1990s Archives - VAULT OF THOUGHTS

type-o-halloween-troc-magnet-2000 — Only a precious few attendees got their hands on this magnet from Halloween 2000.

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.

Trocadero in the 1970s — Special Collections Research Center / Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

“The Queen of Exotic Dancers” Tempest Storm regularly performed at the Trocadero.

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.

The undeniable genius of David Bowie has often been attributed to his ability to never rest on his laurels. Often referred to as rock’s chameleon, he was able to constantly reinvent himself over five decades with numerous, elaborate tours, a handful of films, and over twenty-five studio albums. Yet one period of his career is often seen as a misstep by fans and critics alike: his late eighties / early nineties turn as front-man of the band Tin Machine.

With guitarist Reeves Gabrels and Soupy Sales’ sons Tony and Hunt as its rhythm section, Tin Machine allowed Bowie to surround himself with an organized noise far from the studio polish and lackluster lyrics of his other eighties’ outings. Out of the gate with the raucous release of their first single, “Under the God,” the project couldn’t have come at a better time in his career. Casting off the safe and often silly Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987), the eponymous Tin Machine (1989) had an attitude and edge that had been missing from Bowie’s music for quite some time.

But many in the press were not kind. “A quickly tiresome rich man’s plaything,” wrote Dave Ferman from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Sit down, man, you’re a fucking disgrace,” ended Melody Maker’s review of 1991’s (admittedly less than stellar) Tin Machine II. Mark Coleman, in the Rolling Stone Record (later “Album”) Guide rated both Tin Machine records two and a half stars, noting that “[the] albums are long on thunder and short on actual tunes.” He didn’t even bother to mention their third release, the abysmal live Oy Vey, Baby from 1992.

But Bowie didn’t seem to care about the critics, and would insist that the public would eventually come to love Tin Machine. “We’ll be listening to the first album in a few years and re-evaluating [it],” he said in a 1993 interview with NME. But by 1993, Tin Machine was all but forgotten.

One could argue that Tin Machine was just a few years ahead of its time. “We were grunge before it became a thing,” said Reeves Gabrels in a 2017 interview ; curiously, he recalls a story where Tim Palmer, producer of Tin Machine’s two studio albums, told him Pearl Jam was listening to “Heaven’s in Here” (the opening track on Tin Machine’s 1989 debit) during their time working on Ten (which, along with Nevermind and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, is seminal grunge from 1991). Palmer would mix Ten, and it’s not a stretch to say that a similar (but more mellow) tone can be heard when the guitar lick on “Heaven’s in Here” is played side by side with the up-tempo “Evenflow.” Just as Bowie had claimed to be influenced by the Pixies during this time (and, most likely, other, harder, alternative bands of the period), those same bands were Bowie fans. It’s musicians feeding off of other musicians — as musicians always have and always should.

Why then the vitriol for Tin Machine if it was an influential late eighties precursor to a movement that transformed the nineties? Perhaps the public at large still wanted the clean-cut man in a bright yellow suit who sang “Modern Love” just six years earlier — not this new man in black covering Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” They weren’t ready for a scruffy white duke fronting a four-piece. They couldn’t handle the stripped-down skepticism of a religious experience in a song like “Bus Stop.”

By 1993, Tin Machine imploded, most likely due to sales — sales of the albums, and/or Hunt Sales’ increasing drug addiction. It didn’t matter. Bowie was ready to move on. He would wed Iman, release Black Tie White Noise (a return to his softer side), and eventually find his way to his next inspiration: drum and bass, electronica, industrial rock, and Trent Reznor. The latter would help reinvent Bowie’s sound through his next two albums: Outside (1995) and Earthling (1997). On both, Reeves Gabrels would play.

In an interview from 1997, Bowie would be asked about Tin Machine, and his perspective is telling. Tin Machine was first and foremost, a band. A rock band. Not a solo endeavor. It was “a return to the embryonic fundamentals of rock music, simply in order to clear my head for a while,” he said. Why? “In order to breath life into my being as a musician again.”

Whether or not Tin Machine was among Bowie’s better works is immaterial. It was a chance for the artist to rediscover the “fundamentals of rock music” that he had lost somewhere along the way in the early eighties.

Bowie would go on to produce five more albums after ’97’s Earthling, taking a long deserved ten-year break from music after 2003. He had suffered a heart attack, and while not the primary reason for removing himself from the spotlight for a decade, it was reason enough to spend more time with family, enjoying a simpler, quieter life.

Some will say that his final two works, The Next Day (2013) and Blackstar (2016) are among the best albums he ever made. The latter would be unlike anything that came before, prescient in its themes of mortality, but all the while musically adventurous — heavily immersed in the language of jazz with Bowie displaying a vocal range that is at times, sweet and sullen, and others, staccato and almost cruel. It was sheer brilliance.

He would succumb to liver cancer two days after his 69th birthday — the day Blackstar was released.

Known for having famously once said “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring,” David Bowie has moved on from this world. But he has left us with a catalog that will be discovered and rediscovered by many generations to come.

Among those discoveries deserves to be Tin Machine. It may have been many things, but it was never boring.

VAULT OF THOUGHTS

Tag Archives: 1990s

A Type O Negative Tradition: Halloween at the Troc

In Defense of Tin Machine

By Christopher Davis