Not many bands last 30 years. Not many continue to crank out new material, either.
But KMFDM has marched on through many iterations, founders coming and going, and new lineups that freshen up the sound.
I’ve been a fan since the Nihil era – KMFDM’s glory days. The golden age when each new album, from Angst to Symbols, did better than the one before it.
And like a lot of people, it was “Juke Joint Jezebel” that turned me on to the band. I should say – it turned me on to a world of music I didn’t know before.
The current lineup is a talented group. I do enjoy the twin-guitar gallop of Steve (above) and Jules. Andy’s live drums add a new dimension that makes many live KMFDM songs better.
My buddy Don and I saw KMFDM at the Magic Stick, a smaller venue than usual, along Detroit’s Woodward Ave. It’s actually the perfect place to see the band: small, intimate, and easy to get to.
A lot of the new stuff is so-so, but Sascha always throws in plenty of the classic stuff. “Light,” “DIY,” “Anarchy” – these are the songs we came to scream. Some of the new stuff, like “Kunst,” sounds great live, too. But I think the majority of KMFDM fans prefer the classics.
Who knows how much longer KMFDM will be around. Forty more years? Fifty?
KEEP SHELLY IN ATHENS “RECOLLECTION” [DIR. LAMAR+NIK] (by LAMAR+NIK)
Can’t say enough about this song, and this album, by Keep Shelly in Athens.
Got “Recollection” as a freebie on Amazon MP3 a while back, and put September 16 – the day At Home came out – on my calendar as a must-buy. Now I’m gobbling up everything Keep Shelly in Athens does.
For the video, I had always pictured something a little sunnier in my head: clouds and lens flares and Polaroid color schemes. I guess for that you can check out the promo video.
Anyway. This song has been on repeat since August. Glad to see they made a proper video for it.
We often do things that we regret when we’re out of our heads. Drunk, in love, low blood sugar – whatever the reason, something causes our brain to reboot, usually the day after, and look back on our behavior in horror.
But at concerts, at least we’re doing things we regret with other people. It’s fine to act like a screw-loose reptile when everyone else is just as goofy as you.
Look around you. See all those people screaming their heads off? See how they’re gyrating and dancing in a sea of other lunatics? Notice how they don’t care who’s watching, because (probably) no one really is?
That’s why I go to concerts: to utterly lose myself in the songs I love. These kids, just like me, were having the time of their lives – and they didn’t care who was watching.
The difference is that my enjoyment didn’t stem from the music on stage. No, it came from the kids losing their collective minds. This is why I want to take pictures. They mean something. I mean, look at them. They’re in ecstasy.
Not on Ecstasy, mind you. No, there’s something about a collective musical experience that makes drugs or alcohol totally redundant. Who needs booze when you have grooves?
It makes my heart ache to see these pictures, the day after, and realize what fun we all had that night. They’ll remember the songs and their friends singing along.
Perhaps it was just my childhood fascination with all things printed and ephemeral, but I do feel a definite disconnect now between myself and my –all digital– music collection. I personally like the idea of a physical object to represents an otherwise unsee-able art form.
I’ve mentioned this before, many times: I prefer buying my music on clunky old CDs because (a) I like having a physical backup and (b) it feels better holding music in my hands. That may be an outdated philosophy, now that all the kids are getting their music on Amazon MP3 and iTunes, but it’s especially true in instances like photography.
For instance, I don’t want some boorish electronic photo frame, cycling through pictures at my new house. Photos capture moments, and should stand as artifacts of the time and place.
Thing is, it’s been years since I’ve printed photos for display. Flickr and Facebook are the new digital photo albums.
But now I have photo frames to fill, and fill them I will.
I have work to do, and lots of it, and I have music to listen to, lots of it. Work is good for me. And music is even better.
So they must coexist.
I would go so far as to say I can’t do anything productive unless there’s music on. In fact, I will do just about anything for anyone as long as there’s music playing in the background.
So while Sandwich struggles to combine the two, I struggle when they’re not combined. My typical workflow at the day job has me picking out something on the iPhone, letting the album wash over me, and then digging in to the work.
Brainless tasks, like stuffing envelopes or painting a room, are even better with music – because you can be both there and with the music. Or at least I can.
“I’ve lost myself again
It’s a nightmare
But it’s clear
It will end
But when?”
– Type O Negative, “White Slavery”
Peter Steele came into my life through dumb luck.
