Showing posts with label October Rust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label October Rust. Show all posts

Friday, April 14, 2017

Seven Years Ago Today Peter Steele Left Us

Amazing image/lyric pairing by nervennahrung

As I sit at my computer typing this morning I'm listening to Swans's The Glowing Man, disc one. It's very zen and flows perfectly from my half hour of mediation and ongoing efforts to put proverbial pen-to-paper. But in the background there's a growing sense of unease, as if I've remembered something but not fully realized it yet. Then it hits me: April. April 14th.

Interestingly enough, upon waking this morning I spent an hour or so finally reading the first trade of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's The Wicked and The Divine, which centers around the death and rebirth of gods as rock stars.

Peter Steele, I miss your music. I love what you gave us and will want more until I follow you out to the next big Halloween Party. To commemorate your passing here's an absolutely shattering live version of one of the songs I always go back to. Love You to Death illustrates how Steele - and by extension Type O as a whole - could pen beautiful, emotionally resonant epics and place them beside their pitch black satire without ever breaking the overall tone they perfected over the course of almost, but not quite, twenty years.

Rest in Peace. Now time to break out the Type O.










Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Things I Didn't Say: Wolf Moon



The previous entry is fairly simplified – I desperately long to find a way to eek this Autumn tone out of my soul and onto paper where others can possibly feel it as much as I do. For lack of a word and I suppose feeling melodramatic enough to accentuate said mood I'll say that I commune with this time of year possibly stronger than any other. When I was younger and there were actual seasons in the Midwest other than six months of winter/six months of summer with a few sporadic portals of the transitories thrown in here and there, never fully making a 'Season' per se, I remember what a switch music was in this time. I'd go from my summer, hang-out tunes like John Spencer Blues Xplosion, Beastie Boys and Cibo Matto to NIN, The Cure and Type O Negative like that (*snap*). Over the last several years I spent in Chicago I saw that change as the seasons waned, and here in LALA land, well, it's a fairly even keel all the time. I'm not really complaining – I didn't ever want to have to live through a winter again unless A) we live in the UK (ultimate life goal in the category of positioning for both of us) or, B) have a Thompson-esque compound in Colorado. But while I don't miss the winter I miss the rain, and I miss the Autumns of my younger days.

I remember shortly after my friend Jake died. This was like 1997 and he'd been pretty much the only person that connected to this aspect of my brain. We were both HUGE Type O fans and would often spend entire nights just laying around baked out of our minds listening to their albums (only up to October Rust at that point – Jake, you don't know what you missed in subsequent years man). They were the sonic embodiment of Autumn (still are) and something about the combination of the buzz, the music and that sharp, chill Autumn air that grants such clarity morphed. This is about the time I realized I had what is commonly referred to in the psychological community as 'Synesthesia' and man – pinning my senses together with those disparate elements really took me to another place. A place I can still achieve sometimes if the air is right and the music appropriate.

I went there after Jake died. I drove my old wood-paneled dodge mini-van West into the last, dying strains of sunlight one evening, parked at a random forest preserve and listened to this song. I don't know how long I sat there in the diminishing light, or how many times I listened the song, but finally something snapped and I suddenly found myself walking into the woods, disappearing into the slow, thick fog rolling out from beneath the trees, a inspirational carpet that beckoned me along a path into the thicket, amidst strange, night-time animal noises and the reverberations of Peter Steele's haunting vocals and then all at once, I began to run.
I ran for an undecipherable amount of time and distance; I ran because I couldn't stand still, walk or sit any more. My best friend was dead, my world was shattered after a not-so long ago mending (but that's a story for a different time, like when my first novel eventually gets picked up and published) and my eyes were alive with tears. But there I was, running like a madman, like a wild animal beneath the rising moon, shaking with the raw intoxication that that Autumn air can bestow upon those who can surrender to it. Running with nowhere to go but back to my car (eventually), back to my home, back to my life which, though I didn't believe it then, got better.

Thank You Peter, Kenny, Johnny Josh (and Sal in the early days). Thank you for the a soundtrack to a night I will never forget and that will always grant me strength and passion in a world seemingly derived to extinguish them.