Taken from War's historical records:

26 hour nonstop drive through the badlands. War, Pestilence, Famine, and Plague have moved into the west. 

We arrived in the Zuni Desert and camped near a riverbed. There are hand-painted billboards for our concert hanging on barbed wire and cactus every dozen miles or so. We grilled burgers and played tequila-fired football by the full moon. Famine ran through cactus and fucked up his foot. My finger injury from the Star Bar last week has become necrotic and weeps black blood. I was worried about playing guitar, and then demolished the thumbnail on my good hand with the football. Plague and I climbed a mesa and met coyote, who were cautiously friendly and crawling with fleas. We sang with them and slept on soft sand. We woke up at 5:30 a.m fucking freezing. The coyote were gone but they left us a 6 point deerskull. We climbed back down and met a native looking for his sheep. We were on his land. Strapped the deerskull to the trailer-hitch with bunjee cord and left. To kill time we hiked into The cinder cone of Bandera Volcano and from there followed a lava tube to The Ice Caves, which are perpetually lined with glittering ice from the Paleozoic era. In the desert?!? Bowannie Hall is a small public use building in nowhere. They fed us fried chicken. Every Zuni Indian for miles came to the show. The girls are gorgeous but do not talk to us. The men do, and have many curious Secret Metal Handshakes. Our Navajo friends in Blackmetal band Ashtaroth arrived and I returned the dvds we had borrowed from them last year. We will be touring with them the next two weeks. Our concert was hell unleashed upon unsuspecting peaceful natives. My broken finger shot cherry blood across the strings and faces of the fans in the front row, they went mad with lust for battle, chanting along with the music. It was typical insanity. We were showered with bitter liquor and "Tobacco" until long after the moon was at zenith. We turned north and drove halfway to the next city. 

Woke up this morning in a cracked desert for a hundred miles. The landowner greeted us as Pestilence grilled bacon and we were offered the native hospitality that we are learning is customary,... Liquor and tobacco. So both bands gave him free CDs in return. He told us the nearby highway was once called route 666 and the nearest mesa was called devils peak. This is not mentioned on our road atlas.

Spent the day in a clusterfuck trying to repair tires and buy new bass strings. We grilled burgers and hot dogs in the parking lot of Gators Bar. The venue owners and crew were clueless clusterfuckers with a cute chubby girl named "Hammer". The first band were teenagers who had never held instruments in their fingers before and could not "soundcheck" without bursts of giggles. Ashtaroth sounded much better tonight than last night. The crowd became so rowdy that the police ran everyone off leaving only seven people behind, as if our concert was cancelled. We played a short set to the unenthusiastic sleepyheads who remained. We gave it our half-of-all and left in poor spirits. We arrived in Arizona an hour later and crept into the unpeopled desert mountains and camped among twisty spiny plants and sheer cliffs. I couldn't sleep so I took a bottle of tequila and wandered into the badlands under bright moonlight. The next morning I discovered a very old abandoned mudbrick one-room house with a dirt floor untouched for over a hundred years. There were leather children's shoes, mason jar rings on strings, a funny Mountain Dew bottle and other curious objects. After alerting the band to this we found a 1930s car upside down in a dry riverbed, a mouse with no tail, many kinds of lizards, a cowskull and an intact coyote skeleton.

Tuba City is another Indian Reservation. All alcohol is illegal, there is red dirt everywhere, even blowing into the back of the one grocery store, and there are more stray horses wandering around than stray dogs, though there were many many dogs. Our concert was in a sort of YMCA thing. A platformed stage was built in the gymnasium and there was canvas tarp everywhere to protect the floor, which was hard to walk on because of all the damned red dirt on everything. One of the opening bands had a Navajo midget on lead guitar. The only lights were two boxes of tiny green and red strobes lying on the front of the stage. We could not see our instruments at all, or the audience which sounded like thousands of bloodthirsty Indians howling and stomping in the darkness. There were only tiny pinpoints of light, like a night sky, and between songs we were deafened by the roar of this massive audience. When the house lights came on afterward we were shocked that there were barely even two hundred people there! A full thirty second drive to the next street over brought us to the house of a band called Abysmal Descent, where we drank beer (illegally!) and raised hell. The next morning when we woke up there were heavily scarred dogs sniffing the various members of Ashtaroth who lay scattered across the ground.

