MACHINE HEAD NEWS!

July 30, 2013, posted by Crumbs.

The General Journals: Ultraman

It’s 5 AM and we’re headed to Moody Deer Lake in Kentucky for a day off! Not just a boring sit-in-a-parking-lot day off, this one will be filled with ski boats, Sea Doos, and our friend John is renting a Pontoon boat. We'll be tubing, hopefully wakeboarding, swimming, and drinking beer all day, and MAN, I can't wait!! I love summer for this type of shit, and be able to do this while on tour is not just really cool, but to me, special as well.

As for the beer I'll be drinking while on the lake, I myself will be drinking gluten-free beer, as I have been eating gluten-free for the last 2 months. I had been getting a lot of inflammation/sore joints and even though I ate a lot of sprouted breads and brown rice pastas before, it's one of the few thing I had never tried to see if it had any effect. Not sure how good it's working, but it feels good to eat less gluten, a lot of meat and salads, and getting carbs from fruit, honey, black beans, and brown rice. It's good to switch it up and break food habits.

I found a couple of gluten-free beers that are really good actually, it takes some effort to find them, but they’re definitely out there. I tend to enjoy Blue Moon-style beers, and love the orange or lemon added in them. One gluten-free brewer called New Planet has a "Tread Lightly Ale" and a "Blonde Ale" that are awesome, I found another brewer called New Grist out of Milwaukee that make a damn good beer, and when I was in Cleveland the other day (at our ridiculously amazing off-date with Mastodon), I tried a gluten-free Strawberry Blonde Ale from Dogfish Brewing Company that was fucking GREAT!

I believe the one thing that makes it gluten-free is it's brewed with something other than "wheat", tried some of the ones brewed with sorghum grass, (not too sure about those ?!), but these other beers are surprisingly good, and bizarrely, even if I drink a shit-ton, I don't get a hangover/headache the next day, BONUS!

Another thing I'm looking forward to about the lake is that we will have a full on chef manning the BBQ for us. Jagermeister is one of the sponsors of Mayhem and they’ve partnered up with Chris Santos the judge from the Food Network show "Chopped" to make a line of Jager based sauces, he is a HUGE metalhead/Machine Head fan and has been out on the tour for the last week making the most insanely amazing food. Seriously, the best ribs I've ever had, and these god damn mini-burgers called "sliders" with a "bacon-jam" that are TO-DIE-FOR. I think pretty much everyone is very freakin stoked to have him around on the tour, and to top it all off he's a super cool dude.

This Mayhem run has been fucking ridiculous. Shows have been so freakin good. We played Chicago 2 nights ago, and it was just absolute chaos. Chicago is always a great city for MH but this was just plain retarded, they are fast becoming the Metal Capital of the United States! Last night was Detroit who were some bad mother-truckers and definitely keen to hold onto their "Rock City" title, they now hold the record for most circle pits of the entire tour, with 6 massive pits, including one behind the sound desk!! Gotta mention Hartford, Connecticut which was insane, as was freakin' Noblesville, Indiana... holy mackerel, bat-shit-crazy!!!

All the bands are really good out here, and I've caught every single band on the tour so far, and there is something good I could say about every one of them, but if there was a "hot band", the "hot band of the tour award" goes to Motionless In White. Good band, kinda Bleeding Through meets Marilyn Manson, fast with heavy breakdowns, but with singy bits, rock parts and melodic keyboards that add a New Wave feel to it. Gothy image, lots of make-up, but so over-the-top it's cool.

For main stage though, I'm crazy about Rob Zombie, I could watch this show every day. Much to the chagrin of a few of my bandmasters I’ve never been a KISS fan, but it's like the new KISS. Seriously, this show is just so god damn cool and on so many different levels it's ridiculous! I mean from the stage outfits, to the visuals, to the opening sequence with the weird masks, costume changes, robot monsters, giant devils, giant boom-boxes, break-dancers in skeleton outfits, it’s just got so much going on. The first time I watched it, when he put up "Ultraman" clips on the video screens in "More Human Than Human" I just about shit myself. As a HUGE Ultraman NERD when I was a kid, (collecting all the action figures and books, posters, etc.), to see that in a metal show...I was like "wow, Rob Zombie really is the coolest motherfucker on earth!" Let’s be honest here, who the fuck puts Ultraman clips on their video screen? NO ONE... no one except Zombie.

About 6 months ago our babysitter played Rob Zombie for my youngest son Wyatt (who's now 6 1/2) both him and my oldest Zander (who just turned 9) dig it, but Wyatt in particular got really into it. Neither myself or Genevra knew this though, so when Wyatt came up to me one day and said "dada, can I hear the song that goes "hey yeah, I'm the one blah blah blah blah" I was like "Huh?" Is that Zombie? I hadn't played it for him so it took me a second, but soon enough I pulled it up on Spotify and he was rocking out to it, a few days later I asked him if he wanted to see the video for "Dragula," he watched it, and MAN, it was like a lightbulb went off in his head. He FLIPPED OUT, I mean, he went C-R-A-Z-Y, it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, I've never seen him flip out over a band like that, now he's doing all the moves, and the headbang, and the hands and faces, it was AWESOME!

So as the tour got closer I told him "you know dada is playing with Rob Zombie, do you wanna watch the show?" He was all over it. My wife asked me to do some recon the day before the Bay Area show in LA to make sure the shows wasn't too crazy / inapproriate, and after watching it, I decided we'd skip Wyatt and Zander seeing the opening song "Teenage Nosferatu Pussy" which flashes in giant letters the word "PUSSY" across the screen 20 times, (LOL!), but after that it was all good. So there we are, Genevra, Zander, Wyatt and me, all watching Zombie at the Mountain View show, the kids first rock concert (that they really wanted to see) singing along, throwing horns, head-banging like, well, kids, it was awesome, really really cool.

I can almost guarantee this is not what every American family does (and from time to time, why the hell not?), but that's what our family was doing, and it was perfect. This is life, not everything is going to go the way you want, when you want it. I feel the sooner you realize that the better, but you have to find your times of peace and yeah, perfection whenever possible. For some it’s when the day is done gathered at the dinner table, for others it might be at a church of some kind, but for the Heavy Metal family Flynn? We found it amongst the masks, costumes, monsters, giant devils, boom-boxes, break-dancers...

And yes... Ultraman!


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