Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

New Year's Grieve

Me at the Tote. NYE, 2005.

Like a drunken farmer squeezing off a load of buckshot into the dying brain of a sick cow that he never particularly liked much anyway, 2005 was put out of its misery last night, with the screaming, afterbirth-encrusted foetus of 2006 emering from between the spread, blood-smeared thighs of Mother Time. Somehow, the little maggot managed to dodge my coathanger, broken bottle, and rubbing alcohol - and instead of the apocalyptic vortex of biblical fire that I have so been praying for, instead, 2006 saw a beery entry into our collective chronology, and I saw myself at the Tote - with the ever-lovely, ever-faithful, ever-dependable Jazzy Kath on one of the hottest days yet recorded - sweating and sweltering and swatting and swearing as I was enveloped in a crowd of nasally pierced, hard rocking freaks.

Because, after all, The Spazzys saw me through 2005 - as Van Halen was my soundtrack for complete and total mental collapse in 2004, The Spazzys chronicled my phoenix-like ascention out of the flames of my own ennui and self-loathing, as I soared across the skies of Greensborough, trailing fire and ice from my razor-sharp talons. Yes, in the post-banged up fender-era, The Spazzys were constantly to be heard wafting from the windows of the old Torana, as I lumbered painfully across the shattered-dreams wasteland of Melbourne, my prow pointed determinedly towards an uncertain future. Yet, despite all common sense suggesting that it is ludicrous for me - beautiful, cosmopolitan, educated, cultured me - to be listening to such trivial nonsense as The Spazzys, I couldn't help but submit to their passionate siren's song of Phil Spector-meets-The Ramones postmodern goodness.

Then again, that's not to say that I don't resent The Spazzys. I remember seeing them, so many years ago, at the Big Day Out - and in my deranged, sunstroke-addled haze of kaleidoscopic delusions, I managed to hobble beneath a table in the very salubrious beer garden at the Melbourne Showgrounds, and in a shaky hand, I wrote very simply on a sheet of notepaper:

"GOD BLESS THE SPAZZYS"

I then folded said piece of paper up and hid it in my shoe for many, many months. The Spazzys are one of the finest bands that this loathsome, self-fellating city has ever produced, and 'Aloha! Go Bananas!' is undoubtedly one of the finest albums that this country has ever produced. That being said, I can't help but shake the feeling that the girls would probably be complete and utter bitches.

There's nothing wrong with that. After all, Roger Waters is a complete and total shithead, but that doesn't always detract from my admiration and love of the man.

Oh, fine. I'll come clean, and I'll tell you a story.

So, I ended up at a pub on Brunswick Street one night - I can't remember which one - and The Spazzys were hosting a night of Rawk Trivia. This sounded like the shit, so I scraped old Ellie Mae up off the floor, and bundled her into the Torana. I loved 'Aloha! Go Bananas!', but I was somewhat reticent to get quite as up close and personal with the girls as I was about to. After all, people in bands are almost universally human trash of the worst kind. Exceptions to this rule include Bruce Springsteen, Grace Slick, David Lee Roth, Bruce Dickinson, and that guy from Dokken. Everyone else sucks. And, the odds were certainly stacked against our Spazzy heroes. We entered the pub, waited for the night to begin, and - do you know what? Imagine my complete and total surprise when...

... they really hated me. See, the room was full of hip, swinging, rock and rolling kinds of Brunswick Street cats - who all have seen a member of the opposite sex naked in the last five years, and who all wear Ramones shirts, and who all thought 'The Proposition' was a good movie, instead of a steaming lump of self-indulgent shit. I was completely and totally out of my depth, socially, and my young charge Ellie Mae did as Ellie Mae does, which is to make a beeline for the bar and begin chugging as much red wine as the bar has stocked. The Spazzys, though, couldn't have been less impressed if I'd shown up, taken a dump on the floor, and proceeded to put a leash on it, taking it to the bar for a drink and a bowl of pork rinds. As I crashed about gracelessly in my capped workboots and smelly overcoat, strings of thick, cloudy saliva hanging in ropes from my blubbery, cracked lips, they looked at me as though I was nothing more than an overturned bucket of discarded genetic material, harvested from a sick, cancerous billy goat. The Spazzys wanted me to die with total and complete zest, even after I got an obscure question about P.J Soles' role in 'Rock And Roll High School' right - which I thought would earn me at least a few brownie points. When we won our round, our round simply ceased to come up in the official evening's records - making space for hairier things to come, in the form of bearded, deeply trendy boys in emo glasses, who held court with zippy quips and deft displays of their knowledge of popular culture, while I stood in the corner with a glass of flat coke and tried to look inconspicuous. And then, it was over - and I slinked away into the cold night air, carrying the wildly jabbering Ellen Mae, who blasted me with gusts of boozy breath, and rattled on about her 'sexual needs'.