There was no concert today. We visited a site where dinosaurs were recently discovered, and crossed the Hoover Dam, and made our way into the Heart Of Darkness after nightfall. As the saying goes, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so this part of the story remains a secret to anyone who is not either a member of Ashtaroth or Apocalyptic Visions.

This venue used to be a strip club, and there were mirrors and high-backed leather sofas everywhere. The venue staff panicked and tried to cut us off when they say that the show was getting out of control, but you can't unplug drums so we finished our concert in the usual way, violating all sorts of fire safety laws in the process. I cannot remember the name of the opening band, but they were impressed enough to give us their entire share of the profits for the night, and we eagerly took them. One gigantic Samoan was so bombed by our performance that he took us, and Ashtaroth too, to a nearby strip club called "The Library" that was actually decorated like a library inside. i was disappointed to discover that the girls did not dress like actual librarians.

Everyone at the Whiskey A Go Go is a rude cooler-than-thou dick and they treated us like shit, except for one bouncer who could pass for Vin Diesel. The place is a dinosaur museum. Once long ago it was relevant and great people made history there, but now it is a filthy drunk on the sidewalk reminiscing about the old days. Bands want to brag that they have played this famous venue and so the concert schedule becomes "amateur night" every night to indulge these petty fantasies. This is probably why the staff treated us like ignorant children, they are used to dealing with nothing else. We are not ignorant children and we didn't waste a second, playing seven songs with blitzkrieg ferocity and vanishing offstage in a storm of brimstone. The delicate Los Angeles audience was stunned. Soon afterwards we were driving back east to our next concert, and in the rear view mirror I could see Los Angeles incinerating, smoldering, and belching black ash into the air, asking itself "what just happened?" The girl I crushed on in middle and high school is a DJ in LA now, and despite her promises did not come to the concert after all. I can drive 2200 miles to see her but it still isn't quite close enough for her to close the gap and drive one mile to meet me. Just like it was when we were kids.

It was 112 degrees in Tempe Arizona. There were hundreds of cute youngsters with fancy heavy metal haircuts and carefully ripped jeans. They matched the first band as if they had been coordinated by a decorator. When the first band left so did all the audience. The second band did not show up and the third band took forty minutes to get ready. By the time Ashtaroth played i was hammered, by the time my own band played I was sledge-hammered. I hustled the girl at the bar for free drinks and had over a dozen shots of tequila in me, and after each shot I took the slice of lime and impaled it upon the nails in my armor, leaving me looking like a spicy hawaiian platter. And the concert was fucking spicy too, we all performed better than ever. We raged like liquor fired meteors dipped in broken glass and flashpowder and all six people in the bar thought we were great.

I woke up with my phone stuck to my face in a field of lava stones in Tucson Arizona. Many people in Tucson don't have lawns because water is so scarce, they just have a little plot of broken red rocks. This was the home of Ashtaroth, and even after I came out of the shower I was still trashed enough to send pictures of my dick to people via cellphone, as if anyone would want to see that first thing in the morning.

We gave five dollars to an old woman who lived on the border so she would watch our Warship until our return. With armloads of guitars and cymbals we walked to the mouth of a tunnel that swallowed us in a long arc over dozens of railroads and shit us out onto the streets of Mexico. Juarez is the filthiest. Sidewalks lined with garbage form a barricade against the street where dead animals burst their entrails across the cracked upholstery of deserted vehicles. The air blisters us with diapers and electrical fires spiced with rich body odor. The newest buildings were at least a half century old and patched together with debris. Los Hysteria Sabor was less than a mile away, from the outside it was only a service entrance to nothing but inside was large and dangerous looking. Our guide was a massive pale Spaniard named Raoul, he arranged our first meal of one small meatless inedibly hot burrito and a flat Sprite watered down with seawater from low tide. Welcome to Mexico!

I do not want to talk about the strip club we visited.

