4/20 Deadstar Assembly and Filament 38 Show. Part 1: On the Road

Here is the story of the April 20th, 2010 Deadstar Assembly and Filament 38 Show (or “How I got to Cleveland and how I returned home. Oh, and I saw some bands there too, and some girls with metal underpants.”) This was getting to be too massive, so I'll be writing this in a series of three posts.

Part 1: On the Road, and not much like that Kerouac book other than some driving and craziness
The morning of the event was traumatizing for several reasons, first my husband told me that him getting to work was more important than me going to see Deadstar Assembly, and that if my car refused to start that morning he would have to take his car to work, and I could not borrow it for the Cleveland adventure. Thankfully my car started, and with that I secured the trusted car for my own purposes. I had to put gas in that car now, simple enough, right?
It was simple enough, until the hillbilly in the rape van approached and told me that I had “purdy lips.” Yeah...I stared at him until he got back in his van. There will be no rape van lovin’ with some grizzled hillbilly that I had thought was a rough-looking old woman when I first saw him.
Things got more rearranged when Brannon canceled on the adventure because of work, it’s okay though I know he needs to work any evening he gets since the little old ladies don’t order martinis with their lunches... and no one is buying his screenplays or my cracked out bullshit, so I feel for him. Him canceling though freed us up to leave a little bit earlier, which was okay.

I did have my other friend to go with me still, so say “Hi” to Melanie. The picture is from after the show, and she's kind of short so I had to try to be short too. This will be her first Industrial concert, she usually listens to singer-songwriter stuff...which kind of sounds like Jay Nash.

She used to be into Slipknot and various Nu-metal and stuff like that during High School, as I was--I'll admit it, I saw Disturbed in concert three times because I'm cool like that. Yeah, I know it's not all that "cool," but I had fun. I'm not sure if I can get into Jay Nash's style of music, but along our drive we agreed that Industrial is kind of the darker electronic version of “singer-songwriter." From Melanie’s descriptions Jay Nash sounds like an okay dude, but when I hear “singer-songwriter” I always picture some pompous ass sitting on stage with his guitar. That brings to mind a show that is coming up this week, Voltaire will be playing at Outland on Friday April 30th 2010. :)

We started out our drive listening to what has turned out to be my go-to driving CD The Full-Custom Gospel Sounds of The Reverend Horton Heat (just noticed that Rev. Horton Heat will be in Cleveland the same night as the 16 Volt, Chemlab and Left Spine Down show in Cleveland, which is on May 16th) as we departed from Lancaster around 4:30pm. The car has a 6-disk CD-changer, so also included in my driving music were CD's by XP8, Nine Inch Nails, Dismantled, The Matadors and Nick Cave. We drove up 37 through a lot of cute little towns that we said that we’d have to come back and check out, but I always say that when I go through Granville and then I never go back. We saw some interesting churches, a really neat cemetery, and three ice cream places with names like “Dairy Shack” or something along those lines. We stopped at a gas station and somehow got on the subject of music festivals and long distance driving for entertainment with some truckers. We talked Kinetik festival actually, and of musicians traveling from Germany and how much it costs for foreign musicians to come to the states. The one trucker had previously lived in Germany.
Then we drove for what seemed like forever, stopped for dinner at a Wendy’s in some smallish city that I don’t remember the name of, but the people there looked at me like I was the first weirdo that they had ever seen. And they were even staring at Melanie, which is kind of hilarious because she usually wears khaki and pink, but was decked out in black on this occasion.
We drove some more and after an hour or so, started to see surroundings that looked Cleveland-like, which was good since I was starting to get caffeine-related jitters and the urge to walk around in an attempt to dissipate the twitching. Melanie told me to not have a stroke or heart attack because she had to be at work the next day.

To be continued...