Inside The Tavern men are wearing flannel shirts and pot leaf belt buckles, ivory-handled hunting knives and baseball caps. The women are connected by aesthetic themes of bad bleach jobs, skittery eyes and sharp collarbones.
Onstage is a Metallica-heavy cover band from El Paso called Martial Law. The band plays a four-night stand here before heading off for the rest of its Arizona tour, one that includes stops in state hot spots like Bisbee, Globe, Safford, Winkelman, Wickenburg and Show Low. Tonight the band is as I imagine: bad posture, long, thinning hair, mushy torsos and misplaced incentive. Four bored dudes having spent the days since high school getting stoned and working on cars, the nights rehearsing cover songs in storage units decorated with egg cartons, Slayer posters and inverted crosses. They get the chords nearly right but have no impetus to drive them. What Martial Law is great at is bringing to life a bored desperation, the kind of hollowness that captures El Paso at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. It could be El Paso, only today it's a small town in Arizona.
I wonder where the joy was in all of this, and what is its purpose? I was suddenly overwhelmed by a strange sadness.
The band plays an "original" song called "Kill-Eyed Joe," which, from what I gather, involves some guy who beats up his girlfriend and winds up in jail. The singer introduces the song by saying it's one where "the bitch has it comin'." Even with such a pronouncement, the placid expressions on the faces in the crowd don't change. Even the women sit unmoved and stoic, dutifully by their men. Whatever anima they might possess is sated by cheap beer. Just one more night in a collection of identical others.
Through the racket and cigarette smoke, I see a guy making his way down the bar, handing a pamphlet to each figure hunched over a glass. He wears a starched stiff white shirt and a tie decorated with little bears. His hair is gel slicked, with the part running straight as a knife edge. Gives him that untrustworthy look of a Bible salesman, the type that used to make door-to-door rounds in the suburbs.
When he gets to me, I break my stare from the dew ring the beer has left on the bar top. It's all the effort I can muster. Booze murk makes the lines of the bar's pallid interior seem like an enjoyable place. The happy, snowy scene of the bar's elaborate 3-D Bud display doesn't seem as far off as you'd expect considering that at this very moment it's a good 110 degrees outside. I was finally and fitfully drunk. Thank God.
Anyway, this guy hands me this flier that reads "Alcohol and the Auto, Who's the Real Killer?" and underneath are a couple of paragraphs too fuzzy to read. Instead, I focus in on Martial Law's horrendous singer and stare at his 75th-generation Eddie Vedder Christ-pose-number-94 and sort of zone out.
I look up at the Bible-salesman type who's now staring down at me. His smile is eerie and his teeth are perfect.
Circling all around his head like halos are neon beer logos. I see him lift his arm. In his hand he wields a giant sickle-size scalpel. With one fell swoop, he swings the thing down, making a swooshing noise. I feel the head of the scalpel cut flesh, just below my rib cage. The warmth of the blood running over my pelvis makes me feel like I just pissed my pants.
Not a moment later, the man has my bloody liver in his hands. He flashes that eerie Bible-salesman smile and just stands there, holding my liver in front of my face. Through a drunken haze, I study it.
My liver is about the size of two and a half man fists and looks pulpy, dark and bloody, sorta like Pignon's "Cockfight" or your neighbor's cat after a losing battle with an SUV tire tread. It looks like that, only worse. Dangling rose-colored tubes move like octopus arms spurting bits of blood.
My liver is in his hands. My liver, my liver, my life. I start to fade and feel myself slipping from the barstool.
Martial Law kicks in with Metallica's "Blackened" and I break from my daydream. The Bible-salesman type is still standing above me staring down, grinning. But my freshly expunged organ isn't bobbling in his hands at all. He isn't even holding a giant scalpel. He's clutching a small stack of anti-alcohol fliers. He shouts, "Are you okay?"
I reach down and touch the right side of my ribs just to make sure. Yep, the liver's still there, all right -- a little bloated, perhaps, but safe within the confines of my hide.
The Bible-salesman type shakes his head and moves toward the bar's exit. I watch him walk out into the night. I shout down for the bartender, I'm ready for another.
Caroline's Spine
Attention Please
(Hollywood Records)
Roy Thomas Baker's lips are pried from the Scotch bottle long enough for another putz 'round the proverbial track -- as if his work with Journey and Foreigner didn't already cancel the motors of both the Cars and Queen. Caroline's Spine, whose spineless rawk band nature is echoed best in the utter nuance of its name, burps up this year's best bit of 1992 nostalgia. Worse, they behave as if they don't know that a line like "but your reality has consequence" carries as much pomp as to guarantee that circumstance will once again rout ingenuity. Not that the band even had a chance at the latter.
Samantha 7
Samantha 7
(Portrait)
It was only a matter of months before CBS imprint Portrait reportedly pulled the proverbial (hair) plug on the roster of metalists it had signed -- the ones your big brothers loved. Naysayers, or, rather, insiders claim the label lost millions on new records by Ratt and Great White, even with messianic cheese-whiz and Aerosmith prop-up John Kalodner at the proverbial helm. I mean, L.A. Guns actually turned down an offer from this label.
Here we have the best argument ever for C.C. Deville to have attended community college in lieu of some horseshit music institute. What's more, he sings! And Night Ranger douchebag Jack Blades produces!
Besides, "I Wanna Be Famous" plunders Cheap Trick's "He's a Whore" to such embarrassing levels that it's truly the lowest ebb in the history of rock 'n' roll kypes. And if that don't make you want to crawl into a hole somewhere and wish upon Richard Hell's star, then something is seriously wrong with you. Either that or hollow arena barre chords, nasal vox and nose rings aligned in a vaguely pop manner give ya wood.
Billy Joel
2000 Years: The Millennium Concert
(Columbia)
It wouldn't even take abundant strobe lights, heavier power chords and songs about anal sex to make Rob Halford a Billy Joel fan. No way, sister.
Various Artists
Nativity in Black II: A Tribute to Black Sabbath
(Divine/Priority)
Devotees of pain-racked tumult can frolic in holy night bliss with Nativity in Black II, yet another Sab trib on which earnest-faced slugs like Godsmack and System of a Down offer takes on substance-abuse odes like "Sweet Leaf" and "Snow Blind." What would it take to make us run back to Ozz with arms akimbo and lips pursed in kiss-ready positions? Uh . . . here it is. Oh, Ozzy, how we missed thee!
Broughham
Le Cock Sportif
(Warner Bros.)
Porn star on cover? Check (Raylene).
Band made up of five square-headed mooks sporting Vandykes, backward baseball caps and weight problems? Check.
White guys appropriating ghetto badass/hedonistic rocker personas so as to be tough as revolutionary squall? Check.
Songs that include the words "pager," "hot tub" or "homeboy"? Check.
References to "Sealy Posturepedic embedded asses"? Check.
Track titles like "Don't Speak English" and "Bong Hits"? Check.
Is my promo copy already collecting dust in the used bin at a local record store? Check.