During our concert the blasphemies I screamed in Spanish were met with madness and excitement. People smashed chairs and launched themselves at one another two at a time in complex wrestling moves. The police came with menacing automatic rifles. After a mere thirty minutes the concert was shut down and a dozen fans were arrested. The club owner threw us out along with everyone else and was difficult about paying us because we did not fulfill our contracted time slot. There was some heated exchange before things were settled and we stood freezing on the street in egg-smelling rain. By "settled" I mean we were paid nothing, and the arranged transportation was cancelled. With no time or opportunity to change out of my filthy and sweaty stage clothes I suffered an uncomfortable twelve hour ride on a cramped bus with leaking exhaust and an overfilled toilet all the way to Durango Mexico, wanting to commit suicide.

We spilled out of the bus into Durango, into blue skies, fresh air, delicious food, beautiful women and pretty buildings. Cafe Madrid was an awesome venue with a high stage, towering sixty feet ceilings and friendly people. I wandered down the street and soon met two Mexican teenagers who were fascinated by my black eye makeup and six inch nails porcupining out from the leather on my arms and legs. They resembled Hot Topic mannequins and spoke no English but cheerfully took me on a walking tour of their city, explaining the names and purposes of many of the old buildings. Also they described the hierarchy of local teenagers divided by musical genres and assured me "Metal es numero uno." It didn't appear to be untrue. There was a festival in the square with fireworks and mariachis. Two hours, a thousand group photographs with strangers, and a bellyfull of native roadside-cart snacks later I returned to the venue, but now trailing two dozen metal teenagers like a Satanic Pied Piper. Grateful for the hospitality, I convinced the bouncer to let them all in for free and they quickly annoyed the shit out of everyone with their rapid Spanish questions which no one understood. There were just under a hundred people at this concert, and half of them were cowboys, but it was my favorite of the tour anyway. They were loud and screamed for encores until we ran out of songs, but they were not violent like the people of Juarez, and afterwards we were absolutely mobbed with affection. We sold every last bit of merchandise and were given endless alcohol and cheek-kisses (these people are very touchy) I autographed everything from beer labels to pants legs and they were still grabbing at us when we squirted into taxicabs and drove home with a Caballero from the bar to sleep for the night. His house was old and pretty but ghetto in a cute Mexican way. More people soon showed up... the Caballero's son likes metal and called all his friends... they brought gigantic beer bottles and a party erupted. I met a Mexican girl named Samantha who looked just like Samantha Bell in Georgia, only blonde with dark skin. 

Returning from this strange world was a magnificent ordeal of nearly forty hours that could easily be made into a trilogy of movies, and completely heartbreaking, but I don't know that I will ever want to talk about it.

This was the birthday of Todd the Viking and Shane-A-Roo, both members of infamous Florida Swamp Metal band PARABELLUM. The concert was held in a printing warehouse decorated with sprawling banners of horror films, some high enough to be billboards. The audience was shitfaced and violently enthusiastic throughout our set, to the point that Todd himself (decorated in a brightly pink princess's birthday hat) interrupted our concert a few times to try and get people to settle down. I didn't mind. What's a microphone stand bonking me in the face occasionally compared to a celebration of destruction? Although there were many pretty girls there the only one who showed any interest in me was the creepy one, who was not even discouraged after I rammed both arms' worth of nail-plated armor into her body and perforating her clothing. I feared that Todd would kill himself driving so I took his big ass in his tiny car to another bar, and because there was no Karaoke he demanded we go to the Handlebar, where we had played a concert on New Year's Eve two years ago. On the drive through downtown Todd pointed out Sluggo's bar where my drummer had bitch-slapped the guitar player for DAATH long ago. It was very good to hang out with Ben, Jeremiah, Jason and all the local loons again, good to be back in Pensacola, good to be a total nobody pretending to be a rock star, and good to have people believe this was true. I love this life. But I still hate you.

