Stevie Chick has a really interesting feature up on his site. It’s a reprint of a really old article he was involved in whilst being associated with the legendary (yet short-lived) ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ magazine. Read it here, and then tell all your friends.
It was a tense show, unforgettable, perhaps the most fearsome gig I’ve ever seen in my life; unforgiving, vicious. Over forty minutes, the band’s grinding comedown rock slowly but surely cleared the venue of all the shark-like A&R men out to catch Sparta (featuring ex-members of At The Drive-In, recently signed to Dreamworks for megabucks), and anyone in the audience not attuned to the band’s uncompromising meld of Sabbath-sludge and Stooges-slash, as the band drew out the abrasive slo-mo spasm of “SPMC” to breaking point. Up in the peanut gallery, employees of Fred Durst’s record label pelted the band with their complimentary cold-cuts and sandwiches, in retaliation for the band’s continued mockery of the Limp Bizkit frontman on North’s website www.buddyhead.com.
As the set wound up to its climax, the friction between the music industry bullshit and the band’s fuck-you integrity ignited. Cardamone glided into the crowd, looped his mic-cord round the neck of a persistent heckler and dragged the trouble-maker forcibly to the ground. Returning to the stage, he clambered atop a speaker-stack and tore down a “SXSW” banner, mobilising nervous venue security at the foot of the stage. While Cardamone distracted their attention, North plucked up the mic-stand and smashed open a glass-case suspended stage-right, containing what was, supposedly, an guitar originally belonging to beloved, long-dead Texas whiteboy bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan. He grabbed the guitar, and plugged it in.