Boston
Don’t Look Now: Dad’s A … Metalhead?
by | Oct 12, 2023 1:28 pm
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Posted to: Music
Bullet for My Valentine featuring Of Mice and Men and Vended
Palladium Theater, Worcester, Mass.
Oct. 10, 2023
Am I a metalhead now?
I ask this question because I found myself at the Palladium Theater on Tuesday night for a Bullet for My Valentine concert. I’ve always had respect for metal (Metalocalypse is one of the greatest shows of all time), but never listened to it enough to consider myself a fan, much less one of the committed. My son changed all that. One of my friends told me when my son was born that he was going to make him into a metalhead. His mother was a recovering metalhead when I met her. Metal was this kid’s destiny.
As I’ve attended shows with him, I’ve started contemplating my place in the scene. Am I just the dad who gets dragged along to his kid’s hobbies, or am I becoming one of the cloth?
Allow me to present my metal resumé:
Bullet for My Valentine lead singer Matthew Tuck.
Bullet for My Valentine is my fourth metal show.
My first show was years ago, when my aforementioned friend took me to Warped Tour. Now that my son is old enough, he’s asking to go to shows. In the last year I’ve seen Bring Me the Horizon at the Big E, Gojira in Boston and now Bullet.
I’ve moshed. This is honestly a very low bar, but it’s a necessary one to clear. Before I started attending shows, I thought that moshing was what the shows were all about, and that it was random and violent outbursts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Moshing is an important part of shows, but it’s only a part. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Mosh pits form with plenty of warning, so you can get away from them if you don’t want to get accidentally pushed in. And the pits are surprisingly safe. No one is trying to hurt you, and the action stops when someone is knocked down. The shoving isn’t about aggression; it’s about exuberance. At the Bullet show, I also learned that there are different types of mosh pits. The video above shows a “circle mosh,” where the point is to run in a circle at increasing speed. I hopped in and put my seasons of cross country and track to work. There was also a “rowing” mosh pit that formed later, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Pour one out.
I’ve suffered loss.
Like I said, the mosh pit is pretty safe. It’s the crowd surfers you have to watch out for. You can’t see them because you’re facing the stage, and you can’t hear the people behind you warning you because the music is drowning out almost everything.
I put my glasses on to take some pictures. A few moments later, a crowd surfer’s foot slammed into the back of my head, and sent my glasses crashing to the ground. When the nearby audience members noticed me looking, they immediately joined the search. A short woman with auburn hair handed them to me. The frame was cracked and the lens had come out, but she miraculously found both. Nothing that copious amounts of super glue and acetone won’t fix.
"You Want a Battle (Here's a War)"
I recognized a song!
I don’t listen to metal outside of shows. Whenever I go to a show, it’s my first time hearing almost everything in the set list. I enjoy the feeling of discovering new music in a live setting, but I sometimes wished that I could join in with the rest of the audience.
It finally happened at the Bullet show. I actually recognized “You Want a Battle? (Here’s a War).” And I knew the chorus! … which is just “You want a battle? Here’s a war!”, but still. Progress!
Bullet for My Valentine
I’m going back for more.
The truth is, if I wasn’t enjoying myself at these shows, I would tell my son. I’d pay for him to go with my friend and let him tell me all about it when he got home and show me the pictures and videos. But I love going to shows. The music is great and the spectacle is fun, but the audience is the main attraction. It feels like I’m in an explosion of love and joy at every metal show I’ve been to, and Bullet’s show was no exception. I think I was accepted into the tribe when a six foot tall man with a fire red beard grabbed me and hugged me. Then he went right back to moshing.
What do you know? The people around me didn’t just turn my son into a metalhead. They turned me into one too.
NEXT
The Palladium hosts Suicidal Tendencies on Oct. 13.
Jamil goes to the Bushnell for some hands-on arts.
