Do you Billie Holiday? I love him!

Tonight! Risque Café at Clark and Sheffield in Chicago! Punk Rock Tuesdays: Hosted By me (Brendan Kelly of the super awesome Bad Sandwich Chronicles and some outlying Chicago punk rock acts).
Two buck cans of Hamms! Punk Rock music! Go Go Dancers! (this last one is supposed to be happening starting tonight. Sensual delights! No foolin!) Cheap food! Cheap thrills! Other awesome specials to be announced tonight, including one that’s (no shit) so awesome I can’t even put it in print, because advertising it is (again, no shit) illegal! But it’s not illegal for me to tell you what it is if you come in, so see you fucks there! In the words of Phil Collins: “Tonight, tonight, tonight! Woah.”

Okay, just throwing that out there. Oh, and I’m gonna be special guest bartending at the L and L tavern this Saturday. That’s right, turdlets! Finally, your Lawrence Arms themed vacation to boystown will be complete as you sit in a dank pit with losers like me and take shots of whatever cheap whiskey Kenny fills up the bottles of Tullamore Dew with. We’ll talk more about that later.

On to the real shit:

So, my friend from Norway needs a primer on who Slipknot is/was. He’s, like all of us, shocked by the tragic passing of the one that they call uh…I dunno, number six(?), and who wears the…again, um, scary clown mask(?) and who played the bass in Slipknot before finally heading off to that ultimate mosh in the heavens (hells?) just last week. He was young, the whole thing’s sad and well, the people in the world who don’t know exactly what’s meant by the descriptors that slipknot conjures (‘maggots’ and ‘horror masks’ were two terms that seem to have most befuddled my Norwegian contemporary) need some clarification if they’re ever to get any closure, so quickly, here’s what slipknot is:

Slipknot is a group of ten (yes, ten) hicks from Iowa who are presumably so ugly that they must constantly wear masks. The masks are disturbing to behold and those who wear them take great pride in describing how disgusting the insides of their masks are, often noting in interviews what bodily fluid encrusts the insides of which masks (things like “oh, bro, the clown doctor mask is covered inside with my bloody snot and barf!” [really!]). For the first large chunk of their careers (henceforth referred to as the “nookie” era) they didn’t let anyone see them without masks, which, well…I guess it’s cool. They could all just go party right amongst their people after the show and not worry about having to deal with punishers or potentially having tons of cheap and easy (but likely VERY disgusting) pussy thrown their direction…so, uh, maybe that’s a bad idea too.

Well, they figured that out eventually and all took off the masks for some highly anticipated (not really) side projects, but that’s beside the point, if you’ll pardon that slight pun.

Slipknot is into horror, the singer dude calls the fans maggots and they usually all wear orange prison jumpsuits on stage along with their masks (Oh relax, slipknot fan! I’m sure they’ve evolved wonderfully since the nookie era, but I’m telling these folks what is relevant as far as when they were huge). They all go by numbers, not names, they are numbers 0-9, and they have a dj (number 0) and a couple of percussionists besides the drummer. The whole thing’s pretty fucking goofy but kind of undeniable in that visceral tribal way.

Oh, and they kind of suck. And their side projects (remember that “Brother song from spider man? eeew.) were worse. Now the bass player’s dead and well, that’s sad. Bummer. Um…so yeah, that’s slipknot in a nutshell. Everyone good? Good.

It’s funny, the deaths of celebrities bring out all this crazy mysticism in everyone, particularly the ‘it always happens in threes’ thing. This one has been getting bandied about lately with the recent passing of Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper. Let’s ignore for a moment the huge disparity in the careers of these two thespians, they were both actors and both iconic in their own way, so it’s safe to say that their deaths occurring in the same week constitute two out of the perceived triad of dead famous folk, right? So who’s the third? Are they dead yet, or is it one of the folks that died recently that we’re forgetting about because our iphone porn and GPS systems have reduced our generation to having the memory capacity of goldfish? It’s a tricky question.

How about Britney Murphy’s dead husband. That’s a crazy one, right? I mean, that’s like how your grandma dies and then your grandpa just gives up and goes the next month…but these two were roughly my age. Fucked up. And that guy’s not really famous. If anything, he goes in the ‘three’ that she’s in, which means the third one is still walking around out there, one line of strawberry coke away from the great hereafter. Watch out semi famous women constantly hounded by tabloids about your weight, erratic behavior and bad choices of men (I’m looking at you, everyone!), because you, or your greasy older husband could complete that trio of death. Speaking of ‘trios’…

what about Dio? He’s as famous as Gary and Dennis, right? Well, maybe not, but he’s close. Of course, if you’re the kind of guy who has a bald top of your head and a long, luxurious and cascading ponytail and you maybe have at least one action figure in the original box, well, you probably would tend to group Dio with the dude from Slipknot before you’d place him with Gary Coleman, right? And if you’re just a pot smoking fifty something, you’d probably put him with Dennis Hopper, but that leaves two different pairs, three if you count Britney Murphy and what’shisdong, and no trios…Nothing’ s happening in threes, cosmos…I’m a little disappointed.

Oh, wait! Is it thee pairs of dead celebs? That seems a little needlessly complex, doesn’t it? Is that guy from slipknot really even fit to hold Dio’s jockstrap? Is Britney Murphy’s dead husband even fit to hold gary coleman’s jockstrap? And fuck, man, Chris Haney, the co-inventor of trivial pursuit died too! What about him?

He completes a nerd duo with Dio but then we have to match the slipknot bassist up with Britney murphy’s husband to keep the pairs going, which makes sense since they were neither one famous themselves, but what they were in was famous. So that works. Who’s left? Dennis Hopper and Gary Coleman. That’s nice. What about Brittney Murphy though? Fuck.

The moral, kids, is that death is all around us. Some people celebrate it, like those barf encrusted maggots in slipknot, and some people ignore it, like Gary Coleman…nah. That doesn’t quite match up, does it? I dunno, folks. Just be cool. It seems like jesus is pissed at us. Don’t walk under any safes hanging from ropes or open windows with anvils balanced on the sill on the way to see me tonight, at the Risque café for punk rock night, kay? Good deal.

Later turds.