My high school buddy Nathan and I were playing “Magic: The Gathering” at his place, listening one of those satellite TV stations that does nothing but play a certain category of music. I was probably 16 or 17 at the time. We’re sitting there, and this thundering, brooding rock came on, and I asked what it was.
“Oh, that’s Type O Negative,” Nathan said. “Their frontman is a giant, seven-foot-tall guy with that deep voice. They sing mostly about sex and death.”
Sold, I thought. What more do I need to know?
But actually I forgot about that encounter for a few months, until later that summer I was browsing through the CD section of Jackson’s Circuit City when I found the Type O Negative section. Browsing through the albums, I took a chance on the newest one – October Rust.
It turns out I picked the right one, because October Rust changed my life. It has since risen to the top two or three albums I listen to, and it introduced me to something I had been looking for. Here, I discovered, was a perfect blend of lush, methodical, brooding music. It was funny, heavy, and catchy as hell. I remember “Burnt Flowers Falling” being stuck in my head for months, and after repeated listens the whole thing became a classic.
From there, I caught up on the rest of Type O’s catalog, with the (what I felt) uneven Bloody Kisses, the album that gave Pete and the band their first big hit with “Black No. 1.” I had to wait two or three long years until World Coming Down came out my first year of college.
That was the thing with Type O. You had to wait Tool-long periods of time, usually four years, between albums. What you had, you had to stick with, until some other life-altering event in Peter’s life made another album necessary.
For me, World Coming Down was almost too much. It was their darkest album yet, dealing with death and suicide and – for the first time that I can think of – Pete’s cocaine habit. And from that album on, Type O albums weren’t immediately grabbing. Hell, I didn’t like WCD after the first few spins. It wasn’t until I spent a year or two with it that it began to grow on me.
When you give them enough time, however, they become a part of your standby list. Need a CD to get you to work in the morning? Grab Dead Again and skip to “Profit of Doom.”
I remember printing out reams and reams of Type O guitar tabs in my high school computer class. I’d get done with my work so early that the teacher gave me permission to dick around on the Internet. So I’d head to a Type O site and print off all the guitar music, and learn those dead-heavy chords in dropped-B tuning.
I remember walking to my first in-college job, at Lincoln Elementary in Adrian, rocking World Coming Down as the maple leaves fell around me, and thinking that Type O was the soundtrack for fall.
I remember “Anesthesia” getting me through a few breakups.
Are a thousand tears worth a single smile?
When you give an inch, will they take a mile?
Longing for the past but dreading the future
If not being used, well then you’re a user and a loser
Type O drummer Johnny Kelly, in the After Dark video, called what Pete did “sonic therapy.”
For Pete, is was for himself more than anyone. Over the years, the music became less about girls and sex and more about family and addictions.
During the interim between Life is Killing Me (2003) and Dead Again, Pete faced all kinds of wacky stuff: incarceration at Riker’s Island, a stint in rehab, the death of his mom, coming back to Catholicism. Through all that, he never lost his sense of (dark) humor. And I can’t speak highly enough of the end product: Dead Again fucking rocks, and I’ve listened to it constantly since 2007. Constantly. It’s now right up there with October Rust in terms of rotation.
That got me thinking a few days ago. Dead Again was released in 2007, and we usually wait about four years between albums, meaning new Type O was due to hit in 2011.
Turns out I was right. The band’s statement on the Type O web site put it best:
Ironically Peter had been enjoying a long period of sobriety and improved health and was imminently due to begin writing and recording new music for our follow up to “Dead Again” released in 2007.
Now he’s gone. But as Don said, there’s bound to be some music in some deep, dark crypt that has yet to be released. Let’s hope.
With a recent trip to Iceland to “clean his mental health” behind him and The Profits Of Doom ahead (an early summer release is planned), Steele is non-committal about Type O’s future. And if he did return to making music as a hobby? “Maybe I can start my own website and send out CDs for free to fans, who could send me a donation for what they feel it’s worth,” says the former NYC Parks Department employee. Then he adds – with the slightest hint of self-deprecation – “So I guess I could expect a bag of shit in the mail.”
Pete and his humor. Man, to count the time the guy made me laugh out loud. I remember nearly pissing myself in the Adrian library reading interviews from the guy. As a journalist, Pete would have been a dream interview, full of those “did he really just say that?” moments. His personality was a big as his giant, hulking frame and as deep as his voice.
Hell, the guy did a Playgirl spread. Now that’s having a sense of humor about yourself.
I had no pulse last time I checked
I’d trade my life for self respect
So I say with my ass whipped
There are some things worse than death
I can’t believe I died last night – oh God I’m dead again.
