I spent last Tuesday evening in Baton Rouge at the “Bad Boys of Rock” concert. Don’t ask. I was just there.
Arriving at the River Center, I quickly realized my deficit of tatts and facial jewelry. So did everyone else, as the pre-concert crowd gravitated away from me and my long-sleeve, button-collar oxford shirt. At least my Dockers were black. At the door, my cameras were inspected as if I were employed by the New England Patriots. My sports anxiety continued as I was patted down, wondering if I was carrying any of O.J.’s memorabilia.
Inside the arena, I was immediately asked by one of the ultra-courteous, red-vested greeting staff if seating was assigned or by general admission. This information was of course printed on the tickets, so “Why is he asking me?” I soon realized it was the button-collar oxford, which makes me look like I know everything – just like it does in the classroom.
I had mentally prepared for this concert as the Bad “Mouth” Boys of Rock concert. How else would their badness manifest? Nobody buys tickets for chicken decapitations these days. Besides, I had heard all curse words before in elementary school, their proper usage confirmed by my 70-year old grandpa the day he caught the neighbor’s kids jumping over the fence to steal duck eggs from the coups in his Golden Meadow backyard. I didn’t know my grandpa spoke any English, much less these select hyphenated nouns. Perhaps I was a descendant of a true, early-century headbanger. After all, he spent most of my life “in” a rocker, so perhaps he lived “as” a rocker before I was born.
True to my assumptions, each of the four bands expelled expletives undeleted, at least only to confirm their status as “bad boys.” This includes the opening band, Revelation Theory, which was the tamest of the four. Being a relatively new and untested band, I argued that they should be called “Revelation Hypothesis,” much to the disinterest of the bejeweled, illustrated, unisex mammal sitting next to me. To make more conversation, I pointed out how the continual head-bobbing of the long-haired guitarists demonstrated an excellent biological mechanism to rid the mammalian scalp of parasites.
Buckcherry, the second band, played the best rock. While Rich Luzzi, lead singer of Revelation Theory, was beefy and ripped, his counterpart in Buckcherry, Josh Todd, had difficulty filling his clothes, so he took most of it off. Imagine an emaciated Ken doll with overgrown hair and unbendable legs bouncing around stage, and that’s Todd. Despite interesting music, Todd’s syntactic use of curse words as verbs was enough to make lovebugs separate in shame. Ultimately, however, this is good for your car enamel.
Papa Roach played the next set. After the first song, lead singer Jacoby Shaddix greeted the crowd by cursing and then expressed his pleasure on returning to Baton Rouge where he has “lots of family.” Apparently in some circles, verbal vulgarity is an excellent way to make your extended family proud of you when you’ve hit the big time. Before the second song, he climbed to the second level where I sat and seemed as if he were coming directly toward me, perhaps seeking retaliation for the review I gave his X-Fest performance in The Nicholls Worth last April. Was I to be a newspaper man cut into shreds by his own pair of scissors? Instead, he sweated on some girls who fawned near the guard rail. I’m not certain, but at this point I think the bejeweled, illustrated, unisex mammal sitting next to me actually moved a muscle.
Lastly, there was Hinder, the headliner. As a verb, “hinder” means to obstruct and as a noun it means “the buttocks,” so I’m not sure where this band was going with this name. For about thirty minutes the band grated their way through drinking and girl-done-me-wrong songs, not nearly as interesting as their CD cover art. On the arena floor, however, their songs invoked a series of counter-clockwise mosh pits, which is the proper direction for such things north of the equator.
In the course of a four hour evening of bad-boy rock, I saw more ink than would all the bubble jet printers in the city of Baton Rouge. After the concert, I came home and wondered if I’d be able to hear my favorite lawnmower ever again. And when I awoke the next morning, my hearing scars reminded me that the past was real.
