Posts Tagged Kirk Windstein
Crowbar Headlines President Warren G. Harding’s 12th Inaugural Celebration
Posted by Keith Spillett in The Politics Of Catastrophe on December 16, 2013
President Warren G. Harding was easily elected to his twelfth term last month in a landslide election, garnering a record 98 percent of the vote, easily defeating the New Whig Party candidate and Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine.
Harding, leader of the Democratic-Republicans For God Party, continues to be the most significant politician in the history of the United States and is expected to be the leader of the nation until the world’s predicted destruction in 2173. Tonight, Crowbar will be the final act in what is expected the most widely witnessed television event since the execution of the ten leaders of the Kennedy Rebellion in 1969.
Harding’s political career is the stuff of legends. Even the youngest school child has heard the stories. After a relatively lackluster first term that featured corruption in the form of the Teapot Dome scandal and economic turmoil, Harding died of a heart attack on August 2nd, 1923. Had Harding not risen from the dead during his own funeral on August 4th, his presidency would have been a forgotten chapter in the history of the United States of the World.
Harding, who claimed God had allowed him to come back to life in order to lead the United States of The World to its current position as the most powerful nation on the planet, was reelected to a 4 -year term in 1924 after the still unsolved murder of Democratic Presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Harding’s mission to bring “normalcy” to the world began during this term. He invaded Canada, England and Mexico days after his election and by 1934 the United States controlled all of North America and most of Europe. Only its defeat in The Great Nuclear War with Argentina in 1962 stopped America’s march towards world domination.
Argentina’s nuclear strikes destroyed most of Harding’s empire and led to the revolutionary forces of John Fitzgerald Kennedy taking control of most of the Northern United States and renaming it Camelotia. Harding’s forces regrouped and retook the North in what was known as The Second American Civil War. Still, many questioned Harding’s leadership and he looked like he might lose the election of 1972 to Paul Newman. It was then that Harding performed The Five Miracles.
Harding, Who Will Only Allow Himself To Be Photographed In Black And White, Celebrating His 12th Term As President
These miracles included Harding making the nation of Albania disappear, turning water into Coca-Cola, using lasers from his eyes to melt The Washington Monument, reanimating Thomas Jefferson and the creation of flying cars. Harding eliminated Congress and the Supreme Court and declared martial law, which lasted until 2003. He rebuilt the military and, with help from the visitors from the Planet Klorg, was able to take control of the entire world except for Mongolia, the last stronghold of anti-American forces.
Harding occasionally still allows elections, but few experts believe that the opposition is given a fair chance to be victorious. All people who vote against him are immediately executed and used to feed the multi-headed battle giraffe drones and robot oxen that the USW have used to militarily control many of the Outer Territories.
With the outcome of the election never in doubt, many television and Conquernet experts have spent their time speculating who would headlining the inauguration. The prevailing wisdom was that Pentagram would be the band because of the close relationship between President Harding and vocalist and former Vice President Bobby Liebling. However, it is also known that Harding is a huge Crowbar fan, particularly the Odd Fellows Rest album. Last Friday, Crowbar vocalist Christina Aguilera and her husband, guitarist Kirk Windstein, received a call directly from Harding announcing the news.
Rumors have already started to swirl that if Crowbar has an excellent performance, Dave Lombardo, the band’s drummer and former Ambassador to Mars, might be asked to be Secretary of State. Lombardo has refused to comment directly, but his manservant Kerry King did indicate to several reporters that the famed drummer would take the job if it were offered. King, many remember, was enslaved by Lombardo after the failure of his 2005 neo-disco solo album “I Like To Boogie, Boogie” drove him into bankruptcy.
Friday Night At The Masquerade With In Solitude
Posted by Keith Spillett in The One Time I Left The House on September 24, 2011
Photos by Shannon Mcginty-Spillett
The first thing you need to know about seeing a metal show in the American South, Atlanta in particular, is that almost every person in the audience is going to look nearly identical. It’s beyond bizarre. Standing there in the middle of the ballroom floor at The Masquerade, my wife and I could have easily been at a casting call for actors looking to play Slayer’s Kerry King in a movie. Short, squat, bald with scruffy beards, tattoos and black shirts. How do the police ever tell them apart?
The evening started promisingly enough. My wife and I were accosted by some inebriated, bearded lunatic in a panel van who slowed up to tell us his motor was dying, then drove off when he noticed the can of mace my wife was clutching tightly in her right hand. The van, which had an ominous Mothers For Palin sticker emblazoned on the back, had clearly been used in some sort of white slavery ring that we collectively wanted no part of. But these things happen from time to time.
