Runnin’ with the Devil Tomato

Last night was pretty darned evil, I tell you what. First off, there was a $6 cover charge at the Record Bar to benefit some damned bike club. They’d had a bike race that began and ended at the RB and involved riding in pentagram-shaped routes all over the city. Evil.

Then, the Pornhuskers played — but without all the fire-breathing and nudity and gross misuse of sex toys. Disappointing, I guess, but not evil. In fact, they sounded really good. The guy who usually sings was playing drums and singing, which Beelzebub totally cannot pull off, even though he says he’s the best drummer in hell. Their sound is like punk delivered in large heaps from the back of a dumptruck full of porn mags — crushing and dirty. Too bad we didn’t get the visuals. Without boobies, 6/6/6 veers close to becoming just another day. So that’s why I had to do something evil. My pen quit working the minute I walked in the door, and I wanted to write down that bit about the dumptruck full of porn as soon as I thought of it (yeah, that’s how we hacks roll, baby), so I looked around and saw a pen sitting on top of a speaker or monitor beside the stage. When no one in the band was working, I yoinked it. I figured whoever owned that pen couldn’t possibly put it to better use than me — unless, that is, the original owner was going to stir a cocktail with it, which is certainly the highest use of the pen.

Next up were the Haunted Creepys. This masked band has only played Halloweens and maybe a few other special occasions. They wear purple-hooded robes with fabric over their faces, sort of like Jawas in graduation regalia. The Creepys combine short blasts of garage punk with tales of roaming time and space, rockin’ out at graveyards, dicking around with the supernatural and other things that went with the robes and smoke machines. Some people were heavily into it, and the dancefloor steadily filled up. I even saw one guy mouthing the words to a song, which seems strange considering how few times the Creepys visit this dimension — but now that I think about it, it was probably a cover. I’m terrible at identifying those.

Partway through the show, the bass player lowered from the ceiling a small wooden cage about the size of a Kleenex box. Inside of it was the ravenous Hairy Tomato, which the lead singer gently extracted from the cage, teased its stringy tuft of hair and held it aloft. The softball-sized vegetable was equipped with a gaping jaw full of vampire fangs and looked pretty ferocious. After a long monologue about the Hairy Tomato’s deadly properties, the beast was dispatched to wreak havoc upon the world (which means I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t see what happened to the damn thing — the last time I saw the Creepys play, the Hairy Tomato got pulverized, an act accompanied by much shrieking from the band, which reminds me of this one time I got drunk and took off my shirt and went to the fruit basket on the counter and… never mind).

Following that spectacle, DJ Stevie Cruz (singer with the Esoteric) began a Metal School session. Not many people had stuck around to rock out to Quiet Riot, Motley Crue and, basically, a couple hours of classic and pop metal, which I can only stand in small doses, I’m afraid. I guess that means I’m not very evil after all.

But I did steal a pen.