Death by Earwax

Last Saturday evening I was at the re-opening of a rock club that was immensely popular back in the nineties with angst-ridden college kids who liked to wear black. At the risk of sounding uncool, I will say this: I wasn't one of those kids. I was only there with Effie and Gay on the invitation of our friend the rock maiden, Nikki, whose med school colleague was playing bass guitar for one the bands. I did not pay for my P150 cover charge; Effie did, just to convince me to come along. She said it would be good for us to see something new. I had no idea what I was in for, and apparently, neither did she.

Barely three minutes into the performance of the first band of the night, there were only two thoughts running through my mind-- Paracetamol, and Oh God Get Me Out of Here. Forgive me for what must be a narrow embrace of the many varieties of music, but I did not enjoy having gibberish screamed at me while my eardrums were perforated by guitar-playing that was indistinguishable from the sound of a chainsaw. One singer's shriek was so high-pitched I thought he had laid an egg. Even if I had mercifully lost my hearing completely while they were trying to make the devil rise from hell, there was still the horror of having to look at the performers -- a bunch of pockmarked men in their forties (or possibly only in their thirties, but have been done in by all the booze, drugs, late nights, cigarettes and infrequent baths) in virtually the same black t-shirt and grimy jeans. And the hair, good lord in heaven. There was one band that featured two knuckleheads with hair past their shoulders (one poker-straight and layered, the other chaka khan frizzy), both of whom spent all their time on stage violently tossing their heads around, as if trying to detach them from their necks. I almost snorted beer up my nose; I thought it was hilarious. Every single number sounded exactly the same as the one before it, and for the life of me I could not tell what language the vocalist was singing in when he managed to keep his head still long enough to gargle something into the microphone.

We left the club at 1:00 in the morning. The immediate sensation as I walked out of the doors of that place was not unlike having one's head inside a goldfish bowl. Transient deafness. Coupled with the feeling that my soul had been sucked out through my ears. But I regained normal hearing when the club was two hundred yards behind us, and somehow my soul must have escaped through a crack in the heavy red doors. Not for me, this insane metal and hard rock. If there really is music underneath all that noise, I'm pretty certain I don't belong to the breed that can hear it.