Be quiet and let 'em rock
I can barely shuffle my feet; my calves are in so much pain. I pull my heels on because fashion is essentially another form of masochism and I so rarely wear flats. I try to keep my head up; the nape of my neck throbs painfully, like someone sucker-punched me in the back of my head and then attempted to guillotine me with a block of wood. I pop an Advil.
It’s Tuesday today. It’s been three days since the Deftones gig at the World Trade Center and my body’s still feeling the effects of a solid hour and a half (plus-plus) of moshing and headbanging. The residual aches and pains are, strangely enough, a pleasant reminder that on Saturday night, I had the time of my life.
I gush and gush and gush about how awesome the gig was on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and someone on the Internet asks me if I’ve been a fan since the first album. “Adrenaline” was released in 1995, when I was eight. I answer honestly, “No.” Did he really expect a second grader to be listening to Root and 7 Words? (I don’t think I’ll ever understand this kind of pissing contest. Does it matter how long you’ve been a fan? I like Joy Division and I wasn’t even a dirty thought when Ian Curtis died; does that invalidate my enjoyment? Does that make me unworthy of getting my groove on to Transmission?)
Iwalked into the WTC on Saturday night with a few reservations. When you love a band that much, when you’ve listened to their albums again and again over a span of nearly a decade (and for many, even longer than that), you can’t help developing high expectations. Will they sound as bone-crushingly awesome as they do on their records? Will Chino Moreno be able to hit (and then sustain) all those crazy notes? And most importantly, will they play everything you want to hear?
YouTube videos suggested that, while the band would probably be technically perfect, the same might not hold true for vocalist Moreno. With six albums under their belt, I couldn’t really get my hopes up that they’d play all my favorites. But from the second they kicked off the show with Birthmark, followed by Engine No. 9, and crowd favorites Be Quiet And Drive and My Own Summer, all reservations flew out the WTC doors. I think everyone in the crowd knew we were about to be blown away.
It was absolute chaos. Half-something international school kids, local rockstars, burly metalheads, drunken college boys, shy high school girls; scores of people just started moshing and singing along; one big, breathing body. It’s scary at first, when guys clad in basketball jerseys start barreling past you to get into the middle of the mayhem, but once you stop worrying about getting your teeth bashed in and let yourself start having a good time, the energy is infectious. It doesn’t matter that your limbs feel like they’re about to fall off. It doesn’t matter that your lungs can’t suck in any more oxygen, that your voice starts to crack as you try to match Chino Moreno word for word. You don’t stop. You can’t.
The band gives us a break about six or seven songs in by playing the slow, atmospheric Digital Bath, one of my (many) favorites. We catch our breaths. We give our muscles a break. We sing along. The energy doesn’t drop for a second.
I think it’s proof of how brilliant they are that the entire crowd sang along (passionately, I might add) to Sextape, a song off their latest album “Diamond Eyes,” arguably the most romantic track they’ve ever penned, with as much gusto as they did to Be Quiet and Drive. It’s amazing that a band capable of inciting absolute madness with some brutal guitar riffs can also get you all sweet and sentimental. But I digress.
Deftones played 25 songs that night: a solid mix of hits, favorites and surprises from all their albums. The band was sonic perfection, their frontman effortlessly charismatic (and pitch perfect). They were better than any of us could have imagined, and I feel terrible for every Deftones fan who wasn’t in the crush of the crowd that night. You missed something incredible.
The tickets were pricey, but I think it’s safe to say that everyone who was there last night would gladly shell out more hard-earned cash to see the band again. When the band left the stage and the lights came back up, there wasn’t a smidge of disappointment to be seen. Sure, later on there would be talk of songs that didn’t get played, but there was no bitterness about it. We were all satisfied beyond belief. It was the gig of a lifetime.
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Keep the mosh pits alive! E-mail me at vivat.regina@yahoo.com, follow me on Tumblr: vivatregina.tumblr.com.
