Watch Out! It's On... Like Simon Le Bon!
Alright, ladies and gentlemen... these are the official dates for Loincloth's first shows ever! Sadly, our very first show was cancelled ( Wilmington, this Saturday the 27th ) because the headlining band's drummer quit. I don't know that Wilmington was prepared to have it's entire skyline leveled by The 'Cloth anyway! However the West Coast has been ready to fall off into the Pacific Ocean for quite some time now, so I think they will be prepared for the mayhem that will ensue once we throw down with Sunn 0))) and Dead in the Dirt! Our first two shows will be with our friends in another instrumental metal band, Dysrhythmia. I'd like to say "Whassap!" to Hank Shteamer in STATS, who will also be playing with us in New York City.
The Dysrhythmia shows...
Nov. 16, Long Branch, NJ @ Brighton Bar w/Dysrhythmia
Nov. 17, Brooklyn, NY @ Public Assembly w/Dysrhythmia and Stats
The Sunn O))) / Dead in the Dirt shows...
Dec. 14, Portland, OR @ Roseland/Peter's Room
Dec. 15, Bellingham, WA @ The Wild Buffalo w/Black Breath
Dec. 16, Seattle, WA @ The Neptune Theatre
Dec. 18, San Fransisco, CA @ The Mezzanine
Dec. 19, Santa Cruz, CA @ The Rio Theatre
Dec. 20, Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda "The Power of the Riff" presents with:
High on Fire, Corrosion of Conformity, Black Breath, Void Ov Voices
Finally, back home...
Jan. 19, Raleigh, NC @ King's
So there you go... Loincloth have waited the appropriate number of years to play our first show. Twelve years, to be precise. Here's hoping we have aged like wine, and not like roadkill! If you are confused by the Simon Le Bon reference in this post's title, you'll have to watch "Squidbillies" on Adult Swim ( Cartoon Network ) to know what I'm talking about. Poor Rusty, he just couldn't sound bad-asser 'n hell even if his life depended upon it.
Challenges...
I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I decided to buy a drum set. I knew that I wanted to be able to play music with friends of mine, but I didn't know what kind of music we'd play, if I would be able to play competently or not, or whether I'd buy a Ferrari or a Lamborghini with my first royalty check. Almost thirty years have passed, and I still don't know what I'll do whenever I get my first royalty check, but my sixteen year old Ford Ranger works just fine! I feel truly blessed to have been able to travel with great friends, playing the music that we loved to play and to have put something out there that some people find inspiring. People tell me that I have a unique style, and friends of mine who don't even dissect music the way I do know when they hear me on a recording right away. I know that my style of drumming may not be for everyone, but I take the fact that I stand out to people as a great compliment. No one may ever have noticed me as a drummer if I didn't do one thing when I was starting to play drums... challenge myself constantly.
Metal Moments: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Raleigh, North Carolina is not exactly a hotbed on the cutting edge of the national music scene. There have been bands and songwriters who have been successful from the area, but the scene here is pretty small and very incestuous. We were a small town that began to diversify in the late 50's and early 60's when Research Triangle Park was built. Lots of New Yorkers with ties to IBM transfered to the area, and eventually New England's version of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria reached the shores of the area known as Cary, or the "Concentrated Area of Relocated Yankees" if you are from Raleigh proper. As far as I know, the area referred to as "The Triangle" ( those who came to work in RTP live mostly in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill ) still has the highest concentration of PhD's in the world which is great, but these people are not rockers. Our next massive influx came in the 90's with the great hispanic boom that followed the Texas construction industry. Great people, fantastic food, impressively ornamented Hondas and nicer pick ups than any of my North American friends, but like scientists in the 60's... not the culture from which metal gods are typically born, or should I say "bjorn"?
When Confessor were beginning to make a name for themselves the only band that the whole world knew about from around here was Corrosion of Conformity. Those guys were constantly touring, but they weren't metal enough to get the calls to be opening acts for some traveling bands, and they were too big to be opening for club acts anyway. Confessor were the only band to call that could bring in fans when certain metal acts came through, so we ended up with some strange shows thrown our way. Promoters in the area must have thought that all "metal" was universal, and that there was a sense of family between "big hair bands" and underground metal. Underground metal felt about as much of a familial tie with its big haired cousins as Lyle and Erik Menendez felt with their parents. Any time I ever saw an image of Poison, Skid Row or any of those bands a subtle command of "kill... kill... kill" would begin to pull me away from whatever I had been doing. Several times friends of mine found me walking towards the west with an axe, always muttering "must... cleanse Los Angeles... must save us all". That lack of understanding on behalf of promoters, and a real dearth of polished metal bands in the area made for some unlikely opening slots for us.
It's About Damned Time! Loincloth, Live!
Well there probably aren't very many bands who can say they have been around for twelve years without ever playing a single show. It is quite possible that Loincloth is the only "active" band that can make that claim. Our historic run is about to end though, and there are four guys who are incredibly excited to see that dubious distinction become a humorous asterisk in the footnote of their biography. October 27th, Wilmington, North Carolina... the beginning of the rest of all our lives. What will the world look like the next day? Will Loincloth finally provide the flying cars we've been waiting for all of our lives? Will they be able to find a suitable mountain to carve our likenesses for the future site of Mount Rockmore? So many questions, so many possibilities...
When Tannon moved down to Raleigh so that Loincloth could finally finish writing the album we had envisioned for so long, we never thought about what would happen after the album came out. In fact, there was no "after the album came out" as far as we were concerned. Tannon would move back to Richmond and we would all be proud to have our little dream realized. End of story. There had been some talk of trying to play a local show or two as we were writing "Iron Balls of Steel" but we saw early on that wouldn't be feasible. We focused on writing everything the way we had to in order to be able to record before Tannon needed to go back home to Richmond. Mix down, artwork and layout... aside from a few references to someday beginning to write our second craptastic album we were done for the foreseeable future. It didn't take long though, to get the itch. I applied some anti-fungal powder and caught up with the third best drummer in the band.
