Four or seven years ago today...
posted on 13 Dec 2005 under category Meta
It was exactly seven years ago today that I saw Death for the last time.
Little did I know it would be the last time ANYONE would see Death.
The last official date of the tour was the previous night, December 12, 1998. I saw the whole tour schedule and was quite pissed that they didn’t have an Atlanta date, but a couple of weeks before, just after thanksgiving that year, I scanned a copy of the ‘Loaf (Creative Loafing, a local entertainment paper) and saw the show - “DEATH AND HAMMERFALL - THE MASQUERADE, DEC. 13”.
Anyway, I got my ticket, went to the show, and enjoyed it immensely. It helped that everyone was having a good time - I guess because of it being the last night of the tour, they just kept horsing around during the set and afterward, even putting Richard Christy on stage in some fucked-up leotard thing singing for “The Waffleheads” (Various members of Death and Hammerfall on different instruments than they normally play, all wearing those paper hats the cooks wear at Waffle House), doing a cover of The Perpetrator’s “Let Your Tongue Roll”. Nothing but smiles and laughs all around.
And then three years later, to the day, I open up my e-mail and read Metal Nightmare zine author Tom Wren’s eulogy for Chuck Schuldiner. I knew he’d been fighting cancer, but didn’t follow his progress all that closely. I was shocked. And sad. Over the years I’d seen the band four times. I met various members a couple of times, and even spent a few hours hanging out with Chuck on the tour bus one night through a happy accident of speech.
It’s become fashionable in some nutless circles to talk shit about him and his accomplishments. All I can say is ‘fuck them’. From what I could see he was a decent person who had a great gift for playing guitar and songwriting, and while he left us quite a legacy with eight full-length studio albums, the growth from each to the next kept us all wondering “wow - where’s he gonna take this vision next?”
Where, indeed…
But as the old guard dies, the new guard steps forward, inspired by those who have gone before. Seeing the changes wrought on the metal landscape in Death’s wake let us all know that he may be gone, but definitely will not be forgotten.
Somehow, that makes my next post all the more fitting, as I can still remember just like it was yesterday how walking into that comics-games-music store on Merrimon Ave. in Asheville NC and buying “Leprosy”, and hearing it for the first time, changed my vision of what music could be - in fact, changed my very life.
(Am I recursive now? I’m having memories about my memories. I still commemorate his passing and his final show, and I’m one of only about a lucky 1000 or so who can say that. It’s poetic that his passing can be tied to his last live show, and it’s satisfying to me that my last memory of him was seeing him have such a great damn time - he was beaming the whole time, just having a blast by having a great record, a great backing band, and a great opener, one that he certainly felt like he could take out with him without worrying about the styles not matching. I still remember him and the other Death guys standing off to the right (if you’ve been to Heaven in The Masquerade, you know that ramp by the door that headed back towards backstage - they were up there) just smiling and getting a kick out of watching Hammerfall playing their hearts out.
And nothing, I mean NOTHING, in my life will ever erase the memory of Richard Christy in that leotard singing “Let your tongue roll over my bunghole - you’re my kind of girl!”)