JUMPING DARKNESS PARADE: DAATH’S EYAL LEVI ON DANGER AT METAL SHOWS

Any of you who left comments last week telling me about fucked up things you’ve seen at show rule. I’ve always felt that metal shows need to have an element of danger to them or there’s something wrong.

Let me rephrase. Not that there’s something wrong, but there’s something missing. People who talk about how metalheads are well behaved and community oriented are misguided in my opinion. When I was growing up, metal shows were scary. The metal scene from my formative years was one where you needed to always watch your back because of all the different things that could happen to you. It could have been skins jumping you for not being a skin, it could have been sharps jumping you for having long hair, it could have been wall to wall pits where motherfuckers with razor blades were running around cutting motherfuckers. It could have been any number of fucked up things. These weren’t your sanitized for the kids deathcore concerts of today. If you want to know why I say that, I’ll bring up an example from a deathcore tour DAATH had the pleaure of being a part of in 2007.

We got done with our set. This set was a very violent one for us. I’m actually going to tell you guys what happened during the set later in this article, but for the sake of making my point I’m going to continue.

We finished our set and then the house music came on. Blink 182 was playing. The entire crowd started singing along. I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing. At an extreme show kids were singing Blink 182!!! Times have changed. There is nothing dangerous about Blink 182. It says something about the people who are listening to the music. I couldn’t imagine that happening back in the day.

Seeing Morbid Angel or Pantera or Cannibal Corpse back in the early 90s was a scary experience. I haven’t been to a show in a long time that has had the vibe those had. Sadly, I’ve seen more violent pits at hard rock shows than at metal shows recently. I’m not advocating violence or anything like that, but I am saying that I want the music I listen to to come from a real place. Metal is violent music. It should inspire some level of danger and violence. If it doesn’t, then it has failed to get the feeling into the heart of the listener.

That said, during that set I was talking about our old vocalist was throwing water into the crowd. I guess it pissed off some douche bag, who then charged the stage and spat in our singer’s face. Our singer then smashed douche bag’s face with his microphone. Those guys later on thought that our merch dude was our singer and jumped him and broke a bunch of our merch. This took place in West Palm Beach.

See? Florida again. And on the topic of Florida let me tell you about ANOTHER SHOOTING at one of our Florida shows. We were playing in Jacksonville with Cattle Decapitation and Goatwhore in 2006. I was inside the club and I noticed these two girls that were all shaken up and crying. I asked an employee what the fuck had happened, and he told me that some dude tried to shoot them. I went outside and there were two bullet holes in the window next to the club. Apparently some guy tried to rob these girls and ended up trying to shoot them, too. Then he booked it the hell out of there. These girls were so fucking shaken. They snuck out of their house to come to the show. This was their first metal show and their introduction to our great scene was getting shot at. The best part is that the police had to call their parents to let them know what happened. SUUUUCKED for those girls but oh well. Life goes on.

I gotta get some sleep. Six hour drive to Edmonton tomorrow. I’ll rant at you fuckers later!

-EL

Visit Daath on MySpace to get the full itinerary for their summer tour with Goatwhore, Abigail Williams, Abysmal Dawn, and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky.