I have spent the better part of the last few days reading Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe's new memoir, Dark Days, in anticipation of Blythe sitting in on the RIP a Livecast this Sunday. The book is an amazing read and one of the more gripping parts of the first part has just been made available on Rolling Stone.
The excerpt is Randy recalling exactly what he remembered from playing that infamous Prague show on May 24th, 2010 at the venue Abaton.
Blythe recalled a small stage, with terrible setup and not enough security. He also recalled there was no barricade separating the band from the crowd, leading to an unhappy vocalist. He particularly remembers one fan being incredibly rowdy, who could or could not have been the fan who died, Daniel Nosek:
I was particularly annoyed with one young blond-haired fan who jumped onto the stage again and again, trying to put his arms around me as I tried to sing. I watched him fly into the audience at one point and hit the floor pretty hard, only to reappear on stage not too long after. He had already made two appearances prior to this instance, and despite my pointing at him, shaking my head to communicate my displeasure, here he was again. I decided at this point I had had about enough of his shenanigans, figured that he was drunk or crazy, and decided to teach him a lesson. As he came toward me, I reached out with my left arm around his neck, slipped my hip behind his, and took us both to the ground. Once we were on the ground, I wrapped one of his legs with my left leg in what my middle school wrestling coach would have called a half-grapevine, then straightened up a bit and grabbed him around his throat with my left hand. I didn't choke him, but applied enough pressure to let him know I meant business, and in between singing lyrics into the mic I had kept in my right hand the whole time, I began to yell something to effect of "No! No more, you asshole!" into his face. I suppose the best analogy of this whole physical confrontation would be that of a mother dog when she puts one of her pups on its back with her mouth and growls at it – Hey, knock it off kid. I'm serious.
This young man apparently didn't think I was serious, because he began to grin and raise his hands at me in the horns (the clenched thumb and raised index and pinky finger salute you see audience members doing at all rock concerts now), almost giggling beneath me. I must admit, this slightly pissed me off – I was trying to work, he seemed to think that it was his right to come up and drunkenly disrupt our performance, and now the little shit seemed to be smirking at me. I held my temper in check though, didn't throttle the grin off his lips, and just continued singing and yelling "No more!" in his face until he decided he had had about enough of being on his back and tried to get up.
Oh, no. That wasn't about to happen. You wanted to be up here so badly, you little fucker, I thought, and now here you are. With ME. You'll leave when I decide it's time for you to leave. He began to look a bit panicked, and started to struggle some more to get up, so I took my hand off his throat, wrapped my left arm around his neck and pressed my whole body down on him. I gave up yelling "No" at him, and pressed the microphone into his face as I kept screaming the lyrics into it. This really seemed to freak him out – he couldn't move and I was screaming into his face from just inches away. I held him there until he looked truly shook up, then I let him go. I figured I had made my point and he would not be returning to the stage. I do not remember him leaving the stage, but I do remember my bassist John looking at me and saying, "That was fucking awesome."
To make the event even more somber, Blythe recalled immediatley after getting off the stage that he was informed that Slipknot bassist Paul Gray died:
Paul Gray was a friend of mine from Iowa who played bass in the multiple-platinum selling nine-member band of masked lunatics, Slipknot. Lamb of god had toured with Slipknot a few times, starting in 2004 on OZZfest, a roving multiple-band package ordeal that travels around the United States in the summertime spreading mayhem everywhere it touches down. Paul and I had met before at a club gig lamb of god did in Iowa, but we really bonded the summer of 2004, stealing golf carts from the venues we played, joking around, and talking about punk rock bands. We went on to have our fair share of good times in the years after that, from raging nightly backstage during a nine-week tour our bands did together, to bumping into each other at different festival gigs throughout the world. The last time I saw him alive, he had come to see us in Des Moines, despite the fact that he had a flight in a few hours to Europe to start a tour. He was a big-hearted man; once I stayed at his house in Des Moines with my other band at the time, Halo of Locusts, when we played a gig in his home city. Paul wasn't even in Des Moines at the time, he was on tour, but when I called to see if he was in town, he insisted that we stay at his house and called a friend with keys to his house and had her open it up for us. Paul and I had talked several times about a musical project we wanted to do, and had figured out a few people we would cherrypick from other bands to make something unique and entirely different from Slipknot and lamb of god. I still have the musical ideas in my head, but I haven't been able to think of anyone that could fill his shoes. Maybe I never will, because he was a special guy. I miss him dearly.
The entire excerpt is certainly worth going out of your way to read.
Randy's book, Dark Days, comes out next Tuesday, July 14th. You can order it here.
Also, again, we remind you Randy will be sitting in on this Sunday's RIP a Livecast. If you can't listen live, be sure to leave a voicemail with a question for Randy here.
