“I just want to go home, stick my tongue in the wife’s ass and hang with the kids.” That’s not exactly the type of thing you expect to hear during a working lunch, right? I’ve been in my share of weird situations but I still managed to choke on my sandwich as I gasped in surprise. That was during my first week on the job at Concrete.
There was a bit of an unofficial reunion last weekend and chatting with some of my former co-workers brought back some long since repressed memories. The people were adorable, fascinating, and incredibly amusing, but I’d have to admit that wasn’t my favorite job of all time. I know this is going to be hard for you to believe, but I’m not very METAL.
I have never listened to a Judas Priest album. I couldn’t name you one song from the Slayer catalog. I didn’t own a single item of spandex. I only had one tattoo. I’d never, ever been in Don Hill’s before.
Before working at Concrete I didn’t know that Iron Maiden even had a mascot. I certainly couldn’t have told you his name. I can now. It’s Eddie. See? I pay attention. I can also say things like “Rockin’ like Dokken” though I think people can tell it’s not my native language. Oh yeah, who’s METAL now? I know, it’s so not me.
It was always extra awkward when bands would visit the office. They’d just randomly pop by all day long. (I suppose METAL bands don’t “pop” by. They might stop by, or visit…I guess “crash” would be the best verb choice here.) Then again, non-music-playing METAL heads would crash at the office all the time, too. I certainly couldn’t tell a difference. As a result I wasn’t as impressed nor as fawning as I should be when random platinum selling artists were blocking the copying machine.
It was worse when the visiting band in question was one of my projects. Then they’d want to meet me. I could talk marketing and proposals all day long; I just didn’t know how to talk about anything else.
“So, um, Otep, um, it’s really great to finally meet you.”
“What did you think of the concert footage we sent over?”
“Um, I really like the thing you did with the pigs’ heads and the stakes?”
Hard to believe I didn’t make it in that gig for much more than a year isn’t it? Sure, there’s something to be said for the amusement factor of brainstorming sessions around the single Gilded Cunt. I never got tired of convincing the spell check on my machine that Vomitory was, in fact, a real word. Somehow, by the time I was faced with putting together a proposal for Dying Fetus I thought, “Maybe this just isn’t for me.”
So now that you have that back story, you can imagine my amusement at meeting up with my old METAL friends in a trendy little bar just south of NYU while the DJ spun 80’s pop and hip-hop. Oh how the world changes…