Dressed For Excess
We were there to see In Solitude, but most of the throngs of concertgoers were there to see Down. We had no such plans. We are two middle-aged adults who have learned to value a good night’s sleep over the wild excesses of staying out past 10 to see a band. The original plan had us dipping out by 9 o’clock after the In Solitude set so that we could collapse into an orgy of Chinese food and Friday night re-runs. Unfortunately, The Masquerade pulled the old bait and switch on us and put some highly talented but unfortunately named band called “Pony Killer” on before In Solitude. My wife and I retreated to the benches outside where I was given a Nobel worthy dissertation on the entire life history Jeff Loomis, formerly of the band Nevermore, by some complete stranger with a broken leg wearing a shirt featuring Jesus smoking a cigarette.
As we walked into the club, I noticed Crowbar singer and Charles Addams cartoon character Kirk Windstein standing about 15 feet away from me. I have always loved Crowbar and I thought strongly about getting a picture with him, but I had some concerns. I had met Windstedt once before in Albany, New York when they were opening for Sacred Reich in the mid-90s. Our brief meeting took place as we stood next to each other at a urinal before their band went on. I excitedly stammered, “YOU’RE The GUY from CROWBAR!!!!!” Windstein silently looked straight ahead at the wall and tried to escape my glowing gaze. When I reached my hand out to try to pat him on the back, he sprinted out of the restroom with a terrified look on his face. It was a highly awkward moment that I had repeated over and over in my mind for the last 15 years. Out of sheer concern he might have remembered my poorly timed outburst, I put my head down and kept walking.
I was horribly bored standing in the audience before the set. The thing you forget about shows when you are not there is the pure tedium between bands. Standing on your left foot, then your right, smelling the guy next to you who hasn’t washed his Watain shirt in about five concerts, watching the one lonely guy in the Incantation shirt pace and talk to himself, randomly thinking about how your 401K performed last week. You get a brief rush when the guitar tech comes out to check the levels, then, nothing. Ten more minutes of overhearing conversations about what the real meaning of Black Metal is. Sheer mind-numbing misery.
Pelle The Conquerer
All of a sudden, I felt my head snap backwards. In a wild rush of incense and power, In Solitude appeared on stage and launched into a violently surging version of “The World, The Flesh, The Devil”. Adrenaline shot through my veins. My pulse went from a calm, resting 60 to an unrestrained, thumping 180 in a fleeting span of seconds. I felt like a had been sleeping in the middle of a highway and raised my head up only to see an 18 wheel tractor trailer bearing down on me. IT had begun.
The way they started out was pure magic. The first thing you notice about In Solitude is presence. Some bands act like they plan to spend the entire show apologizing to you for being up there. Other bands act like they completely and unquestionably belong where they are. They command your attention and hold it unreservedly for the duration of their set. In Solitude falls squarely into the latter camp. They are there for a reason and you WILL understand that reason before they are finished. The stage was simply too small for them. They were hooked uncompromisingly into the Master Cylinder, bringing a message that transcended all other thoughts and ideas that had existed in me up till the moment of their arrival. They demanded complete and total connection and, with their every action, settled for nothing less.
Their set covered most of the critical material from their two albums. The crowd, which was clearly more inclined to listen to slow, lurching southern metal riffs, was won over by the third song. Wild-eyed singer Pelle “Hornper” Ahman managed to work the crowd into a bloodthirsty frenzy through a series of high-pitched shrieks and animalistic antics that ran the gamut from spasmodically shaking his thin frame to ramming the microphone into his head. The only thing I could possibly compare his energy level to are the few live recordings I’ve seen of Paul Di’Anno fronting Iron Maiden at The Ruskin Arms around the time Killers was out. Ahman simply hemorrhages sweat and intensity to the point where you are concerned for his well-being. By the time Down front man and metal legend Phil Anselmo strode out on stage in a Ghost shirt to bellow a few bars of “To Her Darkness” with the band, their was no doubt that this was an act on the precipice of greatness.
Anselmo Tears It Up
There is simply something unique and memorable about In Solitude. They are cut out for greater things. Even my wife, who finds the B-52s to be a bit on the heavy side, seemed deeply impressed with how they carried it. We witnessed something arrestingly powerful last night at The Masquerade and everyone there knew it. The performance seemed to be part of an elaborate first act in a career that will have a lot to say about the direction metal music is going in.
The Tyranny of Tradition 