A placid, overweight crowd clad in black T-shirts and tattoos obediently raised fists and finger signs for Slayer but could hardly be bothered for Hatebreed, the act that preceded them. Maybe it’s an Iowa thing, but even the most alienated trench-coat Mafiosi tend to be well-mannered and a bit shy around here, no matter what they do with themselves at home. There were no spooky fashion statements Friday night anyway, just an abundance of male hair and poundage.
Maybe that’s because the interesting people were turned away at the gate. A couple of amateur “security” personnel were playing airport at a folding table, doing everything they could to piss off the paying customers, including charging them a dollar more than the advertised ticket price of 29 bucks. Attendees had to wait in line to be clumsily frisked and relieved of cameras, and to turn out their pockets in case they contained a seed or two. The girl frisker was busy selling overpriced tickets, so I walked in unmolested, with two Saturday-night specials and a wad of plastique in my bra. Just kidding.
Sophisticated staging provided some thrills early on, but nothing could save us from the monotony of Satan-speak and a formulaic wall of sound that did its best to conceal a uniform lack of imagination and even boredom on the part of the bands. Up close, they’re probably middle-aged and tired. I hope so; otherwise there’s no excuse for their uninspired material. The crowd seemed directionless; even the diehards waving their pinkies and index fingers were doing so by rote.
I hear the angriest fans did beat the shit out of each other in the mosh pit, where the volume must have been sheer brain-shedding torture. I didn’t visit; the pit was hard to get to because the sound guys had established a vast perimeter around themselves, and fans needed security passes to proceed from Point A to Point B. Homeland Security for the few.
The funnel-cake people were there, and save for my earplugs and vibrating skeleton, I could have been at the Bix. From the look of things, there was one place to line up for Budweiser products and the evil syrup Jagermeister, and a couple of T-shirt vendors rounded out the sub-carnival atmosphere. The only puking drunks we saw were clearly underage; I guess security was too focused on crotches, cameras, and seeds to check ID. We left early.