Blah Blah Blah… its not Detroit but that’s a good thing, right?
-Robb Flynn
The metro Detroit area has a few different suburbs carved out for you, purposefully made to feel as if you aren’t in Detroit… oh, but you are.
You are.
You know you are when a thousand black-clad heathens converge on a revamped ballroom downtown of this “not Detroit” city for what can only be described as mass combustion.
Tours have gimmicks. The music industry is a gimmick. This is not a gimmick.
23 years of music condensed into 2.5 hours seeping out of four flesh-n-bone, dirty, haggard, road worn dudes couldn’t be a gimmick if it wanted to be. It’s a bubbling cauldron waiting to spill its lava on all the reasons you shouldn’t even be out this far from home on a Monday.
Who’s feeding whiskey to these animals? Waiting. Sounds of chatter and the radio float around; it feels quiet. Waiting. Putrid smells from other humans confront. We wait. We wait and we wait. When the tools are in front of you for what you came for the waiting seems endless and it stirs rage, a red-hot rage. The wait to ignite seems endless.
Ignition is what connects us with the notes and chords. The mix of gasoline we seep from our energies with the spark sent from their boots meeting the stage and their fingers meeting strings and sticks; igniting an inferno that will burn through and flare every time they demand you to scream.
Smoke and steam, even the memories of long since contained blazes, change; shape your vibration, matching it to the chords of the soul penetrating riffs you have torched to memory.
Plan, position, resist, respond, transfer, unravel, learn. And its over. Hot coals break and smolder, the resonance of Halo scorched in your vibe. You leave what you came to leave as ash. You take what you came to take, like a cauterization. Music, metal music in particular, clarifies and confronts what’s inside, brings it to life, then burns it out.
And Machine Head knows how to burn.
GG
Crofoot Ballroom
Pontiac MI
February 2015
