Eroding sanity on the Prague rock scene ...

By KEVIN DEAN
School of Communication
University of Miami

PRAGUE— I guess it was around my 12 th consecutive lap on the tire swing when I began to wonder if the embroidered dragon on my friend Honza’s shirt had come to life.

I saw the dragon’s nostrils flare and emit elongated fiery bursts that reached out and exploded on my face, snapping like whips and sending me flying off my tire swing and into the dirt.

Dizzily stumbling, I’m like a farsighted child in front of a Christmas tree, squinting to block the cold, damp wind. I stagger ahead and run face-first into a thick metal fence and it is then that I remember the events of the evening and the biker-jacket-wearing Czech herb dealers, the lurking shadows in the park, and that I am on the inside of a children’s playground.

I swallowed hard, forcing vomit back down my throat and commanding myself to get it together in front of my newly acquired Czech friends.

But I couldn’t help it. The town had wrapped its fingers around my body, squeezed it like a sponge and then let the salty juices trickle down a cobblestone street into a gutter.

 

Because my pants would fall down, that’s why

The next day while walking at a half-trot through the streets, I turned a corner too sharply, and to avoid banging foreheads with a short, stout woman hiding her mole-covered face behind a scarf, I stuck my arm out.

Luckily, my arm wrapped around a traffic light and my forward momentum forced me to swing around the outside of the woman. I made a semi-circle around the pole and halted to a stop directly behind the woman, sandwiching her between myself and the concert posters plastered all over the pole.

One of the posters read, “Erosion of Sanity: Euro death-grind-core band, Wednesday at Klub Kain.” Perfect, I thought. In two nights, I’ll meet people who also feel like their sanity is sliding away from them faster than a fat kid on a downhill slip-and-slide. Plus, they’re musicians, which means that their foreign music will be dark and evil. And all about how they want to spawn Satan’s love child in their wombs, even though they are men, but because they eat flesh, they acquire secret mutant ovaries whenever they hear Judas Priest.

I began to wonder if these demons were some sort of roving pack of cannibalistic, werewolf musicians that roamed the streets of Prague thirsty for heavy metal and blood, when I began to hear a low, sad, dog-trapped-outside-in-the-rain sort of whine, and upon realizing that I was still squashing the old hag’s moles into the cold steel pole, I quickly tore away the flyer, turned, and ran the whole way home.

Almost to my apartment, I heard the signature wail of Iron Maiden erupting from Rock Pivnice, an underground heavy metal bar located on the corner of Krasova and Husinecka in Prague 3. Here, underground means located below a soccer stadium and, as I clambered down the steep flight of stairs, suddenly the bar door flew open, sending a hot and putrid gust of air into my face from the unairconditioned bar.

I am descending into the depths of hell, I thought.

That is until I walked inside, and realized that this was, at best, a rock and roll bar stuffed inside a shoebox and then carefully placed in Satan’s armpit.

A lady bartender stood with her hands on her hips, scowling at a passed out man in front of her. He was slouched over on a barstool and his face was plastered so firmly on the bar’s surface that his lips were puckered up like a large mouth bass.

Suddenly, from behind the jukebox came an explosion of hair, air guitar and pure thrash metal. A much more long-haired man, ironically wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt, leaped off of a nearby table, landed directly in front of me and began violently swinging his hair while launching into a guitar solo.

He clenched his hand into a fishhook/sledgehammer combo that swung so fast, I silently feared the moment when the guitarist’s forefinger would lock into the fish-like patron’s lower lip, jerk him off of his bar stool, and send him tumbling to the wooden floor.

But he probably wouldn’t wake up, I thought, as I ordered a tall, half-liter Gambrinus for about 75 American cents.

I spread my flyer out on the bar, pointed to Erosion of Sanity and then looked at the bartender hoping to get any sort of reaction. She coolly took a drag of her cigarette and shrugged her shoulders.

I needed more than just a Euro-death-core fanatic to guide me to the concert. I needed someone that joined the band members on stormy nighttime climbs into the surrounding hills. There, they would dip rusty goblets into blood-filled birdbaths, thirstily hoist their glasses high into the sky, and then let the entire town below hear their horrible screams and howls as the dark electric sky lit up their blood-stained faces with streaks of lightning.

By the jukebox, the bar’s only musician was well into the third song of his encore. He had replaced his t-shirt with a sleeveless, unbuttoned Cannibal Corpse jean jacket and as I approached him with my flyer and pointed to Erosion of Sanity, he turned and ran across the bar, jumped onto a corner table, and placed his ear directly on the speaker, letting the piercing notes rush through his body like river as he stomped his foot and manipulated his fingers into imaginary power chords.

I followed him and held the flyer in front of him once again.

“I need you!” I screamed to him, trying to explain that I couldn’t get to the show on my own. My voice was shaking and becoming increasingly desperate.

“Please … spiraling out of …”

I trailed off, realizing that my voice was drowned out by the music. I looked up and saw that his eyes were closed and that his entire body was convulsing while his snarled upper lip mouthed the angry lyrics.

I sighed while walking out of the bar and as I climbed the stairs to the street, a generic American metal track began to play back inside. The lead singer was leading the crowd in loud counts of “Alright! One! Two! … One! Two!… One! …”

“Two!” I yelled as I pumped my fist in the air, picking up the chant. “One! …”

But I stopped and realized that I was leaving the bar no better off then before. Not only did I feel even more erratic, but I had no one to loan me a leather belt to bite into while the band members brand me with a hot iron on stage.

I came to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t make it through the sound check before they dismembered me and threw my limbs out into the bloodthirsty crowd.

 

Erosion of My Sanity?

