When Good Robots Go Bad - Chapter One

4/7/05

Two lead pipes duct taped together to form a body and stuck on wheels. A head fashioned from vacuum cleaner parts. A broken television with an angry face drawn on the screen with magic marker. Dozens of cardboard boxes spray-painted silver for armor. These were some of the first prototypes that Chris came up with for the robot army that accompanied our ridiculous band at every one of our shows.

Chris and John had started the band first as a joke with a few other friends to create something different and crazy. And indeed, they succeeded. At their first cohesive point there were two bass players and a drummer. They played their first show like this, at El Torreon for Stand Against the Hand 2 in March of 2001. The most memorable parts for me besides the obvious onslaught of thrash music were the Leftover Crack cover and the fire-breathing and inevitable flaming mannequin that graced the stage while they played. After this, they decided to ask me to play guitar, seeing as their second bassist had just quit. Chris was one of my best friends and it sounded like a lot of fun, so I said yes. I was fifteen.

My first show with the band would be in St. Louis. Chris’ cousin Rob had set it up for us. We had never been to the club we were playing, and I had only practiced with the band twice. I had never played guitar or sang in front of an audience before and was intensely nervous. Needless to say, our props were going to have to be pretty amazing to distract everyone’s attention from our severe lack of preparation.

The week before the show, we spent far too much time building robots and not enough practicing the actual songs. Things went that way for a while. Somehow, we managed to transport this mass of duct-taped pipes, random pieces of plastic wrapped in tin foil to be used as heads or arms, appliances and cardboard to St. Louis the day of the show.

Shortly before we were due to play, Chris decided it would be a good idea to go dumpstering (how we got most of our materials) at a used book store. We got about thirty used romance novels and wrote our band’s name all over them. These would come into play later on.

I remember sitting “back stage,” at the club in St. Louis, sweating profusely. There were four walls covered in spray paint and two couches that reeked of beer and vomit. I was playing my guitar and trying not to be nervous. I knew that we would play horribly, but I just wanted to do it to have some fun. Finally, we went on. I had never seen such chaos as what occurred in the next fifteen minutes.

We started out hard, sloppy and fast. The songs were blurs of blast beats and black clouds of distortion dominated by an oppressive, thrashing bass tone. Our loyal robot companions were sent out in a fleet and defeated by angry club kids almost immediately. We hadn’t even finished two songs and our first fleet was down! The stationary robots, like the television and the vacuum-bot were also taken from the stage by the audience, thrown on the ground and crushed. We didn’t really care, we were just happy that kids were going nuts.

After we had sent out our fleet of metroid balloons and they were sufficiently popped and destroyed, we looked around for any more tricks we had up our sleeves. The crowd, several 18-25 year old kids with black hair and black clothes cheered us on and urged us to ‘bring it on’. Our friend Mookie broke his wrist somewhere around this time by punching the stage really hard. Things were getting edgy, that's for sure!

About ten minutes into the set, Chris leaned over to me and said, “Hey man, let’s give ‘em the FIRE!” I nodded and he grabbed his helmet.

Chris had designed a bike helmet, covered in foil to make a sort of bowl on the top. Growing from the sides were two large aluminum horns. He then placed the helmet and bowl, filled with lighter fluid, on his head and buckled it. As he lit his helmet we all began making incomprehensible noise on our instruments. It was quite a sight to see. The crowd stopped dead in their tracks as Chris was screaming into the microphone with a flaming head, looking like a fucking demon. After about two minutes, the helmet fell off Chris’ head and onto the pile of used romance novels we had picked up earlier.

“Oh shit!” I yelled, as the books went up in flame. At this point, for no discernible reason, we and everyone in the audience began hurling the burning books in all directions. The flames were all stomped out shortly and we were told over the P.A. that the show was over.

One thing I will say for us as a band is that we are fairly respectful. We’ll make a mess, sure, but we always ask first and we all do our part to clean it up. After we did this, we went outside and met our potential aggressors. Much to my surprise though, almost everyone was telling me things like “awesome show, man!” and “I can’t believe you guys did that! Amazing!” I felt pretty good! Then a club manager or someone with a flash light and a tucked in shirt came up to me and said “You guys are banned from here forever, and we’ll never be able to use fire at a show again. You almost burnt the club down.”

So, in many ways, my first show with the band was a complete success. We almost burnt the club down, got banned from it forever, and we didn’t even play that horribly. All in all, a successful display of powerviolence was made.