EXECUTIVE EDITOR BRANDON GEIST: CONFESSIONS OF THE 'RANDOM METAL GUY'

As you might have seen/heard/totally slept through, the Dillinger Escape Plan played Late Night with Conan O’Brien on February 6. The next day, blabbermouth.net posted a video of the performance, which you can see here:

The video elicited a long string of comments, including this one:

posted by : beermenow
2/7/2008 1:21:33 PM
incredible. i love the high five of the random metal guy in the crowd

Well, I have a confession to make: I’m “the random metal guy.”

First, you should know that I’m a fucking huge Dillinger fan, and have been so for a long time. I’m not always so into their albums—which can be, at times, a little too arty/poppy/migraine-inducing for my taste—but I’ve never seen them fail to totally kill it live. The dudes risk life and limb every night and bring a very real danger and unpredictability to whatever venue they’re set on destroying; as a result, many, if not most, of the best shows I’ve ever seen (a list that includes Metallica, Pantera, Neurosis, Rammstein, among others) have been Dillinger shows. I’ve also interviewed guitarist/founder/main man Ben Weinman and vocalist Greg Puciato approximately a billion times for Revolver mag, and they’re really cool guys, which means that as much as I was pulling for them as a fan, now it’s personal.

So when I heard that the band was going to be playing the Conan O’Brien show, I had to be there. Perhaps it has something to do with his barbaric name, but Conan has always shown the most support for metal of any network-television personality I can think of; I remember eagerly staying up to watch Slipknot, Lamb of God, and Mastodon appear on his show. I hadn’t been able to weasel my way into any of those tapings, but this time I was fucking getting in, even if it meant sticking on a fake moustache, picking up a trombone, and impersonating LaBamba. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary, and with a little help from Editor in Chief Tom, I managed to land myself and my eternal +1, Maya, on the V.I.P. list.

Which wasn’t quite as cool as it sounds. When we got to the NBC studios in New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza at 3:45 or so (I’d been told to show up no later than 4 p.m.), we were given wristbands and tickets and told to come back at 4:20. When we returned at 4:15, we were directed into the V.I.P. line along a wall, behind a velvet rope, in what must be the hottest, least-ventilated hallway in the entire sky-rise building. Within seconds Maya and I were both sweating like we were back in the Malaysian rainforest. And since we weren’t allowed to bring beverages into the taping, we had nothing to replenish our quickly diminishing fluids. Needless to say, we weren’t feeling V.I. at all.

Actually, we were nearly at the point of passing out when the older gentleman in a khaki-colored jacket and light-blue button-down shirt behind us asked Maya, “So, who are you guys here for?” “For the, uh, band,” she responded. “I thought so,” he nodded, as if indicating the rather obvious fact that we were the only people in line wearing metal T-shirts (me, Neurosis; the wife, Metallica), or with tattoos (me), or under 30 years old (the wife). (I just turned 30, like, a week ago, dammit.) “So, you know the band?” Maya queried skeptically. The man just pointed to his scruffed-up baseball cap, which, we hadn’t noticed until now, had “The Dillinger Escape Plan” embroidered on it above the bill.

Turned out the dude was Ben Weinman’s dad; he was there with Mrs. Weinman and was really friendly and talkative, obviously very proud of his son and the band. We ended up talking to him for the rest of our otherwise uncomfortable wait. He said he wasn’t really sure if the guys were excited, nervous, or both—“It’s very hard to tell with Ben,” he noted—but added that he did know they were very tired from all the touring they’ve been doing in support of their latest album, Ire Works. He also revealed that they’d be performing the new track “Black Bubblegum”—maybe the poppiest thing DEP has ever written—since, he explained, it was the only song that Conan would let them play. But probably the most scandalous tidbit he disclosed was when I asked him what kind of music he played around the house when Ben was a kid: “I probably shouldn’t tell you,” he smiled, “but mostly original cast Broadway musicals. When I heard ‘Fix Your Face’ or whatever the song is called on the new album, I said to Ben, ‘That part sounds kind of familiar—did you get it from Hello Dolly?’”

After a good 20 minutes of waiting, talking, and sweating, an usher finally came over to our line, unclipped the velvet rope, and directed us all towards a security checkpoint complete with metal detector and stern guards. As we were separated in the rush of people, Ben’s dad said to me and Maya, “So we have to be really loud for them,” encouraging us to hoot and holler for his son’s band—which was completely unnecessary since we had been planning for days to make an unholy racket in support. After successfully penetrating security, we were shoveled into an elevator that automatically—without pushing a button—took us to the Conan floor; there we were ushered into the actual studio, which was surprisingly small, and into our seats—right next to our old friends the Weinmans.

