• Rating:
After being constipated for three years, I allow myself to write a scroll.
April 19 (or 20).
*Like an oasis in the desert*
Browsing this site, I discover from a user, presumably on Erasmus in Tilburg (but maybe not, ask him) that Sleep closed the Roadburn.
Oh, just that? Holy wow, Sleep???
It's the second time in three years that I discover too late that Sleep reunited for a live show. Now, I have no idea how they might be live almost twenty years after their flowing dreadlocks and thundering pimples; but "Holy Mountain" is my personal "Buddy Christ", and I was turned the other way when it passed by for the second time. Twice in three years...
Shadows, darkness, emptiness, and dismay; I say goodbye to everyone on DeBaser, tidy up my room, place the slippers against the skirting board, open the window, and start climbing.
"Hey, what the hell are you doing?" thunders the voice from the PC of our Debaser user who (I think) sleeps among the poppies and the windmills.
"They're passing through Italy too, you fool".
A glimmer of hope in the night of days! I climb down from the windowsill, frantically browse the Internet, and look what I discover: on May 17, Sleep are in Piacenza (or nearby). I can postpone my appointment with the first free-fall lesson from the fourth floor. At least until the 18th.
Sure, I have no idea how to get to Piacenza. But I have a great buddy, who:
A) listens to cool music and,
B) has a fully optional cool camel (double hump, air conditioning, and GPS) that has already chauffeured us brilliantly through the various North Italian oases. The chances would be good, but the 17th is a Thursday, and the chances plummet to the "Hanna Montana Vs Godzilla" level. Couldn't they pass by the next day? Oh well, frankly, I don't give a damn, after all, tomorrow is another day.
..."Frankly, I don't give a damn"; "Tomorrow is another day"... Yes, I authorize you to stop reading.
April 21.
*An hour before midnight: dawn*
-22:45
My buddy and I, camel-equipped, are in Desio. Audrey/Rhyme live.
It's his concert, in the sense that it was proposed by him, and while we're waiting for the stage to fill, I realize this is the moment to make my move.
"On May 17, Sleep are playing near Piacenza"
I’m not very optimistic; I know that my buddy (whom for convenience we'll call "ReZ" from now on) wakes up at dawn on the 18th, Piacenza is far away, and probably the idea of continuing to chauffeur me around Northern Italy is slightly getting on his nerves. ReZ is a fair guy, not a crazy one.
"Sorry; who?"
"Sleep, it must be some kind of reunion, I know little about it. But I know they played at Roadburn, and then they started a European tour. In Italy, they're passing through Rome and Piacenza"
"Ok."
"Ok what?"
"We’re going..." Just like that, cold, instinctively. ReZ has more instinct for concerts than Ibra for goals.
"Seriously? Won’t it cause problems for work with the early wake-up the next day? Don’t you want to think about it some more first?"
"No. You said Sleep are playing, right? Then, they play and we move our butts."
And that's how behind a veil of incredulous euphoria, I discovered that, deep down, God still likes me. And that ReZ is effectively out of his mind.
April 24
*Tête-à-tête with Al (Stanley "2001" Kubrick, suck it) Cisneros*
ReZ and yours truly at Tunnel to see Om.
But damn, Al! I get that the munchies and donuts are a combination that would saw Mazinger in half, but letting yourself go like the dark-haired doppelgänger of King Buzzo isn’t good! No Al, holy God, I'm not talking about the hair, I was talking about the bulk. And look, I’m convinced that Buzzo still eats more fiber...
And then the voice... No Al, that’s not King Buzzo style, and no one’s asking you for it; let’s say it outright: this concert is awesome, the "nigga" tour musician kicks butts like even Rocco didn’t at 26 and Emil just made me discover that, besides wanting to be an astronaut, my other unconfessable dream would be to play the drums like him; man, how cool! But you, you mumble instead of singing.
Yes, Al. Seriously, it’s all High & Fight (what does it mean? Dunno, I didn’t want to write "cool" again) because if you pretend to sing with Om, the concert can benefit (and thank heavens today it does) but that "Look onto the rays of the new stoner sun rising" you will have to shove into my ears syllable by syllable, ok? So, in short: if you mumble with Sleep, you’ll give me the greatest disappointment of my life, worse than the 2002 World Cup. That’s all. Today was a thrill, but to put it like someone who roams these parts: I’M WATCHING YOU!
And you, who masochistically are still reading, stop bugging me: in 2010 the World Cup didn’t happen.
May 17
*OMFG (if you know what it means, great; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter: it roughly means "Oh my God!")*
At about seven-something, I show up at ReZ's place for a pre-concert dinner, Talisman of Stone will soon be taking the stage at the Fillmore in Cortemaggiore. We'll miss them, just as we’ll miss Doomraiser and Morkobot. But Piacenza is far, and you don’t say no to Spätzle.