As each year passes, I can feel it. Can't you? Just beneath the skin. A twinge. An itch. Something you can't scratch - but if you could, you'd scratch it until your fingernails were worn down to the stumps. Do you know what it is? It is your bones slowly calcifying as the days, and months, and years, and decades rack up, leaving their scars on your clock, and bloating your body with a disease - the disease of festering age. And last night, as I stood in front of the stage at the Tote, and I watched The Spazzys playing such a wonderful, potent set - above the din of the crowd, and the slashing guitar chords, and the traffic, and the fireworks, I could still hear it. I could hear the sound of my bones changing. Deep inside each bone, I could hear the crackling sound, as spiderwebs of hairline fissures exploded from the core, spreading their fingers outward, and clawing determinedly to the surface. As I looked around at the pulsating whirlpool of sweat-drenched bodies, I could feel each sliver of bone peeling away from the root, spearing into the soft honeycomb of flesh, causing pinprick rivulets of blood to blossom out into the liquid internals of my body. I could imagine my eyes filling with blood, as the band thrashed away madly - they would eventually explode outward, drenching the punters in front of my in a shower of blood, jelly, and shredded eye matter. I could almost taste the geyser of blood and stomach acid that would vault up my oesophagus, drenching the people in front of me, as the band played, waist-deep in an ever-rising ocean of blood, gore, and fragmented bone - courtesy of my slowly disintegrating body.

I don't want to meet The Spazzys. I don't want to know what they think of me, or how I may or may not repulse them. It is a difficult thing for a lad of my age to acknowledge his age - as I whirl around and around on the ball of my heel, screaming wordlessly with tears in my eyes, I see nothing but doors shutting where they once were opening, and so, I envy the youth and vitality of The Spazzys. The road in front of The Spazzys is one full of sunshine, and the endless expanse of tarmac that allows one to - as Jackson Browne once said - 'look out at the road rushin' beneath my wheels, I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels'. While I, on the other hand, leave nothing but an endless litter of twisted, rotting corpses in my wake, their flesh shredded by the beaks of the buzzards that swoop down, feasting on rotting, bloated entrails of the fallen and felled.

This year has been a fucking bastard of epic proportions. While not being as laced with insanity and mind-numbing loathing as 2004, it has been a year which sank down, down, downward, like a boulder chained to the feet of Jeff Buckley in deep water - and then, suddenly, at the last moment shot upward. 2005 was truly 'The Empire Strikes Back' of the 2004-2006 trilogy. It was a year that had no end, and it was a year that ended in a squirming nest of cliffhangers. It ended with my hand cut off, rescued by Lando Calrissian, after finding out that Darth Vader was my father, while drawing a lot of pictures of my dog.

I like The Spazzys so much because they're a great band - which is evident to anyone who has seen them play - but, I also like them because there's something unashamedly joyous about them. I am sick of listening to pasty-faced losers whining about how nobody likes them. If I want to hear that shit, I'll record myself talking at any given moment of my life. The Spazzys counteract the noxious bile that I generally like to gargle - both aurally and spiritually - and they do it while managing to sound like a cold winter's day in Melbourne.

So, The Spazzys hate me. That's okay. Roger Waters hates me, too. In this respect, they're in good company. But, I don't hate them - and that is the painful thing about fandom. At some point, the object of your fanlove will reveal themselves to be an autonomous creation, which - in all likelihood - will see you as nothing more than a snivelling sycophant, deserving only of the most fiery and savage death. Again, that's okay. They don't have to like me. From my perspective, I only have to like them - and, last night, I liked them a whole lot.

2005 is no more - the grey flecks of shredded brain matter are now attracting flies in the centre of the Rorschach-esque blood splatter that surrounds them, the farmer having long since swung his shotgun over his shoulder, and wandered drunkenly back to the dairy to see if that bottle of scotch he was given last year is still under the sink. The body won't be cremated - instead, it will rot in the blazing, abnormally potent sun of Melbourne, and the foul, gut-churning stench will permate 2006, just as 2004 did in its following year. But, it is a smell which I'm trying to clear.

So, onward - to 2006, and 'Return Of The Jedi'.

Happy New Year, boys and girls.

Posted by David at January 1, 2006 07:26 PM | TrackBack