October 18, 2024

Howdy folks. I hope you've had a good week and are surviving the election season. I'm feeling a little less tense now that Trump is leading (slightly) in the polls. I'm constantly on Youtube, though, watching all the prognosticators (Red Eagle Politics and Depressed Ginger are my favorites), and I won't be able to completely relax until it's over. I went to see Judas Priest on Tuesday (Oct. 15) at the Youtube Theater in Inglewood, inside the SoFi Stadium complex. Had a double traffic nightmare on the way down - it took 45 minutes to get from my apartment to the 405 freeway onramp at Nordhoff. That's 45 minutes to go 4.5 miles, and no, I am not exaggerating. After that, it was smooth sailing all the way to where the 405 connects to the 10. Then, about 6 miles before the Manchester offramp, the freeway turned into a parking lot. All told, it took two hours to go 27 miles. I won't be going to any more venues that require using the 405, but this show was more than worth it. I also got to see the outside of the massive (and massively impressive) SoFi Stadium. It's without doubt the Stadium of the Fyoochum. I'd love to see the inside but I imagine a Rams game must cost minimum 200 bucks, so alas, it will probably never happen. Inglewood has scored big on the stadium/arena front. They've now got the Intuit Dome opening just down the schtreet from The Forum and SoFi. It's gonna be hard for Staples Center and LA Live to compete. You have to walk halfway around SoFi to get to Youtube, a smallish, 4000 seater similar to Nokia at LA Live. Inglewood is trying to put Staples out of bidness, but I like Nokia better because you can take the subway there. Driving on the 405 is a Grade A nightmare. Even getting to the 405 is hell. 45 minutes to go four and a half miles...

Can you say "Escape from L.A.?" Please, Mr. Trump, make America great again. Los Angeles used to be such a great, great place. Now, it's Blade Runner.

But Judas Priest redeemed the whole trip. They were so far off the charts, and it's quite an accomplishment because few other (no other?) bands have done what they have done, which is to replace two classic members and still present a show of equal brilliance. It's a different kind of show, admittedly, because Tipton and Downing were legends, whose twin solos not only cut to the bone through the musculature of the riffs, but were also highly musical. As blistering as the solos were, they had memorable melodies, you could whistle them. Such was the level of musicality in that era. But the heart and soul of the band is now the Faulkner/Sneap duo. They look like two pirate ship captains from the 16th century, flying the JP Flag proudly, riffing with the same power and exactitude as their predecessors while soloing with a fusillade of notes in the modern style. Watching them, you understand why Britannia rules the waves and likely always will. It's Judas Priest on steroids. Metal God Halford is singing (almost) like it's 1981, and his range is light years better than in 2005, when he was overweight and giving up on the high notes. Now, he's killing it (with a little help from a delay/sustain on occasion). But overall, it's become the Richie Faulkner show. He's the best of the "shredder" guitarists. Yeah, he plays a trillon notes, but he's an emotive shredder, and now that I think of it, he may be the only member of that category.

Grimsley (who came with me) mentioned that Scott Travis has improved. "He's turned into an octopus"! And I agree. He used to be a solid-but-mechanical metal drummer who relied on the double kick bass drum pattern. He's more inventive now, playing to accommodate the song, which is what made Dave Holland so great. Holland will always be the drummer who gave Priest their gigantic, booming sound, but Travis has finally come into his own. It was a jaw dropping show. We had trouble finding the car (I street-parked to avoid the fitty dollar parking fee) but the drive home was a piece of cake. 

  I've been revisiting the Judas Priest catalogue since then, reaquainting myself with albums like "Defenders of the Faith" and "Turbo". This got me thinking about the history of Heavy Metal and it's worth noting that the first Black Sabbath album was released in England on February 13, 1970, two months before the breakup of The Beatles was announced on April 10 of that year. Think about the musical vision of Tony Iommi, who was just 22 at the time. To single-handedly come up with that sound, in the era of early Elton John and James Taylor? I mean, The Beatles were still together when he invented those riffs. The music on that first Black Sabbath album arrived so far out of left field (even considering the presence, at the time, of heavy artists like Deep Purple, Cream and Jimi). Who ever heard anything like the song "Black Sabbath"? My goodness. I've come to think of Tony Iommi as a musical mastermind the equivalent of Sirs Blackmore and Page. He invented heavy metal, but the point is that his sound was as radically different as possible at that time. Could his Italian heritage have had an influence?  

Anyhow, that's my musical news of the week. Everything else is As Usual. I'm trying to acclimate myself to the realization that "1989" wasn't limited to that year but has been an Ongoing Thing, at least through 2009. I'm poring over my journal from '09, looking for clues. According to the daily entries, it was one hell of a psychic year. I wonder if the bad guys felt this. Do they have psychic abilities, or are they just connected by their iPhones? I am gonna blow this thing out of the water, I can guarantee you that. My journal is the key. Well, that and my amazing memory of course.

This being Halloween Month, I've been watching nothing but horror movies, so we'll resume our Montgomery Clift retrospective in November. We only have two more Monty Movies to go. In the meantime, I've been sticking to old favorites like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, in movies I've seen multiple times. Last night, I watched "The Old Dark House," and I've harped on this before, but James Whale has gotta be put up there on the Mount Rushmore of directors and artists in general. I know he was inspired by German Expressionism, but he took it to another level by making it larger-than-life. He basically invented the "under the chin" Monster Lighting and gave his creatures a realistic look. Frankenstein really does look like he's made out of cobbled-together body parts. Whale excelled at making the gruesome look real, and he could also do Sinister: look at the mean-spirited performance he got out of Claude Rains in "The Invisible Man". He's got three horror classics to his name (the two I've mentioned and "Bride of Frankenstein"), one near-classic in "Old Dark House", and he also directed the definitive 1936 version of the classic musical "Showboat" with Irene Dunne and Paul Robeson. But we're talking Halloween, and the thing with "Frankenstein", "Bride of Frankenstein" and "Invisible Man" is that they are age-proof. Those three films are as scary and weird now as they were upon release 90 years ago. Maybe even scarier and weirder (because nothing is weird anymore...)

Well, anyhow, I somehow keep going in the midst of all this madness. The bad guys have someone (or some system) that protects them, or This Thing would've been over years ago. They don't go to jail, even though some of them have done monstrous things that law enforcement must surely know about. I mean, if I know what they've done, if I've been able to figure it out and remember it despite everything that's been done to me to block and bury my memory, then surely the police know, or the FBI, or someone. So yeah, the bad guys are protected in some way, and seem blase or blithe about it. They seem not to have a care in the world. But God is gonna get 'em, and one day they will be surprised. That's all I know for certain.