Not only was this our 100th show, it was also some whack-ass AIDS benefit put together by a girl named Jessica. The very idea of raising money for a good cause runs counter to everything we stand for, but I could not resist accepting this invitation for the petty reason that I simply wanted to see flyers made that displayed our "misunderstanding" of what an "AIDS benefit" really meant. Benjamin Lande created this awesome poster that read "a concert to benefit AIDS and all other deadly diseases, together we can wipe out life on earth" or some such thing. Also I had intended to spit offensive epithets on the subject during our concert but I have little or no control over what my mouth chooses to do anymore. We tend to hide like spiders before any concert. We parked the Warship in the shadows by a nearby lake where we could not be seen, and coincidentally next to a fairly deep hole in the ground. We were certain someone would fall into it and teased each other about who it would finally be. It couldn't have been better... Jessica sleuthed out our location and came running over, partially intoxicated, and fell face first after hitting that hole at top speed. Our prediction that this concert would run late was accurate. Our set was cut in half, but it was brutal and well-received. People roll their tired eyes at us in larger cities but they drop their jaws to the floor in one-horse-towns like Statesboro. I did not know we were being filmed or I would have put a bit more effort into accurately executing my guitar solos so, for those people who were excited in the moment at how good I was there is now the means to re-view the performance online and see how sloppy it was instead. Pestilence set his drumkit on fire. Sometimes no one minds but typically it sends the owner of the venue into a panic. Tonight was the first time ever that someone came at us with a fire extinguisher, and soon the whole room became an oxygen-free torture chamber. The audience refused to be run off by a little thing like asphyxiation so we continued to the end of the song, and were then ejected from the building.

Burden Of Vision / Sons Of Tonatiuh / Apocalyptic Visions 

There is no truth, only belief. Therefore when I announced that this was our ONE HUNDREDTH CONCERT it was believed, and why not? Only Pongo and Perdita would have wagged their tales to hear it was our 101st. I always hated the Echo Lounge and East Atlanta in general, but I have to admit that the new owners have re-invented this shithole as a fairly awesome venue, and coincidentally they hired a staff entirely of people I know and get along with. The sound was fantastic. I never say that about venues because it is never true but, damn. I really liked the Ice House, as it is now re-named. There were artists painting away at whatever during the concert. I have seen this many times at Rastafarian events but never at a metal show. I was also surprised to see how many people came to the concert, when our experience has always been that no one in Atlanta likes metal and furthermore that they HATE us! I should also mention some of them came from pretty far away, so maybe Atlanta still hates us. I stayed after the show getting bombed on a fistful of free-drink tickets and listening to people ramble on about how great the concert was until the bar closed, we were all thrown into the cold winter night, and I was left for dead.

Before the concert I was interviewed by a twitchy little guy who wants to be a writer for Rolling Stone. He said it was his first time interviewing anyone. I have always refused candid interviews, preferring having time to think over a written response, but hell I trust my crazy mouth to come up with something by now, it always does. Shenaniganz was a small room at the ass end of a strip mall, we were surprised to arrive and find it had become a sprawling warehouse with hundred-foot high ceilings and a massive stage with a blinding artillery of stage lights. I was really impressed with the improvements and for a moment i thought, hmm, should I warn this guy what is about to happen here? Nope, better to keep my mouth shut and just be banned for life afterwards. For the third time we claimed this was our ONE HUNDREDTH CONCERT, but this was the first time we successfully pulled off all the theatrics according to plan, not the least of which involved a black piñata shaped like a spiked deep-sea mine that I hurled into the audience at the climax of a song. The piñata had been rigged to explode open upon impact and it did, releasing a very aggressive swarm of locusts into the room and sending everyone into a berzerker mania. The hapless remains of the Papier-mâché sacrifice were ravaged by angry testosterone-fueled teens & tweens until insect entrails soon coated everything, and this was just the first of many offenses that guaranteed we would not be receiving a penny of our promised pay for the night. Many people stayed all the way to the end of the concert, more than usual, but still most of them were gone. Those who remained were thunderstruck and we felt it was a very good concert. Saint Valentine's Day Massacre played some new more melodic material that really surprised me. Here's a detail I will never forget about this concert: to prevent losing the roll of duct tape I wisely tossed it inside the piñata. Hours later we filled the bomb with live insects and I began wondering where the hell the duct tape was so I could seal them in. After a few minutes it came to me. I fished my arm up to the elbow in live and hungry insects looking for that damn roll of duct tape. It took me several minutes, and when I finally hooked it out my arm was red and bleeding. It still itches as I am writing this, two days later.

