toe to toe with him and just stares at him while he keeps playing. Eventually the dude stormed off and everyone cheered.

When I was in Whitehorse we did a couple shows where people came on stage and turned our amps off. Best one was playing some Vice xmas party bullshit where we literally played one riff for over an hour.

I sort of feel like the obnoxious band thing is pretty toy at this point in my life but it was Vice so fuck 'em.

daseb wrote:I sort of feel like the obnoxious band thing is pretty toy at this point in my life but it was Vice so fuck 'em.

I go back and forth on the confrontational thing, i think there are good ways and bad ways to do it.

I'm all for other people doing it. I just feel weird and dorky.

i haven't but i tell you guys what - i'll book your band, kick you out, let you back in then do it again!

My experiences have always been sort of counter-intuitive. Slam into a table while playing guitar sending a bunch of glass smashing into the bar floor? Promoter loves it and gives us more money from the door than the other bands. Have my dick flop out of the tiny briefs I thought it was funny to wear on stage? Get asked back for bigger shows.

gnomethrone wrote:My experiences have always been sort of counter-intuitive. Slam into a table while playing guitar sending a bunch of glass smashing into the bar floor? Promoter loves it and gives us more money from the door than the other bands. Have my dick flop out of the tiny briefs I thought it was funny to wear on stage? Get asked back for bigger shows.

The dick slip is the only move that trumps the nip slip.

I am all for interesting or provocative confrontation or transgression (in fact i love it), but too many bands are content to rehash things that stopped being new or exciting before i was fucking born. Back when i was living in a punk house it was like, what page out of the early 80s hardcore handbook am i gonna see tonight? Oh, some band thought it was cool and funny to use racial slurs, or break bottles, or call me a faggot, or throw furniture, or start a fight, etc. etc. etc. Now I have to clean up/kick someone out/cry on the roof alone. Transgression, by its nature, should be the opposite of anticipated, it should be carefully calculated based on the space in which it is occurring. If it is not only predictable, but expected by the audience, it just becomes... well, to me, boring.

That said i used to flail around in hardcore bands, but usually because i am a bad bassist.

psychic vampire. wrote:

gnomethrone wrote:My experiences have always been sort of counter-intuitive. Slam into a table while playing guitar sending a bunch of glass smashing into the bar floor? Promoter loves it and gives us more money from the door than the other bands. Have my dick flop out of the tiny briefs I thought it was funny to wear on stage? Get asked back for bigger shows.

The dick slip is the only move that trumps the nip slip.

I am all for interesting or provocative confrontation or transgression (in fact i love it), but too many bands are content to rehash things that stopped being new or exciting before i was fucking born. Back when i was living in a punk house it was like, what page out of the early 80s hardcore handbook am i gonna see tonight? Oh, some band thought it was cool and funny to use racial slurs, or break bottles, or call me a faggot, or throw furniture, or start a fight, etc. etc. etc. Now I have to clean up/kick someone out/cry on the roof alone. Transgression, by its nature, should be the opposite of anticipated, it should be carefully calculated based on the space in which it is occurring. If it is not only predictable, but expected by the audience, it just becomes... well, to me, boring.

That said i used to flail around in hardcore bands, but usually because i am a bad bassist.

I agree, and we're all queer and the bar owner saw it fit to use a ton of slurs in the process of confronting us. That said, being provocative and loud Is a huge part of stage presence for us so it's on the venue owner to research what they book

oh man seriously if I have to hear one more band full of 18 year olds pretending to be skinheads who are all EDGY because they read that awful American Hardcore book...it's almost a blessing that everyone's moving on to pretending they always liked NWOBHM now.

It is funny when the EDGY singer guy gets going and someone takes them up on it though. I remember seeing a guy going on about how hardcore is 'no longer dangerous' getting three or four milk crates pegged directly at his head mid-speech. Oh how we laughed.

What I mean by 'confronting' is it can be like, done interestingly and genuinely move or unsettle people without rehashing stories you read about NYHC or Throbbing Gristle.

yeah fuck being a dick to people. it's hard enough to get people to come out to shows without douchelords trying to be Lee Ving. I try to respect venues, I just used to have a moderate drinking problem and would occasionally fall into shit. One time we shared a bill with this band that announced they were about to play a gg allin cover. I figured it would be some song about heroin or diarrhea or whatever. They played a deep cut titled "no room for a n*gger". What the fuck do you even do at that point?

Take a shit onstage?

Beat the shit out of the singer and piss/shit all over him, the way GG would have wanted


edit: damn changz

Yeah that's probably what we should have done. They were from the the other end of the county and just wanting to fuck shit up where they didn't know anybody. I talked to the promoter and asked what the deal was and he just wanted them out as quick as possible. My bass player was black so I sort of deffered on our course of action to him. We ended up just walking them out with the rest of the locals and proceeding to play a raging set. Like grownups. That was actually the night my dong bounced out. Not so much like a grownup. Another question: your penis gets exposed on stage, do you stop playing and re-tuck or just shimmy the hips?

it's been said in this thread already, but yeah, sometimes venues are often in a lot of shit for passing curfew with the city. I know it happens a lot in montreal, they're always getting their alcohol license taken away for a period because of that. so in some ways, I can understand/side with a venue if they told the band to arrive early and not play late and they don't do that.

but still, verbal abuse isn't cool. gotta do that shit professionally.

gnomethrone wrote:yeah fuck being a dick to people. it's hard enough to get people to come out to shows without douchelords trying to be Lee Ving. I try to respect venues, I just used to have a moderate drinking problem and would occasionally fall into shit. One time we shared a bill with this band that announced they were about to play a gg allin cover. I figured it would be some song about heroin or diarrhea or whatever. They played a deep cut titled "no room for a n*gger". What the fuck do you even do at that point?

If it were my old house, they would have been getting shitstomped by the wierdo bodybuilder types i lived with, buuuuut we were an anomaly, not the norm. Folks used to get thrown down metal & cement stairs for less. I almost miss it, at least it made clear what there was and wasn't room for.

Milk crates at heads are good. I remember the day i realized i didn't like punk anymore was when a bunch of people who lived in another house in the building got on my case for not wanting a band that went on a racist tirade and said "Fuck faggots" during a set to play there ever again. Their words were "[Said band] was just being confrontational and that's part of punk." Like, nah, that is everywhere, didn't get into punk so that I could experience what i already did everywhere else.

Also, where the fuck are people pretending they were always into NWOBHM? Here all the xvx boys got hard into Death In June and Cold Cave and Boyd Rice and a white male persecution complex. NWOBHM sounds way better.