An unexpected evening downpour had me sliding down the slick cobblestones of Krasova, through Husinecka, and on my way towards the concert.

I slipped around two Indian hashish peddlers hanging out in a courtyard filled with waxed and tagged ledges, made a left on Husistka, and then tacked off into the rain.

Hugging store window fronts for five blocks, I found Klub Kain sandwiched between Bloody Blue Tattoo, a tattoo/piercing studio, and Molekula, a Mr. Wizard / Flight of the Navigator bar.

Four bucks to a man wearing a straw hat and an aquarium scene shirt and I’m swimming through the cigarette smoke and dim lighting of Klub Kain.

As I spin and dodge my way around men with pale, tattooed arms sticking out of leather vests, I decide that I need to find the meanest, scariest motherfucker in the place and immediately make him, or her, my new best friend.

Scanning quickly, I saw a candidate passed out alone in a chair placed directly in front of the stage. His head was in his hands and since his long ratty brown hair blocked his entire face, I treated the situation as if I was creeping up on a sleeping bear with long, laced up combat boots.

While I grabbed a nearby chair, a loose extension cord snagged my shoe and I stumbled forward, dropping the chair and immediately waking the man. In one full motion, he somehow slung his hair out of his face, sprang to his feet, picked up my chair, raised it above his head, finished the rest of his beer, and then put my chair back on the floor right next to his.

He flashed a toothless smile, sat down, and as I joined him, I pulled the concert flyer out of my back pocket, pointed to Erosion of Sanity and made a thumbs-up-thumbs-down sign.

He stared at me for over a minute without blinking, letting his mouth open only enough to let a long string of saliva ooze out and dangle off his lower lip.

Suddenly he stuck out his thick arm and proceeded to flex with such anger that tattoo snakes began to crawl through the eyes of the tattoo skeletons on his forearm.

Dark tornadoes carrying clattering human bones rumbled deep within his soul before spiraling out of his mouth and into my ears, spinning my head towards the stage.

There, a fat, baldheaded man with a terrific under bite was tuning a bass guitar.

I thought that the real bass player for Erosion of Sanity was probably backstage killing time before the show, you know, castrating pigs and smearing the blood all over his face and loins.

That is until several more stagehands joined him on stage and, after tuning all of their instruments, a tall lanky man in Nikes ran onto the stage, grabbed the microphone and began screaming “Jump! Jump! Everyone Jump!” while frantically leaping around the stage like a blindfolded frog.

The bass player reached behind a speaker, pulled out a pair of sunglasses, put them on, and shuffled to the front of the stage while the drummer removed his t-shirt, exposing to the crowd a pot belly, a couple of nipples and some chest hair.

This prompted three teenagers to move up front and I watched intently, hoping that they would begin ripping the heads off rabbits, or at least mercilessly stomping and pummeling each other with microphone stands. Instead, they simply stuffed their hands into their pockets, carefully braced one foot on the stage and began to wag their heads like Gene Simmons bobble head dolls.

Erosion of Sanity moved quickly through their set and by the time the band started playing a Czech version of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” I threw up my hands and moved to the back of the bar.

“Fake metal sons of bitches,” I murmured while slouching into an unlit booth to wait for the show to end. “No bleeding sacrifices! No thrash-grind-core!”

My voice began to crack as I realized what a gamble I had taken resting my sanity on a concert flyer. I had bet the house, and as Erosion of Sanity finished their last song and began to pack up their instruments, I began to realize my losses.

I pulled my hair, ripped my shirt and gnashed my teeth. I smashed a beer bottle and just as I was about to begin cutting myself with the glass shards, a middle-aged-man dressed entirely in black leather slid into the booth across from me. His smooth black hair fell like broken guitar strings onto his torn leather jacket, and as he lit a match for a cigarette, I could see deep wrinkles that started on his chin, then wound up his cheeks like rivers before pouring out onto his forehead.

This is a man weathered by decades of European heavy metal, I thought, and the only person here who can help me.

Give him the microphone! Stop the show! This is our savior!

Panicking, I leaned across the table, grabbed him by his leather jacket and began frantically shaking him.

“Don’t just sit there!” I screamed, spitting all over the man. “You’ve got to save me! I … need … you …”

I loosened my grip on his jacket, let my head fall onto the table and the man quickly broke free and disappeared into the crowd.

A hand touched my shoulder and I looked up to see a bald, fat face smiling down on me. It was Erosion of Sanity’s bass player, probably here to gum me to death or to sell me one of their CDs. While I wondered which would be the easiest and least painful, he motioned for me to follow him outside of the bar.

There, on the sidewalk lining Husistka, three more Erosion of Sanity members stood about chatting and laughing.

Exhausted, I leaned on a streetlamp and thought that outside of the dark bar the bass player looked exactly like Sloth from “Goonies.”

And then I thought about how much I wanted to tell them that they let me down and that I could never listen to heavy metal ever again in their country.

But before I could open my mouth, the sound of horse hooves striking cobblestone broke the silence. All of us turned at once to see a wild-haired, naked woman riding bareback on a black stallion, galloping down the middle of the road. As they came closer, I could see that she was carrying a long trumpet in one hand and a flaming torch in the other.

She pulled hard on the reigns, bringing the horse to a stop in front of us and letting her long hair fall down into the street like steps to a carriage. She arched her naked body on top of the horse and began to blow into the trumpet, starting slowly at first and then louder and louder as flames danced around her breasts.

I glided around the bass player, into the street, up her hair and onto the back of the horse.

And before I could wave goodbye to Erosion of Sanity, we were off, racing up and down hills before finally taking flight and melting into the night sky.

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