And You Wanted To Dance, So I Asked You To Dance

It was a cold sunday evening, when I attended for the first time to an Eagles Of Death Metal show. Someone gave me a couple of free tickets for the festival in which they would play that evening. It happened in Mexico City, in a festival called Corona Capital.

When I heard the studio albums of the band, long before the show, I did not like them at all. I knew Josh Home was somewhat involved in the band, so I thought this band was similar to Queens Of The Stone Age. When I realized they were a funny band, I felt disappointed.

Then, at a show in Paris, they became sadly famous because they were playing when some crazy killers started to shot innocent people. I did not understand why this funny band was in the middle of such a tragedy, but I listened to their albums again.

It was almost 7: 00 pm, when Jesse Hughes and the rest of the band came up to the stage. Ironically, I was really close to the stage. I never do that, even when one of my favorite bands plays. People was enthusiastic and intrigued because of the involvement of Eagles Of Death Metal in the terrorists attacks in France almost a year ago.  Shortly after the band appeared, a popular mexican mariachi song sounded and people started to sing it along and they became crazy.

Before a brief introductory speech, Jesse Hughes and the band started with I Only Want You, and they sounded terrific and powerful, like I never expected. They were a better band than I thought. Obviously, I felt so bigoted and dumb.

The show continued with the same intensity. The frontman was so dynamic, danced here and there, and talked to the audience all the time. At some point, he put on a jacket allusive to David Bowie. Then, the band made a cover of Moonage Daydream and people got wild. Later on, they played Duran Duran's Save A Prayer, and I fall in love with the band. Since then, I cannot stop listening this version. It's really a great cover. 

My point of view changed completelely. From now on, I will not judge a band from a studio album but from its live music.

I Only Want You

Save A Prayer

Your Purple Prose Just Gives You Away

I just hate sickness. For the last two years and a half,  I've been constantly medicated. Almost eighteen months ago, on May 17th, 2015, I smoke my last cigarrette. On April 20th, 2016, I drank my last beer in a Guns N' Roses show. I have a balanced diet -meat, fruits and vegetables included- on a daily basis. I don't drink soda nor sweet beverages. I avoid palatable food and desserts. If I eat something so crazy -as Chop Suey, or regular cheese, or a small slice of a chocolate cake!-, I feel immediately ill. 

I start to suffocate with my saliva and with deleterious vapours coming from the upper part of my esophagous. It really sucks. Just my wife seems to imagine how I feel. 
People often underestimate my health problem. They always seem to believe that I am being dramatic -that I just experienced a silly transient stomach pain-, but it really is annoying and weakening. If I really had been overreacting, physicians would not had proceeded with a surgery. 

No matter what, I feel sick almost all the time. A week ago, I was recovering from a pharyngotonsillitis. Now, I've got the flu. Of course I went to the physician both times. When I'm not sick in this way, I feel nauseating.

What else can I do? 

I wish I could be healthy, as I was when I was a teenager.  When I got sick, I didn't even need to take drugs. All I mattered about was idleness, music, literature and girls. I miss the comfort in being healthy. I don't even remember how it was.  

I am nostalgic about the first years of highschool. Rappers were trendy, and there was a band called EMF. They had a song called Unbelievable. They sounded rapper and rocker at the same time, and I liked them. I had a crush on a girl that liked NKOTB, and I always thought of her when I heard EMF. She could be my girlfriend, but I never asked her on a formal date. 

I remember how simple it was to go to the movies. When Tim Burton's Batman came out, my parents took me to the movie theater. I was completely amazed by the darkness and beauty of the film. It was a little violent, too. And cryptic. Now, I have to leave the cinema when I feel about to threw up. 

You don't know the boundaries of normality until your not a normal guy. 


Unbelievable

Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans

One cold night –perhaps on November of 1995–, I watched an amazing show on MTV. 

There was this band of four or five guys (I don't remember if there was a keyboardist) touring an album named Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness. Supposedly the album had been released a month ago, or so. 

The show started with a long song.