Now, more waiting. Fortunately, the TV monitors hanging above the audience were playing a reel of Late Night highlights, which were fucking hilarious. Then sketch actor Brian McCann (a.k.a. “FedEx Pope” and “Preparation H Raymond”) came out and welcomed us and cracked jokes for a while, followed by Conan himself, who was even taller, paler, and more redheaded than he looks on TV. He was also really cool and totally broke the ice, danced with audience members, gave out hugs, made audience members hug, basically psyched everyone up. Then the Max Weinberg 7 came out and started jamming—cranking out, among other covers, a big-band version of the Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”—psyching everyone up even more. When the taping actually started, spirits were high.

Unfortunately, most of the show itself kind of sucked. The ongoing writer’s strike has made it really hard for talk shows to book big-name guests, since screen actors and others have all sided with the picketers; this dilemma was readily apparent as soon as Conan announced the guests for the day’s show: Besides Dillinger, the Great Throwdini—“the world’s fastest knife-thrower” (though accuracy, not speed, seems to me the most important attribute in that line of work)—and Donny Deutsch, from some CNBC program, whose name I kept “accidentally” mispronouncing as Donny Douche.

As if this weren’t bad enough, about 15 minutes into the shooting, there was a thudding sound from stage left and one of Conan’s stagehands suddenly stumbled off through the back curtain, holding a rag to his head. Then, on the urging of his producer, a slightly flustered Conan hurried the show to a commercial break, during which another stagehand came out with a mop and began cleaning up something neither Maya or I could identify from the floor, but we’re guessing it was blood. And it turned out we were right: A few moments later, once shit had settled down, Conan explained to the confused crowd that the camera crane had just cracked the first stagehand on the head, giving him a nasty cut, and he was off to get stitches. (Needless to say, by the time the show was broadcast, the magic of editing had completely erased the incident from the history books.)

The first thought that popped into my head was “the Dillinger curse.” If you don’t know, the band has been followed by a cloud of misfortune—in 1999 ex-bassist Adam Doll was paralyzed in a car accident; in 2004 guitarist Brian Benoit suffered nerve damage in his left hand and had to leave the band; Greg has had teeth knocked out onstage and his eyebrow sliced off by a guitar headstock; Ben just recently broke his foot. Then, during the recording of Ire Works, all the fish in the studio fish tank mysteriously started dying off, the studio assistant’s car was broken into, producer Steve Evett’s best friend died and his back went out, Mastodon’s Brent Hinds tracked some guest vocals then the next day fell off a trampoline and sliced open his shins, Greg crashed his car, and Ben got sick and started vomiting uncontrollably the very day he was supposed to start tracking his guitars. If this headsplitting accident was a continuation of “the Dillinger curse,” then things did not bode well for the band’s performance.

As the moment of truth approached, Maya and I—and the Weinmans, too, I’m guessing—were getting more and more excited and more and more nervous. Every time Conan said “the Dillinger Escape Plan,” we shouted and applauded our asses off; the audience members next to us seemed think we were insane (“Dillinger who what, huh?”). When the band members finally took to the stage, strapped on their instruments, eyeing the setting and the crowd with disbelief and anticipation, waiting intently for their cue, it was pretty surreal. It’s bizarre to see dudes you’ve been following for years and seen play the shittiest of shitty clubs, about to rock a venue like this. Then I thought I saw Greg recognize me in the crowd and give a nod and a (mischievous?) grin. I nodded back, thinking, Uh oh.

The actual performance was something of a blur—perhaps because I’d lost most of my oxygen roaring encouragement as Dillinger first kicked into it. The band started out a little tentative, I think, but they sounded solid enough; then, the next thing I knew, Greg was bounding into the crowd, right up to my row, and I was standing up, reaching over the shocked couple sitting to my left, and giving him a high five. It just felt like the right thing to do, or rather, it was just my natural instinct—if you’ve ever been to a Dillinger show, you know how fucking interactive they are—the only barrier between performer and spectator there is the fear of bodily harm rightly felt by the audience member—and so a little interaction here felt necessary. Following the high five, Ben jumped onto and then off one of Dillinger’s huge speaker stacks just as Greg kicked it over, and Greg clambered on top of Conan’s desk, belting out “Black Bubblegum”’s catchy-as-hell chorus while Conan rave-danced along with a glow stick in hand. I know correlation is not causation, but I can’t help but think that maybe my high five gave the band an extra jolt of energy, propelling them just a little bit to their performance’s truly awesome climax. (As for the Dillinger curse, I guess sometimes a camera crane to the head is just a camera crane to the head.)

The next day I got no end of shit, congratulations, and, of course, high fives from my friends and co-workers who’d either seen the whole thing go down on TV the night before or on the web that morning. One of my colleagues made a particularly insightful comment: “You know, I was thinking,” he typed to me over IM, “if Greg had left you hanging, you would have looked like the biggest douchebag ever.” Good point. But in the moment, that was something I didn’t even consider, and in hindsight, it was a risk well worth taking and now well rewarded. I’m “the random metal guy,” and it feels fucking awesome.