Tag Archives: goth

music, musings

A Type O Negative Tradition: Halloween at the Troc

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.
Tempest Storm
“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.

Type O Negative
Type O Negative. L to R: Kenny Hickey (guitar), Johnny Kelly (drums), Peter Steele (vocals, bass), and Josh SIlver (keyboards).

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.

music

Not Goth? Genre Labels and The Sisters of Mercy

Of all genres of rock music, goth is the most difficult to define. Now fully cemented in popular culture with acolytes sporting black clothes, blacker nail polish, and the blackest of lipstick, the movement was not so well defined in the late seventies and early eighties when the term began to be applied (by critics mostly) in the wake of punk.

Coined by rock critic Critic John Stickney long ago in 1967 when describing a Doors show, goth was seemingly first applied to bands most associated with an atmospheric, gloomy, even angular sound late in the nineteen seventies; see, for example, Nick Kent’s “Banshees make the Breakthrough” in his 1978 review of Siouxsie and The Banshees in NME. Indeed, it is Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Bauhaus, and Joy Division (though the latter never went in for the trappings of goth,  but were labeled as such by their producer, Martin Hannet as in 1979)  that are thought of as the pillars of early goth music.

And then there is The Sisters of Mercy. More specifically, its frontman, Andrew Eldritch, who has famously resisted the goth label — even outright rejected it.

THE BAND
The Sisters of Mercy logo
The Sisters of Mercy logo (from Wikimedia Commons)

Formed in Leeds in 1980, The Sisters of Mercy are known for Eldritch’s melancholic baritone, driving bass lines, sharp guitar riffs, and beats supplied by Doktor Avalanche — a drum machine that has been, for the most part, the only constant member of the band other than Eldritch. At first, only singles and EPs were released from the band. Notable among them is the 12″ single for “Alice,” a lament for a girl addicted to pills. It is on this release that a cover of The Stooges’ “1969” — a staple of the band’s set from the very beginning — appears.

In “1969” is found not only one of the band’s key strengths, but also a possible clue as to the motivations of its members to consciously NOT be goth: that is, a desire to honor a wide range of musical styles with their own distinct sound. Eldritch’s deep, reverb-heavy vocals. The synthetic beats of Docktor Avalanche. Guitars that are mesmerizingly fuzzy. The Sisters of Mercy’s cover of The Stooges’ anthem of dillusion and disaffected youth sounds more like a garage band on amphetamines than it does a gothic rock dirge.

Curiously, The Sisters of Mercy turned out many a colorful cover: Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” and Hot Chocolate’s “Emma” among them. That these songs are all dark in tone contribute to an understandable goth label, but they are each faithful insofar as Eldrith’s voice allows — and are possibly even  a bit tongue-in-cheek, with the band realizing the unique juxtaposition of music like theirs covering such a wide-range of genres (proto-punk, country, classic rock, even soul).

REJECTING THE LABEL

In an interview in a magazine called Under the Rock — dedicated to all things Sisters of Mercy” — Andrew Eldritch once famously said “I’m not interested in what goths think,” adding that it was journalist David Dorrel from NME who was “a prime originator of the ”Sisters are goth and therefore crap’ smear.” Eldritch went to humourously say “I’m constantly confronted by representatives of popular culture who are far more goth than we, yet I have only to wear black socks to be stigmatised as the demon overlord.”

Still, it’s hard to deny that by the time of their first official album, “First and Last and Always” (1985), songs like “No Time to Cry,” and “Nine While Nine” are hard to describe in any other way than atmospheric and gloomy. “Marian (Version)” alone finds the singer driven along by a quasi-siren song to a watery grave. Yet the apocalyptic “Black Planet” was accompanied by a video that showed the band crusing California on a sunny day in, of all things, the Mokeemobile! If this was goth, its video, at least, eschewed the darker aspects of the band’s image.

Floodland (1987) would find Eldritch developing a more epic sound, full of booming eighties production (e.g., “Dominion / Mother Russia”) and a semblance of pop sensibiltiy on tracks like “This Corrosion” and “Lucretia, My Reflection.”

By the time of the band’s  third album, “Vision Thing” (1990), an all-out hard rock assault is apparent in songs like the titular track, “Detonation Boulevard,” and “More.”

Andrew Eldritch performing with the Sisters of Mercy at Wacken Open Air, 2019 (photo by Sven Mandel [taken from Wikimedia Commons])
Still together (insofar as Eldritch assembles musicians to go out on tour every few years), the Sisters of Mercy have never released a fourth album. Problems with their record company famously turned Eldritch against the industry. Instead, he has focused over the years since on performing live.

After all is said and done with Sisters of Mercy, it is curious to note that practically no early influential post-punks bands particularly like the goth label (see this great reddit post). But why? The simplest answer is that it is reductive, lumping bands with a wide-range of styles into one camp (that is, appropriately enough, often campy). Goth carries a stigma of being a one-trick-pony of sorts: with tired themes and funereal beats. The wide berth given to most other genres is just not open to bands labeled goth.

THE INHERITORS

As for modern goth, the music has splintered further with its labels of death rock, cold wave, dark wave, even ethereal wave.

Bands like Cold Cave, Drab Majesty, and Dark seem to embrace the association of their music with all things sad and scary, morbid and taboo.

In that regard, artists like Andrew Eldritch and his Sisters of Mercy need not even be concerned with labels. The world has moved on. Other artists have picked up the all-black flag (not to be confused with the eighties American Hardcore band) and run with it into the cemetery as the sun sets and the leaves fall.

In the end, it’s all rock and roll, and that’s the landscape where The Sisters of Mercy should ideally find their place. The Cure’s relatively recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has legitimized music (that is fairly or not) labeled goth, and The Sisters of Mercy may one day be judged not by the doom and gloom of their music, but the unique sound that made them stand out from the crowd.