Ghoul Speaks

In a MySpace post appropriately called " L.A.P.D. hates fun", Oakland blackened thrashers GHOUL share the tale of their ill-fated warehouse gig in downtown LA on Saturday night:

Well, we stowed away on a cargo ship for three weeks to get from Creepsylvania to L.A. Crises were averted, obstacles were overcome, and deckhands went missing. When we finally got to the venue it seemed as though it would be smooth sailing. The warehouse and audience looked pretty much exactly like what a Hollywood production designer would come up with if you asked them to come up with a wild underground punk-rock-heavy-metal concert; complete with skateboard ramps, graffiti, urinals filled with vomit, buckets filled with urine, large piles of empty beer bottles and cans, and about five or six hundred spiked, mohawked, poodle haired, and otherwise anti-social looking people. It was pretty great, and we were briefly sad that we had to kill all of them in a few short hours.

The show got underway and more and more people poured in, and out onto the street. The Grill 'Em All truck was parked outside, serving hamburgers designed to inflict as much arterial damage as possible on the slavering masses. Seriously. One of them has deep fried bacon and cream cheese on it. That's so much more horrifying (and delicious) than anything we could come up with. At some point all this awesomeness apparently attracted the attention of a neighborhood party pooper and the police were called. The word "neighborhood" is a little misleading though. The whole area was dominated by warehouses. The only open business for blocks and blocks was a strip club. Maybe they didn't like their squeaky clean image sullied by a bunch of drunken heshers.

Demolition was right in the middle of their set and the plug was pulled so the guy who ran the place could get on the mic and tell the audience that the cops were outside and everyone had to leave. This seemed to have zero impact on the care-free revelers, who threw caution to the wind and just continued their debauchery as if nothing had happened. This lasted about 10 minutes, with the increasingly impatient MC repeating his pleas for everyone to put down the beer and walk out the front door in an orderly fashion more and more frequently. Finally some people started to get the hint and started moving. Outside it looked like the police were preparing for martial law. They were all lined up, batons at the ready, just in case some anemic Ghoul fan decided to throw away an entire life of quiet interest in role playing games and underground music so he could pick a fight with the L.A.P.D. 

About a hundred people or so were left when the cops finally came in. For some reason they decided to use the door that was blocked by a huge metal desk, instead of the door everyone else used. I guess it made their entrance more dramatic when they had to use brute force to loudly force the desk out of the way, but it was a strange move. I wonder if they get into their cars by going through the trunk, or if when they come home they climb in through a second story window instead of using the front door. Such are the mysteries of the minds of the police.

It took us awhile to get back in and reclaim our stuff. We heard the show was moved to a bar. Or a house. Or back to the original venue. By that point the audience had dispersed, Dissector was already heading to the docks to catch the next garbage scow out of Dodge, and the Killbot had already been defragmented and shut down. But like Jean Claude Van Damme said in the classic cyborg movie "Cyborg", "We will be coming back." to L.A. to play a show.