Murder City Devils - feather bed whiskey blanket
The Murder City Devils, Live at the Showbox Seattle, WA 2-11-09
Seattle’s a boring, cold, half-empty place. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so. This was how it seemed to me the couple days I spent there to see the reunion of the Murder City Devils on their own rainy turf.
Let me back up. I grew up with the Punk Rawk in New Jersey and as my 20′s were giving way to 30, I was beginning to feel more and more as though either I had gotten too old and lost the spirit or the rebel noise wasn’t as good anymore somehow. So many bands seemed like carbon copies and I just didn’t believe a word of it, if you see what I mean. I bought Broken Bottles, Empty Hearts a few years back and it was like being 15 again and listening to your first Black Flag tape in someone’s dirty attic. It was the same feeling of total agreement and that someone is yelling what you yell in your head. The Murder City Devils took all-ages matinee shows, tattoo flash, and paper bag booze under bridges of all of our high school days and took it further, made it into punk rock noir. Something was going on.
Seattle’s a long way from New Jersey and me and brother T. Frankenstein have duties; wives, kids, mortgages, jobs. At a weeks notice we put everything on hold, went into debt to see the Devils play again. Me and T. walked on in, bought the Feather Bed Whiskey Blanket boxed sets the Devils were selling, which included a collection of all their albums on white vinyl with memorabilia, all packed up in casket silver and funeral black, and we waited for the Devils The venue was huge with bars on either flank at the back, a basement with a coat check, and cold as hell, like a meat locker or a history museum and the crowd was not so crowded. The opening bands were alright; an adorable girl with a guitar referring to a notebook of lyrics as she sang, a screamo-type band and then the MCD took the stage at Midnight. They all looked older, I guess we all do. The singer was bearded and looking like a Lit. Professor, drunk as fuck after exam week. The organist chain-smoking hard behind her piano. But they played hard and they gave it everything they had in that cold ass hall, even if the pit was not so much and the crowd was not as receptive as you would expect. They did their thing; they reached out to you as far they could even if you weren’t reaching back.
You can’t go home again, even if you’re home. Everybody’s old days are gone and that’s probably for the best. The show the Devils put on was unlike any Punk rock show I had ever been to before and wasn’t what I expected. It was like a kind of religious service in that cold ass empty hall in that cold ass empty town. But I was fuckin’ glad I was there.
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