Have you ever tried to sing into a microphone that is on fire? I have. For the fourth time in a row we told everyone this was our ONE HUNDREDTH CONCERT and maybe all our concerts will be our hundredth from now on! Mick gave us a free bar tab, he is the fucking coolest. Our performance was razor-perfection, our most blisteringly blindingly bodacious execution yet. The old sound engineer was back at the controls again so things were great, the bloodthirsty audience knifed our pig heads and spread blood across the stage. I threw a pinata shaped like Godzilla out into the crowd and they ripped it open like an old-fashioned Nazi Boot Party. When they realized it was filled with maggots instead of candy they set it on fire and threw the wreckage back at us, setting the stage on fire. Caustic black smoke made it very difficult but not impossible to scream the vocals and we never stopped. Pestilence lit his drum kit on fire again for the finale and someone tossed a cigarette lighter into the blaze, setting off a minor explosion that set many things on fire including my hair and the microphone. My tongue got singed but it was an unforgettable sight and I just hammed it up. Some of the people at this concert have come to see us a dozen times now and they are familiar with our show, and it is taking on a life of its own aparently- an unstoppable train wreck of metal madness. Before passing out from too many Irish Car Bombs I managed to introduce myself to a pretty girl with long black hair who takes a very long time to say anything.

No fire, no insects, nothing crazy. We just conjured a whirlwind of merciless wrath that infected the crowd with an ill-temper. Onstage are theatrics are fun but sometimes it is good to just wow 'em with our chops and nothing else. I am over the One Hundredth Concert schtick, but Pestilence suggested that we begin celebrating our 101 Damnations. Ha! Plague laughed so hard when he saw people bowing to us and falling to their knees that he began to play drums out of time but we are so unstoppable at this point that we rolled with it. The song finished with an Olympic Medal-worthy ten point flourish. An enthusiastic mosher bonked me in the eye with the microphone stand, after which I kept one foot planted on the base to keep it from bonking me a second time. After the show I traded our decaying pigs heads for a couple of beers, and the lucky recipient ran down the street to unguessable mischief.

A massive storm recently caved in the roof at Lenny's Bar, and it was still raining the night we came to do our thing. There was water on the stage and from where I was standing a pretty good view of the dark sky. If there was ever an opportunity for many of our detractor's wishes that I be struck by lightning to come true, this was the night. There were unusually numerous people at this concert but I have no illusion about why this happened-- there was also a human-suspension performance being given in the corner of the room with fools dangling from steel hooks in their flesh swinging around and whatever. Two of them were people I knew pretty well and this was the first I heard that they were into suspension. We have stomped out all the troublesome brushfires in our live performance and everything was perfect. Having finally become tired of announcing that this was our "One Hundredth Concert" and anyway it was now up to 105 or 106 or something, I instead said it was our 666th concert. I cracked open a piñata shaped like a black goat over the heads of the audience and spilled bucketloads of live crickets in all directions. Many of them got irreparably stomped into the mesh cover of the stage monitors.

You know people are exaggerating their interest in your band when you play a concert across the street from their house and they still opt to stay home. Rev Rebel cancelled their appearance which is never surprising. There were at most a dozen people at this show and I knew almost every one of them. This robs every erg of magic from our appearance. You can't really transform into a larger-than-life charicature of evil heavy metal in front of your friends. They see you every day and it comes across as cheap comedy. It could be argued that this also happens in front of strangers but I disagree on the grounds that no one ever complains to our faces. There is much grumbling from the safe hiding-places of the internet but no one dares approach us with anything other than awe. Michael from Burden Of Visions gave bottles of champagne to all the bands tonight as a form of payment. None of us drink champagne so I donated this to the small handful of girls nearby. I couldn't get the pinball machine to work very well but I did steal all the free beer I could find and get some pictures taken of myself holding Linh Vuong over my head like a Vietnamese rag doll.

Our first show of 2009 was like returning to work after Christmas Vacation, but the break put enough distance between us that we rediscovered how much we really like these songs. On the drive north I sent text messages to every girl in Spartanburg South Carolina that had ever seen naked and asked if they would show their titties as we drove past. Only one agreed to do this but she was considerate enough to bring a dozen of her adventurous friends along so as we ripped past exit 29 we hollered out the window to twenty-four happily bouncing breasts. This is a great way to start a road trip. We arrived in Maryland early the next morning and the venue was not open yet. After cooking breakfast on a garbage can in the parking lot of a Wal Mart we went to the Bay Harbor to walk around and investigate lighthouses, pirate ships, and WWII submarines. It was cold and the water was frozen. The rest of the day was whittled out in Washington DC, where I learned that the back of the Lincoln Memorial is completely flat and blank, and that the corner of the building by Abe's left foot is actually a book store and gift shop. There is an elevator in there, where does it go? The police were very interested in us and we were frequently approached with friendly questions about the band. No one objected when we played a brief game of football on the lawn of the Washington Monument so it must have been agreed that we were not terrorists and the ball was not a bomb. I noticed that the word KENNESAW is misspelled on the Civil War Monument.

The concert itself was a bombastic victory. It was a huge crowd (for us) and they were very responsive to all our stage antics and we were mobbed after the show. Someone threatened to fight me because of my disrespectful attitude but in the end all he did was spend about a hundred dollars buying glasses of vodka for me. Cheech, the owner, was very cool and allowed me to bartend for him when it got late, which was fun and ridiculous. I am too drunk to remember the reason for this but I agreed to allow the singer of Middle Child Syndrome to slap me in the face after we did a shot of tequila. She did not hit me hard and I of course acted like it did not hurt at all, but the truth is that my head exploded with white light and my ear was ringing louder than it ever had, and I have fired some really big guns in my life. It scared the shit out of me and I fear permanent ear damage... but all this I kept secret and continued to laugh and act like a big tough jackass. 

The next morning I awoke to discover I was incredibly sick. Congested, feverish, almost voiceless, and with little sense of balance. Most exciting of all- when I blew my nose air would whooosh out my ear with a hot blast. I looked this up after we got back home and learned that a "patented eustachian tube" is annoying but not dangerous, but for the remainder of this trip I was fairly panicked about it. I am not notorious for learning lessons from the foolish things I do on tour, particularly when I am hammered, but let me tell you this: The Ear Is Not A Toy!

We arrived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan early the next morning and miraculously secured a parking space right in front of the venue. We tromped around the city until it was time to load our gear inside, which wasn't long because this was a mid-afternoon show. The ABC No Rio is a converted opium den from the 1970's that has endured many overhauls as a crack house, homeless community, and other rent-free arrangements before emerging as the painted whore that it is now with rickety floors and no heat. We crammed our massive artillery into that tiny cavern and played a ferocious concert to a dazed and blank-faced mob of New Yorkers who seemed puzzled as to what exactly was happening. There was a small crowd of time travellers in attendance who looked like teenage bay-area thrashers from 1985 complete with white Rebox sneakers poofing out from beneath their tight black jeans, and these weirdos totally grasped the situation and began a moshpit which claimed the life of a microphone stand. Had it not been for them this would have been a thoroughly depressing concert, my voice was nearly gone and I was very sick, the PA consisted of two tiny stereo speaker rigged poorly for the job that squealed like pigs, and we actually fucked up the opening of a song so badly that we trainwrecked into silence in under twenty seconds--- a bullshit mistake that veterans as old as ourselves should NEVER be guilty of! It was mortifying. We haven't fucked up like that in two years at least and here we were in NYC looking like high-school fuckups in the one city where I really wanted to make an impression. Well, it didn't seem to sink our ship, because the odd semi-Mexican looking Anthrax-esque moshers were so excited by our old school metal assault that one of them actually sliced his arm open with a knife and filled a tampon with his own blood as an offering to us right in the middle of our show. I felt honored by the bizarre gift. First thing after our last song I tied that tampon to the rack mount on my amp and there it will stay forever.