By a quarter to nine, we mount on the camel.
ReZ on the front hump holds the reins. He urges the quadruped, consults the GPS, scans, curves, straightens, curves again, enters, continues, and pushes. I, on the back hump, limit myself to saying a load of nonsense until the night of the Piacenza suburbs welcomes us at the gates of the event.
We park the camel practically in front of the venue and enter.
The place is quite large, moderately full, and A Storm Of Light have already begun to play. Before reaching a listening spot, we head to the "Records t-shirts CDs LPs stickers patches fanzines and something else I no longer remember" stalls. I snap up the double vinyl of "Dopesmoker," a nice sticker that I have no idea what to do with, and we go out to deposit the treasure in the camel's humps.
We get back just in time to: hear the last two songs of A Storm Of Light, watch them leave the stage, and watch the video that will open the concert. There’s a guy, a sort of Philippe Daverio dressed more suitably, speaking a language all his own (slowly, I will understand it's English) standing in front of paintings talking about the Flemish in Great Britain (?) and Montezuma (oh God, I guess that's what he talks about, because, again: I didn’t understand a damn thing).
And then all of a sudden it happens that Al enters the stage doing the soundcheck by himself, followed by Jason Roeder who, also alone, sets up the drums, and then Mr. Nobody comes in to do the soundcheck for Matt Pike (who likes to remind himself that he is a rock star; and surely I won’t argue with him).
I don’t know how long it takes, but the concert starts -about time, finally, you might say- and it begins like this: DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER and so on for the first 20/25 minutes.
I noticeably feel the blow, and while dragons and planets suppurating stars are projected on the screen; my brain gets slapped by Dragonaut, Holy Mountain, The Druid, Sonic Titan, etc... In all this, on the drums, the Neurosisian Jason knows how to prevent me from wanting to cry for never seeing Chris live; Matt between one song and another first proves (again) to himself to be a rock star by sipping beer and puffing on cigarettes, then the body shows him he no longer has 20 years, that starting with 25 minutes of hypnosis perhaps wasn’t a good idea and so he decides to lay off cigarettes and alcohol and limit himself to pure and simple geriatric breaks (very few and unnoticeable, eh, a maximum of two... Matt is very cool, but we already knew that).
In all this, Al is a god. Sings as best he can, but it's Al. On stage, ugly as hunger, with the movements of a heroin-addicted autistic in withdrawal, he still manages to shine on his own. If, for instance, Matt takes a minute between songs to catch his breath and look for his incisors on the stage (no Matt, we don’t have them). No problem: Al kneels before his Mesa and fires off a fat bass micro-solo that from Cortemaggiore makes the urn with the relics of San Vittore tremble in the Basilica of San Savino in Piacenza (San Vittore thanks and asks for an encore).
Holy Mountain flows smoothly, I even hear stuff I don’t recognize yet still enjoy a ton, partly because today if they started singing “blonde braids and blue eyes and then...” I’d still be fine with it. I’m also okay with the guy to my right who first smells of marijuana and then stinks of rancid carcass.
Amongst a giant summit on the screen and some astronaut lost in space, the setlist ends and the concert wraps up with 15 minutes of DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER DOPESMOKER and the stage empties.
Serious people ending up exhausted, ask Madonna for encores.
So there, it's already twenty to one. ReZ and I on the return, on the way to Milan, ride the camel in reverent silence. I have no idea if he liked or hated the concert, my eyes don’t tear up only because I’m a former metalhead, and as Hammerfall once said (ever heard of them? good, keep going: don’t dive deeper) "A Metal Heart Is Hard To Tear A Part". But, well, yeah, you know, how to say it? Let’s just say that now I can come clean: my first concert was when I was 14 and went to see... LIGABUE!!!
But hey, today I saw Sleep, and you all stay quiet and be envious; and if you aren’t, it’s because you still haven’t understood anything.
The end of the review.
Oh my God, sorry: Marijuana/Bong/Grind/Kneading machine/Make me a filter/Hey! Did you have the chicken?/How much did you get it for?/It was crap: full of seeds/Are you passing it or not?/Give me a tip of a cigarette/It’s nice and soft/Make me an addition/Do you want it with an M or an S?/In Holland, did that referendum pass? ... Because after Sleep certain topics were talked about and you can’t omit them.
Yes, yes, it was yet another nonsense; I could have spared it...
Big thanks again to Lukapiz (the user who I think is on Erasmus in Tilburg) thanks to whom I can go around saying I’ve seen Ligabue live.
Loading comments slowly
