Bloody Show - Memphis Made (outdoor stage), Gonerfest, Memphis, TN - September 28, 2018

[from Columbus, OH] Lots of small festivals will have two stages so that one’s setting up while the other’s on so the crowd can just switch stages, no dead time. Not so here. SO I’d just been wasting time at the singer/songwriter stage when there was a proper rock band on the other stage – tragic. They were filling in for Trouble Boys from Austin, who had collided with a semi. No fatalities but the band’s name made it all sort of disconcerting. I also wasn’t sure if it was two bands melding but youtube videos make me think not – this was all Bloody Show. I quite liked them. They had a more Goner (the label hosting this festival) sound than the previous bands I’d seen. And they were Dead Serious. Hardcore. Very tight – a unified machine of sound. Their lyrics were apolitical or troubling (“driving drunk,” “now I’m soaked in puke piss and shit… I don’t give a fuck about myself… I don’t want your worthless help”) – and so I had to dismiss any old school punk in their sound – too nihilistic. They thanked Trouble Boys, Eric Friedl (co-owner of Goner Records). They said “fuck the police” – which became an ongoing theme at this concert. Honestly, their onslaught of sound, as tidy as it was, was sort of exhausting to a person who was already pretty exhausted but I also found each of the band members uniquely interesting. I always appreciate a Black band member in genres like this, lead vocalist in this band, sweating fiercely. He did a super Sonics-sounding song about being born the son a psychic witch, dedicating it to his mom who’s been dead 11 years – it was pleasantly unclear whether it was.  I also always appreciate a female drummer, and this one was particularly self-composed, fierce, and non-shit-giving. But I mostly mostly enjoyed the guitarist who was wearing jean shorts, black tube socks, and sort-of-schmancy moderately-glittery white slip-ons.

No clear subculture, a touch of gender bend … the sort of non-conforming I enjoy most. In one enthusiastic guitar kick (necessary, of course, for proper strumming), his glittery shoe was tossed from his foot, shot over the audience, and landed majestically on the blue tarp over us. I was delighted by the audience member who couldn’t stop being delighted by this event – poking his friend to look up at the sad shadow of that pretty shoe on the ugly blue tarp. And then there was moisture on my head. I slapped my head and looked up to find the offending bird …. but only a girl, feet dangling from the top of the concrete walkway I was slumped against, apologizing for slopping her beer on me.