In what's beginning to seem like a trend, the boys showed up and began to unload their equipment, until the road manager for Lizzy Borden took one look at the crew (and its ghoulish makeup) and presented them with two choices: remove the face paint or don't play.
"This is not makeup," drummer Christopher Lee asserts. "This is my identity. This is what I stand for. This is what this band is all about."
Lee's philosophical ramblings didn't impress the road manager, who claimed that Lizzy Borden's contract specifically prohibits any opening act from out-eyelinering it. Rather than argue the point, Death Becomes You opted to restrain the bats and declined to play. And without incident, too: "I'm not going to beat up a roadie and a security guard," says Lee. "Threatening them with physical violence isn't going to do a damn thing." But the exchange permanently soured Lee on Lizzy B. The drummer says he'd even brought his copies of the group's CDs in hopes the band members would sign them.
"Basically my attitude now is "Fuck Lizzy Borden,'" the recalcitrant Lee reports. "I've been listening to you since I was 12. I bought your first record the day it came out. And this is how you repay people like me?" Furthermore, in an utterly unbiased review of Lizzy Borden's performance, Lee asserts that Death Becomes You would have embarrassed the aging headbangers had the former been allowed to perform.
"If we'd gone up there, we would have ripped those people in half," he roars. "We would have fucking destroyed those guys. They were absolutely pathetic -- tired and worn out. I was like, "This is shock rock? This is theater? This is ancient garbage. Shit that should go away.'"
Orbit manager Bruce Todd, to his credit, offered to make amends with the Death-mongers by offering them an upcoming Wednesday-night, local-showcase slot. However, he shouldn't be surprised if Lee and company finally make good on their oft-repeated threat to flee the area forever.
"This place is dead," Lee claims. "This is a waste of time here. But I don't expect people to bow to us, because we're the complete opposite of everything that's popular right now."
In the meantime look for Death Becomes You's cameo in an upcoming underground horror film. B-movie director Tim Beckley filmed the band during a March 3 show at Churchill's Hideaway and is planning to use the footage in his new movie, Blood-Spurting Vampire Freaks. Get scared with the Death boys Sunday, April 8, at Ray's in West Palm Beach.
So, did Bono fall or not? Most likely he was just napping -- along with the 20,000 folks who came out to the National Car Rental Center Saturday night for the first night of U2's Elevation Tour. The last time Bandwidth saw the band, at Denver's massive (and now demolished) Mile High Stadium, its members looked as tiny as microbes and traveled around in a giant lemon -- which was a helluva lot more entertaining than last weekend's rather subdued greatest-hits parade. It didn't help that promised opening starlet PJ Harvey wasn't around to make things more interesting. The British singer, smoldering from all the attention bestowed upon her recent Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea album, has been sidelined with a sore throat and will miss the first five dates of the tour. Enduring her woefully inadequate substitute (insufferably cute Irish pop act the Corrs) was akin to discovering the all-you-can-eat prime rib has been replaced by tofu-quinoa mash.
Which would've been slightly more palatable had U2 come prepared to leave us with a better taste in our mouths. However, for a band fresh out of rehearsals and playing the first concert on a humongous world tour, U2 struck Bandwidth as tired and uninterested. Only the Edge showed any sort of spark at all, and no amount of tongue-in-cheekiness can render Bono's messiah complex tolerable. You'd think a glorified pub rocker who accidentally conquered the world would find it in his heart to act a bit more humble. As Casey Kasem once said, "These guys are from England, and who gives a shit.