We spent the night in Brooklyn with my friend AJ getting drunk and making his roommate nervous. The next day was spent driving all over Manhattan which I never really got to do on any of my previous trips here. I finally got to see Harlem and Chinatown. That night we arrived at Cherry Street Station in Connecticut and it was over a foot deep with snow. This place was much like a snow lodge inside with a huge fireplace, dartboards on the the walls, and numerous comfy sofas. I've never seen so many dry aquariums with no fish in them. Two people came to this concert. I accurately guessed that they were the parents of someone in the opening band and furthermore that they had driven their kids here to play this show. What is the difference between enduring your son's crappy band at home and enduring it at a local bar? I don't know but they clapped after every song and then disappeared, along with the four kids who comprised the opening band, and leaving us to play our surreal concert to an audience that was exactly one man, and that one man was the sound engineer. So I dedicated all the songs to him. I could speak in nothing above a whisper at this point so our music lacked its usual drama. A little farther away, upstairs and around a corner was the bartender/owner and his girlfriend busily knocking tonsils. When they realized what was happening downstairs they began funnelling free booze to us and that made the weirdness a little less weird. Our concert fizzled to an end, we were shitfaced, and the three of them plus the four of us spent the next five or six hours drinking every last drop of tequila in the house. The bartender's girlfriend bought a t shirt and a CD, making this zero-attendance concert the most profitable one of our tour so far.

The kajillion-hour drive back to Atlanta was a hilarious one, but unless you join the band you will never hear about what happened.

I was very sleepy, having been up all night for a week trying to book our tour for the summer. I called the guys to tell them I wanted to cancel band practice and they said we weren't practicing anyway because there was a concert tonight. What? I totally forgot about it. I dragged my dead ass down to the train tracks and we summoned the shitstorms of hell as always, and it was a show like any other at Lenny's. Except I noticed that there seem to be more people at this show? Is it possible that we are getting some minor fanbase in our hometown? Nahhhh....

Despised Icon / Beneath The Massacre / Carnifix / Neuraxis / Plasma Rifle / Lecherous Nocturne / Withered / Apocalyptic Visions

We have two new steel barrels with Bonegaurds painted on them and mounted grinder bars. Famine and Pestilence worked out a new synched fire-and explosions routine for the Tambores De Guerra and it was incredible. We also have upgraded this song so that it is performed entirely on six brand-new mounted kick drums. It was fantastic. We played three concerts throughout the night and our audiences in Spartanburg are always the best--- we were absolutely mobbed onstage. It really sucked to see that Withered got so little respect onstage because they were the best I have ever seen them that night, but not all music is for everyone so whatever. By the time I met Steve from Despised Icon I was wasted and maybe we talked about Black Metal in Canada, or maybe I was just babbling nonsense. 

When Dave from Morose Vitality asks if you need anything, and you say nothing except maybe a meatball sandwich, do not be surprised when you arrive to find he has actually followed through. He is very serious. The stage here has a window above it that leads to an upstairs backstage-area. This arrangement begs for someone to bring Statler and Waldorf puppets up there to heckle every band. Oh please I hope I live to see this someday. A late addition non-metal band created some awesome noise that vibrated the limestone seventy stories below ground. Many people had the balls to make fun of this band but no one would insult them to their face. Typical. Afterwards we went to IHOP with Tod and Dave from MV and laid waste to pancakes.

Being a part of this festival meant filling out and faxing forms and contracts every day for three months. I was photographed, interviewed, and recorded for radio. A few pages of our local newpsaper were set aside for a cover story about my band and the pictures of me were funny/sinister enough to warrant the honor of being cut out and used for a table-card at my favorite pizza place. It says "NO ONIONS" on the back because thats what I have ordered for seventeen years. It was a very tiny taste of what it would be like of people actually were interested in my band.

But no one is intersted in my band and they never will be, because we refused to cooperate with the crew of the rock festival and just days before showtime we were quietly removed from the lineup. Our black magic is very specific and every nail, spike, chicken feather and bloodsplatter must be in place, we absolutely will not compromise. The policy of Apocalyptic Visions has always been: "99% = 0"

I did go to the damn concert though, and oddly enough I was given a fancy lanyard with my name on it as if I were some rockstar with all access though I had not so much as pinched a guitar pick all night. It is the only lanyard I have ever owned!

Dave bought two kegs of beer and bought a bottle of Tequila specifically for me, but since my drummer was in Arizona we did not play this concert and none of us went to the party either.

