November 17, 2006 "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show"

11/17/2006 The Machine Shop - Flint, MI
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction



Another dark night in cold Flint.

I'm not sure I'd ever been there when it was warm. It was always a cold place like Gary. Full of lonely cold spots of empty time and space, often illustrated in the lonesome Ed Hopper glow of a decrepit fast food joint on the side of a derelict industrial highway devoid of any neighbors save the barbed wire-topped fences and cracked pavement and graffitied dumpsters adorning the surrounding real estate.

The bass player for Smile Empty Soul was an amateur graffiti artist and tagged the side of the club in an area where the owners paid no mind to its appearance. He was a living cultural document typical of the era and genre, clad in Addidas and upscale dreadlocks, fancy tattoos. Played his bass low and bent over at the waist during the choruses. An overtly nice guy, and one of the first to offer any sort of social olive branch.

The inside of the club was steel tread plate and fencing, black paint and a real motorcycle hung on the far wall. Stickers of bands I had never heard of with purposefully misspelled names and evil-looking fonts crusted the mirrors and urinals of the restrooms and the smell of cheap beer and bar food saturated the carpets and the clothing of anyone who entered.

This was the shrine of a tribe that had grown into their adult responsibilities with weathered faces and yet retained the wildness of their youth under their hats and long sleeved shirts to be revealed on the weekends at places like The Machine Shop.

There was one old guy in particular who was dressed and groomed identical to Ozzy Osbourne. The resemblance was striking, down to the dark glasses with circle lenses and pewter occult jewelry he wore on his fingers and wrists. He gave out copies of an enormous compendium on the life of Ozzy Osbourne he had written that chronicled the rise and fame of the metal statesman but written in Hessian lexicon and hyperbole so thick it was almost laughable.

It was easy to poke fun at this unabashed idol-worship, but it was hard not to admire the painstaking attention this guy gave to detail. At times it read like a manifesto, other times like a brochure. The book stayed in our van, and at times I spent hours poring over the itemized list of every single show Ozzy had performed in his life, chronicled by this man who thought of him as a god.

It ended up stuffed behind a workshop table at the glass and aluminum shop where I worked on my breaks from tour, and it's possible that it still lives there as I write this. To this day, I still wish I had it.

The audience waited patiently while we played, having never heard of us before and probably have never heard us since. I played to a front row that consisted of union-welder-sized hulks with facial hair and shaved heads, and while it's likely they never liked our music, at times it seemed like they appreciated our sense of combativeness and swagger.