post 101

By anders pearson 16 Sep 2000

last night, 6 or 7 of us went over to the east side for authentic cheap indian food at this little restaurant mimi’s punjabi friend Rich introduced us to. afterwards, a couple of us were going to split and go to the foetus (aka: foetus Under glass, you’ve got foetus on your breath, phillip and his foetus vibrations, foetus over frisco, foetus on the beach, scraping foetus off the wheel, foetus über frisco, wiseblood, the foetus of excellence, the foetus all-nude revue, the flesh volcano, clint ruin, foetus interruptus, foetus inc, garage monsters, steroid maximus, foetus in excelsis corruptus deluxe, etc) show at the Knitting Factory. the others were going to go to a movie but couldn’t decide what to see. somehow, they ended up all just coming to the foetus show (the dynamics of decision making in large groups of people is fascinating). when we got to the Knitting Factory, there was a line around the corner and down the block of people waiting to get in. what happened next, i don’t entirely understand, but i strongly suspect the intervention of the Ancient Bavarian Illuminati, or the Freemasons, or some other even more secret secret society. Rich noticed a necklace the bouncer was wearing. the bouncer recognized a bracelet Rich was wearing. a nod and a secret handshake later, we were all escorted past the line into the club and given the run of the place.

the people i was with seemed to enjoy the show despite not even knowing who foetus was. i was a little disappointed though. the sound was awful; you couldn’t hear the vocals at all (and Thirlwell’s voice is a really important part of the Foetus sound) and the guitars were feeding back painfully every few seconds. foetus albums are almost symphonic in their complex arrangements and layering of hundreds of instruments. live, there were only 5 people playing (including, i think Todd from Cop Shoot Cop on bass) so they just didn’t play a lot of the more complex songs and stripped down the arrangements on a lot of other songs. and they never played my favorite song “Verklemmt” :( aside from the sound though, it wasn’t a bad show.