Amongst hypnotic changes of lights and beautiful images of the oceans reflected behind the members of the band, the cymbals and the guitar sounded slowly... as if their purpose was to wake up the audience from a warm dream. 

The atmosphere was so blue and calm. 

The song didn't sound like anything I had heard before. 

The music was soft and enveloping.

After a few cycles, the cymbals stopped and the guitar and the drums sounded like a fierce roar. Then, again, while a bold guy with a Stratocaster sang the verse and the chorus of the song, the music returned to the softness of the beginning.

The lyrics seemed so poetic and elaborate. It seemed to me that the writer of the song was not a common guy, that he or she didn't read silly literature. 

I hadn't heard of Smashing Pumpkins before, though I watched MTV almost everyday.  

The bold singer, at the center of the stage, with a black and white Stratocaster on his shoulders, was difficult to ignore.

He dressed a black shirt with the legend "Zero" in silver capital letters on his chest and he also wore silver brilliant trousers. He sang with passion and his voice sounded violent and guttural sometimes and sweet and melodic other times. He also kinda sang out of tune. He looked like a mad astronaut. I thought he was the brain of the band. 

Billy Corgan was a rockstar and a poet. 

The drummer, behind the singer, played with intensity. He made the snares and cymbals sounded so coordinated, changing from jazz to heavy rock n' roll beats. I thought of him as the soul of the band. 

On the right side of the stage, there was a thin asiatic-like guy. He seemed so shy, and out of place. He seemed an introverted man trying to be extroverted, but he was completely focused in being the lead guitarist of the band. 

The bassist player, at the left of the stage, was a blonde woman. She had pale skin. Her face was covered of something that looked like powder coating, and she was scary and attractive at the same time. Somehow, she looked sad or indifferent to the fans. 

Nevertheless, she tried to smile each time she had to whisper parts of the chorus of certain songs, and never stopped accompanying the chords and beats of the songs with her Fender Precision Bass. 

Though I didn't know they had a romance, I thought of James Iha and D'Arcy Wretsky as the heart of the band. 

via GIPHY

I was a teenager of almost 15 years old.
Music was everything for me.
The band impressed me so much. 

After three songs or so –maybe the show was edited by MTV– the Smashing Pumpkins played an acoustic set. 

The sweet-furious formula of the previous songs, changed a lot. 
Even Chamberlin used a smaller drum set than the one he used in the first part of the show. 

The members of the band took their places in a small surface of the stage. I think they even sat on small chairs. I didn't know the name of any of the songs they played, but I liked them, too. 

I also found the lyrics sort of poetic. 
I vaguely remember that these acoustic songs talked about love and anguish. 

(A few months later –when my brother and myself started to buy Smashing Pumpkins' albums– I would know that they had played Disarm, 1979 and In The Arms of Sleep on this acoustic set.) 

After the third commercial pause of MTV, the band played another heavy new songs from Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness and some other older songs like Today, and I kinda recognized it. I had watched the video of the song. The members of the band were mirthfully painting an ice-cream wagon and they looked so silly and dumb in the video. 

I guess they appeared so dumb that I just did not pay attention to their music. 

While I watched the show on MTV, suddenly I felt I was a moron because I was so bigoted and I didn't know such an amazing band existed.

A couple of weeks later, as a Christmas gift, my father gave us money.
My brother and myself found Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness in a supermarket and we bought it in compact disc format. We really enjoyed it. We heard it everyday. We recorded it on a cassette and we listened it on a walkman on our way to school or while we traveled across the city on the backseat of the red Jetta, as our dad drove to a boring place and our mom and our little brother were so impressed by the lights and by the Christmas ornaments hanging on the tall buildings in the streets. 

I listened that album for almost one year, day after day.
I even memorized all the lyrics. I even filled a notebook with Corgan-like poems.
Now, I hardly remember the lyrics. I lost that notebook as I lost my memory. 

Mellon Collie was released on October 24, 1995. 

                                                      

Love Is Suicide

Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans