Riot Fest 2009: Butthole Surfers, The Dead Milkmen, Screeching Weasel [The Metro; Chicago, IL]

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Commemorating the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention for the fifth year in a row, Riot Fest 2009 leaned heavily on Chicago heritage acts (or “nostalgia” for those less charitably minded). The four-day, multi-venue punk extravaganza included some of the heaviest hitters to emerge from Chicago's hardcore scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s (Naked Raygun, Screeching Weasel, Alkaline Trio), as well a veritable who's-who of local favorites (Pegboy, Rights of the Accused, No Empathy). The festival drew a broad cross-section of punks from all over the country: from the forty-something old-schoolers all the way down to fresh-faced, mohawked teenagers.

Locals Blackbox had the dubious honor of kicking off the festivities on Wednesday Evening. The gutterpunk duo, consisting of singer/guitar player Damon Ranger and a drummer who looked like Davey Havoc, if Davey Havoc had been forced to sleep in his car for a week, played to an almost empty house. Though their performance wasn't particularly memorable, they kept things old-school with hardcore riffs and five-dollar CDs at the merch table.

When I first caught sight of the freaking baseball team that was The House That Gloria Vanderbilt, I said to myself, “If these guys aren't completely awesome, this is going to be a disaster.” The truth ended up being kind of a sweaty coupling of the two possibilities. The band consisted of ten (TEN!!!) members, including two singers, two guitars, bass, the biggest drummer I have ever laid eyes upon, two percussionists, a keyboardist, and a guy whose only job was to bang a tambourine and/or sleigh bells. While much of the fest's opening act fare fit a little too comfortably in the three-chord, youngLOUDsnotty mold, THTGV offered a refreshing departure. Their sinister post-hardcore crept up on gothica at times as lead singer Todd Pot swung between a gentle keening and a Marilyn Manson rasp.

Unfortunately, their sheer weight in numbers overwhelmed the enclosed space of The Metro, and much of their performance's nuance—the backup vocals, keys, and additional percussion—were simply swallowed up by a murky mid-range. Still, this would definitely be a band worth checking out in an outdoor venue.

Jeff Pezzati's post-Raygun project The Bomb revels in the poppier, melodic direction that his former band gravitated towards near the end of their run. Guitarist Jeff Dean played the fiery yin to Pezzati's stolid yang, all but doing hand-stands while cranking out whip-smart hooks. They stuck mostly to 2005's Indecision, but also paused to test-drive a few tracks from their upcoming album.

So then there was The Butthole Surfers. Wow. Guitarist Paul Leary opened the set with “Something,” (one of three songs he took lead vocals on that evening) while Gibby Hains provided sax accompaniment. They had an enormous white tarp strung up behind the stage, upon which three projectors simultaneously cast images. Looped cartoon segments of a naked baby collided with black and white porn from the ‘50s and theatrical trailers for Romero's Dawn of the Dead. The imagery seethed across the screen for the duration of the performance. Nature documentaries gave way to commercials, images of smiling pinup girls bled into gruesome penile reconstructive surgery, clips of insects feeding or fucking (sometimes both at once) transformed into vintage footage of nurses swabbing the eyes of a burn victim, and in the center of the screen an unending cavalcade of famous horror-movie splatter sequences.

The music proved a more than adequate soundtrack to the skull-fuckery unfolding overhead. Haynes had a medium-sized equipment case strapped with effects pedals and propped up on a cart next to him. When not using the equipment to twist and torment his voice beyond the point of human recognition, he menaced us with a bullhorn. By about the fifth song, I stopped trying to compile a setlist because I couldn't understand what was going on anymore. Entire songs would pass and I would forget to cheer. It was complete sensory overload.

Throughout the night, Leary seemed genuinely appreciative of the crowd's enthusiasm. “It takes a special kind of audience to come and see us,” he said during the encore, and smiled a grin so guileless and sheepish, it was hard to believe that this was the same guy who once vandalized club speakers with a screwdriver back in the '80s. He provided a more stable center of warmth than Haynes, who fluctuated between joviality (joking with the crowd about the unprecedented number of women at Wednesday's show), and standoffishness (ejecting one audience member for pegging him with an empty beer cup, dumping a full beer in another's face for an offense I was too far away to witness).

The band's set focused exclusively on their ‘80s output, with a heavy emphasis on their noise-oriented material and a few punkier gems from their earliest E.P.s (sorry, guys, no “Pepper”). The whole thing climaxed in an astonishing encore that began with the free-form noise-jam “22 Going on 23” and ended with the calamitous “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave.” The stage dissolved into chaos. Haynes cued the strobe lights as the fog machine went into overdrive. The performers were engulfed in a blinding cloud of white smoke, the images on the screen blistering and writhing as the cloud spread its arms to the ceiling, and one by one the Butthole Surfers left the stage.

See this band. Travel great distances if you have to, but do whatever it takes to see this band.

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