King Freak Drinking Blood in the Arena

[vovat]

Beth made a kind of last-minute decision last week that we should see the Freaks on Parade Tour with Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper, neither of whom we're that familiar with as musicians, although I think we've seen all of the movies Rob has directed; she's kind of an apologist for them. It was at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey, which is right off the Garden State Parkway, and has free parking. We noticed people tailgating in the parking lot, and there were a few vehicles with Trump flags, which seemed kind of out of place. I know Alice, while usually not vocal about his politics, said something in favor of George W. Bush at one point, but still. After getting into the venue, Beth got a cheeseburger and I got a hot dog, and I didn't think mine was that great as far as hot dogs go, but whatever. I was hungry. I guess Rob isn't like Morrissey in imposing his veganism on the venues where he plays. There were a total of four acts on stage during the show, with Filter and Ministry as openers. Beth recognized one song by the former, and I don't think either of us knew the latter.

They did do a song called "Goddamn White Trash," so I wonder what the Trump flag people thought of that, if indeed they were there.

Alice is an entertaining performer, with gimmicks including a snake on his shoulders for "Snakebite" a dancing monster for "Feed My Frankenstein," and a straight jacket for "Ballad of Dwight Fry."

Towards the end of the show, he did an illusion of being beheaded in a guillotine, with his wife Sheryl in a Marie Antoinette costume dancing with his head afterwards.

He closed with "School's Out," which makes sense as the song everybody knows, but less so in that it's right after Labor Day. Surely that's in the same category as wearing white shoes. It included a bit of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." Rob's performance was also heavy on props and media, with video screens playing in the background during every song. During "Well, Everybody's Fucking in a UFO," there were both a big alien statue and a dancer dressed as an alien onstage.

There was also a lot of fire.

I wasn't familiar with most of the set, but I had heard "More Human Than Human" before, and the closer was "Dragula," which Beth and I decided was our late cat Reagan's favorite song. I suspect the "Lords of Salem" song was in the movie, and they showed clips from the film during it, but it hadn't stuck with me. Looking at the setlist, Rob is definitely good at coming up with evocative song titles, mostly in keeping with his love of old horror movies. And two of the ones he did at that show were based on puns about Dracula. It was pretty different from most of the concerts we go to, but it was definitely an entertaining experience. While we took a bus from the parking lot to the gates (which, by the way, was playing "Dragula"), but the buses were slow to arrive coming back, so we joined a bunch of other people in just walking there.