It was fourteen hours' drive to Milwaukee Wisconsin but we were the first to arrive. There were six stages in this building and dozens upon dozens of bands in an amoebic clusterfuck of underinformed confusion and only one elevator to glacially eke us back and forth. My band played on what I called the "Children's Stage" as far away from the main action as possible surrounded by enormous open windows in the bright mood-killing afternoon sunlight. Security was called when flames erupted onstage but the hired bouncers were afraid to come near us and the sound engineer took it on himself to unplug everything at random in a panicked attempt to stop us from destroying the building. He apologized afterward. It took over an hour to get all our shit back outside and into the Warship, the sun was still high in the sky and we left hours before the "Real" concert had even begun. On the way home we stopped in Cave City Kentucky and toured Mammoth Cave, the most breathtakingly evil subterranean wonder I have had the pleasure to crawl through. It is 350 miles long and so far below ground that earthquakes pass over it without so much as a whisper.

One year after we had made a desperate purchase in the Arizona desert, a crack in the wheel frame under our towed trailer finally stretched its way completely around the axle and met itself head-to-tail on a quiet hidden stretch of road called Liberty Highway. We had seen no signs of human life for miles when the Warship suddenly lurched and this ancient tire exploded out from beneath our two tons of guitar amps and launched itself into the treeline. The remaining round blade of steel crashed into the asphalt and was ripped into five petals that split from one another and were crushed around the axle like a closing flower protecting the lug nuts that held it in place. In the forty yards it took for us to pull over to the side of the road we had cut a wound into the black top like we were tilling the springtime earth, and found ourselves in front of a small farm. A leathery man emerged to greet us with some tools and advice. A hammer was used to bash the flowerbud open and after unloading all our gear into the grass the trailer was lifted into the air and a new tire was drilled into position. Less than twenty minutes afterward we were feeling wind in our hair again because conquering difficult problems without panicking is what men do. 

The concert went well.

Nick from Southern Plague had the bravery to kick someone in the balls at this concert, and furthermore to shout insults at me while I was onstage. His bandmates abandoned him with no explanation and he was forced to beg someone for a ride home afterwards. This method of firing band members takes significantly less bravery than to say so directly their face, and I know this because I have always told musicians when their time is up and I know how difficult this kind of conversation is. But doing difficult things is what men do.

The keyboard player for Faith In Ashes wore corpsepaint and chewed bubblegum, making him look somewhat like a gecko. They sounded fantastic despite the terrible mix given to all bands that night.

"Tearing Heaven Out Of The Sky" never sounded better than it did tonight.

I used to get thunderclap migraines and blackout while singing, staggering blindly as if I had been electrocuted and in danger of falling down. I learned that the amount of fury that tears through me during our performance dehydrates me almost instantly and so for the past few years I always have water nearby, which solved that problem. Just before our last song my guitar player replaced my bottle of water with an identical bottle of Isopropyl Alcohol. He had actually poured the explosive chemical into a Dasani bottle and placed it in the very location where my Dasani bottle had been only seconds before, and when I tried to drink this poison it was like biting into an angry swarm of microscopic woodpeckers. Had I swallowed this I would have gone into convulsions, cardiac arrest, vomited blood, and died. Instead I spit the chipmunk-cheeked mouthful through my hanging hair and out into the front row of the audience, where it settled in a fine mist over my drums and the mic stand and just about everywhere. For the next three minutes as we hammered on the drums and I screamed angry lyrics I was also wondering what would happen when Famine and Pestilence lit their drums on fire for our grand finale. Would the fire spread to me, or to the soaked clothing of everyone in the front row?

You would have had to been there to see what actually happened, because I think the story is more interesting if I just end it here. I will add this: instead of apologizing for nearly murdering me, Famine decided instead to just call me stupid. I suppose I am stupid.

We left in a hurry, making it to Dive Bar moments before they closed where Elizabeth bought two glasses of Guinness and two shots of Tequila for each of the eight of us. We went to an IHOP afterward that was soon populated by black drag queens emerging from an after-hours nightclub, and spent the night scattered around a house that we soon learned was surrounded with roosters and turkeys. 

What can I say about the greatest venue on earth that I have not already said? Enthusiastic metal fans who fork over money for merchandise and start moshpits and ask for autographs and exposed nipples and buttcheeks and free booze and porno on the big screen and drunken brawls and me taking the bartender's place and the defilement of billiard tables. I had saved a four-feet long firework from Kentucky for this occasion and though it was spectacular, I can't help thinking I should have bought more.