Worst. Security. EVER!

Yesterday was a busy day for me.  It started out with a trip to the funeral home in the morning.  A close friend lost his father last weekend and the funeral was yesterday.  After stopping by the funeral home I ran a few errands around Louisville before meeting up with my friend Mike and heading up to Covington to see one of my favorite bands of all time, Dillinger Escape Plan.

Mike had to run a few errands after work so we were running a bit late to the show.  It was at the Mad Hatter.  It is an interesting club because it used to be a strip club and they didn't do too much remodeling to make it a music venue.  We should have missed the first band, or two, but there was another band added to the bill and the show started late so we had to sit through. I don't remember the name of the first band, but they were awful.  They had amazingly bad hair, the singer wanted to be Davey Havok from AFI and their music was just lame.   The second band we saw, Fake Problems, were ok.  I think I would like Fake Problems on CD, I didn't care too much for them live.  The lead singer was really funny and had a lot of charisma.  They sounded like a mix between The Briggs and Against Me! but heavily watered down versions of those bands.

Finally, what I had been waiting for all night.  Dillinger Escape Plan.  Only way I can explain their music is chaos. If you listen to them on album it sounds a lot like noise at times, but the thing is, you go see them live and they play it note for note.  The best part is, while they are playing this break neck tempo music note for note they are thrashing around and pretty much breaking stuff the whole time.  A great example last night was Jeff Tuttle, one of the guitarist, has a part in a song where he doesn't play. So Tuttle runs into the crowd along the wall, grabs a tall table, and drags it into the pit.  Both guitarist Ben Weinman, and vocalist Greg Pucatio were jumping around off of ego boxes and amps while hitting the PA cabinets that were hanging from the ceiling.  They played two new songs last night.  They opened with one of them, it was cool, a typical DEP song.  The second new song blew my mind.  It started out with a typical Dillinger sound then it morphed into this really cool melodic groove, its slowed down for a bit in the middle and then picked it back up even heavier than the intro.  The new drummer, Billy Rymer, was incredible.  He was some kid they found in some no name band, but the dude slays.

Thursday was the headliner.  I am not a huge fan, they are good and I respect them as musicians, but I just never got in to them.  I owned their first two albums and they have a few moments on them.  They pretty much embody the term Screamo.  They were a lot better live than I thought they would be, but you just can not follow an act like Dillinger Escape plan.  The lead singer Geoff Rickley puts on a pretty solid show.  The band sounded really thin though, like the guitars were really tiny sounding compared to the bands before them.  I got to hear a handful of songs off their album Full Collapse, which was the only album I really dig of theirs.

This is where the trouble began last night.  I think maybe 3 or 4 people max were kicked out during DEP, which is about right for a Dillinger show.   The crowd thinned out a bit during Thursday so me and my buddy Mike scooted a bit closer to the stage.  They only had a few security guards working.  One by the door, another near the bar, and the guy that was up in the pit area.  Well, the guy up near the pit must have had a bad day.  He was basically throwing people out for no good reason.  We left about halfway through Thursday and he had thrown out about 6 people.  Basically if he didn't like how they were moshing or if they bumped in to him he tossed them. How they were throwing kids out was totally lame too.  There was a cop there sitting up at a post kinda looking over the crowd,  there was no reason at all for one of Covington's finest to be at the show.  It was pointless.  The security guard would grab someone he was unhappy with, the cop would leave his post and the security guard would pass him off to the piggy and he would escort the kid out of the building.  Well kids started getting feisty because the security guard and the officer were total jackoffs.  The cop got to the point where he was more or less choking kids out with his billy club to carry them out to the parking lot.  This is where I ended up taking a shot from the billy club in the arm.  The cop was dragging out some kid that was flailing his arms and the asshole officer and the stupid kid fall in to me and I take the ball end of the billy club in the shoulder.  I have never been a fan of police and last night makes me hate them even more.  How were they protecting and serving anyone in this bar?  These kids were just moshing and having a good time.  There were no fights, just kids getting crazy listening to music they love.

Overall, it was a great night, Dillinger put on an amazing show as always so I was very happy.  My arm is pretty damn sore today, It's a little bit discolored from where I took the hit.  But I guess it was worth it to see a rocking show.