Face Pollution

I was talking to Alice Cooper the other day. Had he been present, he would have heard me telling this story I like to recount after about half a beer to whoever is within earshot:

I remember most of the details like it was yesterday. My barely competent attorney, Juan Perez, and I were at a Sebastian Bach show in Nashua, New Hampshire. This was probably like 10 years ago. Almost eleven. After the show—yeah, it was awesome—we spotted a couple of skanks leaning against the bar, waiting to be escorted backstage for an audience with “Baz.” These chicks were straight out of ’87—teased hair, short leather jackets, ripped fishnets, makeup applied with a spatula, giant hoop earrings, the full creature double feature. This is New Hampshire, remember. At a place called Sharky’s. Which is pretty much all you need to know. Well, almost. Because then Skank One turns to Skank Two, waves three fingers in front of her own tropical-fish-like visage and asks, “How’s the face?”

It was an excellent fucking question. Because what if The Face had been obscured by something other than five pounds of foundation, eyeliner and rouge? Or what if said foundation, eyeliner and/or rouge had been smeared across The Face in an unsightly manner, making Skank One look like the famous dead actor from that overrated Batman movie? (Granted, that movie had not been released when this happened. But you can see what I’m getting at here.) What if dust, foodstuffs or other detritus had become lodged in the gelatinous beige craters that just this morning had been plain old acne scars? The horrors were endless, but none more frightening than the potential result: If The Face was not presentable, perhaps Mr. Bach would be disinclined to put his wee-wee in or around it. Not that we have the slightest clue whether or not Skid Row’s former lead vocalist ever engaged in these kinds of sweaty extracurricular activities at midnight on a Tuesday, or whatever, in Nashua, NH. Last time we checked, he’d been married for like 300 years.

The upshot of witnessing this exchange is that my attorney and I replicate it at least a couple of times a month. Whenever we go out to lunch and one of us feels as though we might have crumbs in our beard, we bust out three fingers and a quick “How’s the face?” The question has to be asked with the kind of corpselike seriousness that Diane Sawyer used to summon effortlessly on 20/20 when she wasn’t completely shitfaced. If this routine qualifies as a male bonding ritual, I figure it’s at least way less gay than shirtless chest-bumping at a Rage Against The Machine concert, and maybe only slightly gayer than, I don’t know, watching football on the idiot box, eating hot wings and grunting at each other? But Americuh accepts the idiot box/hot wings/grunting scenario as so stereotypically hetero that its prominence in the national milieu reeks of overcompensation for all the ass-grabbing and bending over that happens on the scrimmage line. It’s like Chris Barnes’ Cannibal Corpse lyrics or something. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, dude. What’s that from, anyway? Shakespeare? Nothing gay about that.

But I seem to be getting off track here. Somewhere on an air-conditioned indoor golf course in Arizona, Alice Cooper is losing interest in my story. Oh, right: The Skanks. The 14-year old inside of me—you know, the one who writes for this magazine—is still secretly in love with those skanks, even though neither of us can remember what they looked like. (That 14-year old would’ve been just three years old back then, but he still knew a sure thing when he saw it.) In a way, those lusty ladies weren’t all that different than my attorney and I that night. We were all reliving a particularly fond piece of our teenage years; we were all psyched to be getting our drink on in the general vicinity of a once-mighty rock legend, and we were all definitely singing along to “Eighteen And Life.” At Sharky’s. In Nashua. Wow. The more I think about it, the more I sincerely hope those faces made the cut.

This bullshit originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Decibel magazine.

Montreal Scene Report: Get Your HAD On

As you know, we here at Decibel magazine pride ourselves on our ability to bring you the latest and greatest in extreme underground metal stylings. In that spirit, we offer the following Montreal scene report from our intrepid reporter and comrade, J. Bennett. Doctor Bennett filed this report while still in Montreal, that sparkling city by the bay (ocean? lake?) from which he has yet to return. We fear his “full immersion” style of journalism has compelled him to join some of the vagabonds profiled in this piece.

Outside the Mont Royal metro stop, Crazy Henri shakes his dirty fists at the heavens and curses the god that has forsaken him. The noise coming from his mouth sounds like a dying whale being fed into a wood chipper by an army of smelly homeless dudes suffering from the DTs. That’s probably because Crazy Henri is a smelly homeless dude suffering from the DTs, right down to the green teeth and semen-encrusted pantaloons. But our man isn’t feeding a dying whale into a wood chipper. He can’t even afford a wood chipper. Luckily, the hot new music genre Crazy Henri is credited with inventing is totally and completely free—despite the fact that you can’t yet steal it off the Internet.

Yes, the latest extreme metal craze currently sweeping the rues of Montreal is called homeless a cappella doom—that’s HAD for short—and it sounds a little something like this:

“AAAOORRAAARGGHHHH!” (Repeat 22 times.)

That’s right, oh faithful readers. No shredding solos, tasty riffing or thunderous blastbeats required. This shit is au naturel, from Crazy Henri’s armpit-microphone to Allah’s uncaring ears. And what began just a few months ago as one unspeakably horrible-smelling human being throwing down the doom—homeless a cappella doom—outside of Who Wants A Crepe? can now be found panhandling in the entryway of nearly every Couche Tard convenience store in this magical quasi-European burg. Today, Crazy Henri enjoys godfather status in the HAD scene. Later this week, he’ll open for local punkers Vaginal Croutons at Les Foufounes Electriques, a.k.a. the Electric Asshole, over on Saint Catherine.

Meanwhile, the occasionally deflated but always hilarious junkies on Saint Laurent congregate in the parking lot behind Club Soda in hopes of catching an impromptu performance by Monique LeTrec, otherwise known as The Sea Hag. Rumor has it she washed up on the beach back in ’03 after fleeing Newfoundland on a raft made out of balsa wood and fish heads. But today she’s the gin-blossomed Bonnie to Crazy Henri’s shitfaced Clyde: The doom-loving duo often go dumpster diving together in the alleys behind Montreal’s most glamorous jack shacks.

Of course, where the smoke from a burgeoning musical trend befouls the local air, the firemen of opportunity always come calling with lighter fluid and recording contracts. Pierre “Peaches” Benoit, a longtime HAD supporter and part-time social worker, is one of these soul-sucking carpetbaggers. But he agrees to meet us for a drink upstairs at Pussy Corps, so we let him run through his talking points. “Homelessness is not a joke, and with a decent push from a big label like Warner Brothers, homeless a cappella doom won’t be one for much longer,” he insists. In a nod to local custom, Benoit arrives at our meeting in typical Quebecois summer garb: baggy three-quarter length cargo pants (white), a bright neon tank top and a moldy pair of burlap man-sandals. “Plus, I read the first half of Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night In Suck City last year, so I know what I’m doing when it comes to dealing with these artists.”

Benoit’s first cash-in is a HAD compilation called Get The Fuck Off My Car, Creep—a re-appropriation, he says, of an epithet often hurled at many of the compilation’s contributors in between street performances. An advance copy of the track listing reveals that Crazy Henri recorded at least two songs for the collection, including his hits “I Got Arrested For Public Urination (Again)” and “Brown Bag Blues,” while the Sea Hag delivers her asphalt anthem “Olde English Lover” and a doomed-out cover of “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” Elsewhere, newcomer Gilles L’espalier chimes in with “URRRGGGHHHHH!” and “I Needs A Dollar For The Muthafuckin’ Aliens,” a local buzz track that fuses HAD with London-style grime rap.

“I don’t know about you,” Benoit says as his halitosis nearly knocks us off our barstool. “But I think this shit could be huge.”

This bullshit originally appeared in the September 2010 issue of Decibel magazine.