| Intro | Friday (Charlotte NC; long boring description) | Saturday (Atlanta, GA; pics) |
Whew! It's been a long, but great two-day pilgrimage to catch Godhead on two dates of the Preaching to the Perverted tour...not to mention Gravity Kills, who were excellent too, and Pigface, who were much better than I'd expected based on the few MP3's I downloaded. :)
As soon as I saw Godhead's Southeastern tour dates I'd thought it would be cool to drive up to Charlotte, which is only about 3.5 hours away, and then see them here in Atlanta the next day. The Charlotte show was on a Friday, so I hastily pre-scheduled the day off work. I'd emailed Jason of Godhead and told him that my roommate Tim and I were hoping to come up to Charlotte, and he told us that their guest-list was full (no surprise there, since we didn't commit to going until close to the show)...BUT, if we could get there early, there shouldn't be a problem. This is called the "once you're in, you're in" tactic. :)
So it was too early on Friday morning when Tim and I tried to get going on the road to Charlotte. My plan was to be on the road by noon, with ETA in Charlotte around 3:30, but naturally we didn't get out of the house by one. I'd been up til around 7am Friday, so I was already starting out tired. Ack!
Atlanta and the Southeast were receiving our first significant rainfall in about 5 weeks, which was great news for farmers but unwelcome news for me, since I had to drive in and out of rain all the way to Charlotte. Tim has no driver's license, so it's alll me. The drive up was reasonably uneventful, however, and we arrived in Charlotte at around 4:30pm. I had planned on getting a hotel room when we arrived in Charlotte, but we'd passed the more 'juicy' freeway exits near Charlotte Airport before I knew it...oops! I figured we could maybe sneak out later and get one....
Using the venue's directions on their website and maps from Mapquest, we turned onto I-77 and found the venue easily....well, after one really scary moment sliding in the rain, as there was a wreck on our exit ramp and a blind curve leading up to it.
Hmmm. Now we've found the venue. It's a bit of a dump. :)
Hey presto, all the gates were locked, too. Doesn't look like much
of a venue, either....
Keith, "Mercury" from Godhead's BBS, had said
he'd be there fairly early, but we didn't see him. More
accurately, we
didn't see anyone who was looking for me, since we had no idea
what he looked like, but he'd seen pics of me online. :)
After a quick phone call and armed with Tim's all-access laminate, we're aboard Godhead's tour-bus which they're sharing with Gravity Kills -- just call it the G Bus. :) Mike is still asleep (being a rock-star is tough, lemme tell ya) but everyone else is awake and Tim and I exchange greetings with our old friends and are introduced to a new friend, Tom Z., Godhead's new drummer and a helluva nice guy. (He's also a bit older than he looks. :))
Tom and I discovered that we have some friends in common, namely the guys in the band Bella Morte -- he played a show with them once with his band Eye Kandy, where ironically both bands played their respective covers of Berlin's "Metro." Both are excellent covers, too.....
We stayed on the bus for a while and watched Strange Brew with some of the guys (cool, since I'd never seen the whole thing before) until a critical shortage was discovered: they were out of cigarettes!
North Carolina has a reputation for being the tobacco and cigarette capital of the world, so Method and I headed off in my car, with visions of $12 cigarette cartons dancing in our heads, just like the billboards said along the highway.....
...and we didn't find any. We think it's all an elaborate conspiracy. We -did- bring back about $70 worth of cigarettes, enough for about two days for the whole tour. :) "Hey, you can sell these to everyone else on the tour for $3.50 a pack and retire on the profits after the tour is over!" :)
We got back and there was still no obvious sign of Keith/"Mercury" at the venue, so we went back inside to hang out, check out the dressing-rooms, etc. Some vicious foosball challenges and good conversations were also on the menu (as well as the bands' dinner catering). It was a relatively late start for the show: doors opened at 9pm and a local opener played before Godhead, who weren't due on stage until 10:10 p.m., so it seemed like there was lots of spare time. During this time inside before doors-open I also met 'deborah,' who's from the Godhead BBS.
After doors-open I checked a few times in the venue to see if I could spot the still-missing Mercury (or give him a chance to spot me :)), but to no avail. Finally it was time for the band to change and get ready for their set, which they started at about 10:20.
Despite only a moderate crowd-response the guys gave a great show
-- and for a rarity, we could actually and -clearly- hear Mike's
vocals! Here's the setlist, from memory:
Lies
Inside You
Eleanor
Penetrate
Sinking
Reckoning
Break you Down
Tired Old Man
It all sounded really good, too. One thing this current tour boasts, it's reallly good monitor- and house-sound personnel. I never had a chance to get my camera out of the car, so I didn't get any photos of their performance, but a photographer from a web-based 'zine, Choler, did take some pics which should be posted there.
After the show, Keith finally found me, and we hung out for much of the rest of the night. The guys stayed accessible inside the venue, signing autographs and chatting, for most of the rest of the night, which was really cool, and just what you begin to expect from these guys.
I watched much of Gravity Kills' set with interest, since I'd first heard them on the Mortal Kombat soundtrack -- a CD that I wouldn't normally have bought way-back-when, but it also included a song from our old friends' band Mutha's Day Out, and the soundtrack gave me a whole new appreciation for the industrial/dance "scene." I'd downloaded a bunch of other GK mp3's and liked all of it, so their show was fun to watch, and their keyboardist, Doug Firley, is among the most interesting keyboard players I've ever seen. He has his keyboard mounted on a custom-built ball-joint stand and he spins it around, up, over, while playing all the while.
Since I had a car handy and time would be critical after the show was over, I'd
been asked if I could shuttle the guys over to their "day-room" in a nearby
hotel so they could get showers--
--Wait, did someone mention a hotel? D'oh! By now it was way too late to
get a room somewhere, so we'd just have to drive straight back to Atlanta.
Arrgh!
After Pigface's set -- I wasn't familiar with any of their mountainous history of CDs, so I was in and out during their set -- we trooped off to the tour-bus to hang out. By now it was after 2am, and since a BBS person had kindly offered her hotel room, I shuttled Jason and Tom Z. over so they could shower up in advance of the screaming hordes at their "regular" hotel. :)
We got back just as the bus was getting ready to depart back to their regular hotel ("This bus is leaving! All visitors off the bus! You have ten seconds! --Please, people?"), so we said our final goodbyes. We'd been asked if we could give Deborah a ride back to Atlanta and we agreed, of course, so Tim, Deborah and I rolled off into the pre-dawn darkness. It was about 03:30.
It had quit raining hard and so the voyage back wasn't too much trouble, although we ran into a strange detour on I-85 near Gaffney, supposedly due to a wreck. We were directed onto some narrow country roads and I kept thinking "Oh, boy, they're gonna have a lot of fun flying those tourbuses down this horse-path!" We got through okay and arrived back in Atlanta at around 8 a.m. Time to crash! Well, okay, I'll check my email first. :)
I'll add more description later, but for now, here are the pics:
