It was October 30, 2007 at Philadelphia’s Trocadero that my wife and I last saw Type O Negative at Halloween. The show was one of several that the drab four held in Philly on or near Halloween — going all that way back to the mid-nineteen nineties. A tradition, really. For my wife and me. For the band. For all the goths and doom metal heads in attendance. For the theater itself (wondering if its days hosting burlesque were any worse than this). And for the city that hosted it all.

But October 30, 2007 would be Type O Negative’s final Halloween show at the Trocadero. They would play two more shows at the Troc before Peter Steele passed away, on April 14, 2010, at the age of 48. Without him, the band would not continue. As for the Troc? It would hang on for a few more years before closing its doors in 2019.

The perfect home for punks, goths, and metal heads from the early nineties to the 2010s, Philadelphia’s Trocadero, located in the heart of its Chinatown, was the smallest, largest venue in the city. So small that a roll of toilet paper could be thrown from the front of the stage to the back row of the balcony (more on that later). Yet it looked like it had once been grand. A fine example of American Baroque. With a history shared with so many other similar theaters across the USA. A history of heyday, and decline.

Known by several names since its opening in 1870, the Trocadero at first hosted vaudeville acts and musical comedies. It began staging burlesque shows around the turn of the century. Can-can dances. Frilly costumes. Light comedy. In the nineteen fifties, popular comedians like Red Skelton would even perform there. But by the late fifties and early sixties, burlesque had long moved on to striptease, and the Troc hosted “burlesque queens” like Mara Gaye, Tempest Storm, Georgia Southern, and Blaze Starr.

It would close in 1978, as its regulars moved on to porno theaters for more explicit offerings.

By the mid eighties, after hosting opera for a short time, the Troc fell into disrepair, only to be remodeled in 1986 for use as a concert hall.

Goth/doom metal band Type O Negative formed three years later, in 1989, out of the ashes of frontman and bassist Peter Steele’s earlier efforts in Fallout and Carnivore. Well known in Brooklyn for playing clubs like L’Amour, Type O Negative was the perfect band for the Trocadero. At first playing venues like City Gardens in Trenton (1991) or opening for Motley Crue at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater (1993), Type O would play its first gig at the Troc on December 1, 1994 (in place of Christian Death, who canceled). They were a metal band that — while the epitome of doom and gloom —delivered as much romance and melody as they did aggression and melancholy.

And their passion belonged in an old theater like the Troc.

“It’s like a disease every Halloween we play Philadelphia,” Peter Steele commented to the crowd at the October 31st, 2000 show at the Troc. “And I have no fucking problem with that.”*

Type O Negative and Halloween go together like black leather and dark eyeliner. With songs like the tongue-in-cheek “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare All)” and the gloom-inducing “All Hallows’ Eve,” no other band owned Halloween like Type O Negative in the 90s and 2000s. Peter Steele loved the holiday as a kid and trappings of Halloween were evident in dozens of their songs.

In the aforementioned “Black No. 1” — a song about a goth girl hesitant to go out on October 31st because her roots are showing — Steele sings, in his unbelievable low baritone…

Now it’s All Hallows Eve
The moon is full
But will she trick or treat?
I bet she will
She willllllllllllllllllll

(followed by a whisper of “Happy Halloween, baby” that is inexplicably excised from the video)

Live, the crowd would sing along with him. Not like crowds sing along at most shows (insipid parroting when you would otherwise want to just here the performer). Instead, it was more of a ritual, like invoking some kind of spirit to inhabit the concert hall. A celebration not just of a band, but of a holy day for goths and doom-metal heads where every freak can be normal for just one night.

People would come in all sorts of costumes. Zombies. Dominatrixes. Devils. All purpose ghouls. Most popular were the girls who fancied themselves vampires (or victims). Dreaming of the 6′ 8″ Steele sinking his dentally implanted fangs into their necks, many of them had come as much for the man as they did the band, waiting outside by the tour bus when the show was over. Peter Steele was a magnetic presence who commanded a stage with self-deprecating humor and rock-star charm.

Alongside him were Kenny Hickey (guitar), John Silver (keyboards) and Johnny Kelly (drums), Together, they transformed the Trocadero into a metal church whose worshippers read from the book of Black Sabbath. Their chemistry as a unit was something to behold, drowning the audience in saturated bass, thunderous drums, a howling guitar, and a keyboard that often sounded like a church organ, beckoning the faithful to some kind of black mass in a temple consecrated by decades of burlesque performers stripping on its stage.

Yet it was a black mass that never took itself so seriously. The equivalent of a harmless strip show — titilating for a couple of hours, but nothing transgressive. A show that more times than not ended in countless rolls of white toilet paper being thrown back and forth from band members to crowd. Peter Steele was front and center, taking the brunt of the unfurling barrage of tissue.

Like the burlesque queens before them, Type O Negative teased depravity but, in the end, provided only fun — an outlet for the darker desires of the audience fulfilled by the performers on stage. A vicarious thrill only the best rock stars can offer. At least for one evening. One show. One Halloween Night. One memorable experience.

In one unforgettable place.

 

*See a Temple News review from that night for this quote and more about the show.

As their first new music since 2008, Bauhaus — the seminal early eigthies Goth band that blessed the world (or cursed it, depending on your point-of-view) with the immortal “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” — have returned to a method of songwriting not seen since the last track on their third album, 1982’s The Sky’s Gone Out. That song, “Exquisite Corpse,” takes its name, and method of composition, from a word (and illustration) game played in or around 1925 by dadaists (cum surrealists) André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. It’s now 2022, and — using that same cadavre exquis style of writing — Bauhaus has released “Drink the New Wine.”

The  song’s title refers to that very first exquisite corpse endeavor by Breton and company that, when collected, included the phrase: “Le cadavre exquis boiara le vin nouveau” (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”). True to its inspiration (and form), Bauhaus’ “Drink the New Wine” is a set of pieces each separately created by the band’s four members  — frontman Peter Murphy, guitarist Daniel Ash, and bassist David J, backed by his brother Kevin Haskins on drums. With their parts remotely recorded during the pandemic, none had heard what the others had done initially. Not until the song finally came together.

From a press release comes more details: “For the recording, the four musicians each had one minute and eight tracks at their disposal plus a shared sixty seconds plus four tracks for a composite at the end.” It continues to note that “the only common link being a prerecorded beat courtesy of Kevin.”

By no means a toe-tapper, “Drink the New Wine” is a tough tune to like upon first listen. Disjointed by design — but bound in (non)sense by our very need to make meaning out of words strung together — the song’s distinct sections would seem to reflect (as they should) the personalities of each band member. Daniel Ash’s semi-psychedlic Marc Bolan-esque playfulness starts the track. “Off to the funny farm,” he sings, strumming a twelve-string guitar. Then Peter Murphy’s commanding baritone breaks that melody with a rather stark repetition of “dreaming of a perfect world” (reminiscent of “life is but a dream” from “Exquisite corpse, forty years earlier). Next up is David J’s wistful acoustic hum, a refrain of “the roulettista rolls the dice” (a reference most likely to modern illusionist Derek DelGaudio’s act where a man gets rich playing a sort of Russian Roulette until, one day, he is ironically shot by a burglar). That section of the song ends with what sounds very much like a muffled gun shot.

All is underscroed by Kevin Haskins’ steady beat of backmasking and reverb-ladden fills. Then parts comes together, with a return to the center that is Peter Murphy — whose beautiful “you’re the cooling shadow of my cloud” — leads once again to the stuff of dreams (“we talk in dreams”) as he and his bandmates alternate among the musical and lyrical themes from all parts of the song.

The final minute suggests what this cadavre exquis ends up, in effect, becoming: “not building a wall, but making a brick.” These pieces do not divide and confine. Instead, they come together, and make something out of what otherwise would be fragements. Musicians very familiar with being apart, then coming together.

First famously reunited for a short “Resurrection Tour” in 1998, Bauhaus has come together one other time since their initial split in 1983. That reunion (from 2005 to 2008) led to their last official studio album, Go Away White — a solid outing that contains the standout Too Much 21st Century. A one-off show in 2019 would follow. But 2022 and 2023 promises an extensive tour.

Still, no album is planned. Unlike Sky’s Gone Out, no theatrically grand “Spirit, creeping rock of “Silent Hedges,” or manic fun of a cover of Brian Eno’s “Third Unlce” may come to accompany this single exquisite corpse. And that’s a shame. Because Bauhaus are capable of great theatricality and pulse-pounding rock.

In advance of the upcoming shows, what we are left with to judge this particular return is only “Drink the New Wine.”

Is it pop? No. Is it rock? Probably not. Is it art? That’s in the eye, or ear, of the beholder.

But it’s certainly got my attention.

And that’s why the song — as divisive as it may be among old fans and new — is more of an annoucement of resurrection of Bauhaus — one of Goth rock’s most theatrical acts ever — than it is a song you or I will be blaring on the car stereo. It’s a call to attention that this band is back from the (un)dead.

And that there’s never been anyone quite like them.