Friggin' Danzig

“THIS STAGE ISN’T BIG ENOUGH FOR GLENN DANZIG’S EGO!”

  • Axl Rosenberg
580

“THIS STAGE ISN’T BIG ENOUGH FOR GLENN DANZIG’S EGO!”

On Tuesday night we got an e-mail from reader Taylor Carik, letting us know that he and a friend had gone to see Danzig at the Cabooze in Minneapolis earlier in the evening — only for Danzig to cancel the show at the last minute, “saying he didn’t like the venue.” Apparently the other bands on the tour played anyway, though — Taylor also told us that “Moduk was alright, too, for corpse paint.” And I know I should have immediately done some research to see if Danzig had, indeed, cancelled a gig because he didn’t like a venue, but I didn’t. I was far too interested in finding out who Moduk were. Corpse paint that can actually play music? That’s amazing! It takes the musicians who usually wear the corpse paint right out of the equation! IT COULD BE A REVOLUTION IN BLACK METAL!!! No longer would corpse paint be beholden to some asshole to make its art.

But while I was busy trying to track down this magical corpse paint, we got another e-mail, from a reader calling himself “Why Hate Abigail Williams?” (to which I can only reply, “Because they blow goats and like it?”), pointing us towards this report regarding the Danzig cancellation in question:

“According to Cabooze booker Jason Aukes, Danzig walked into the club Tuesday afternoon for soundcheck with his namesake band, stayed there all of 30 seconds, and immediately walked out, saying, ‘I can’t play here.’ His crew never gave the club an official reason for why he pulled the plug…”

“…Cabooze staff had already jumped through a couple production hoops before the show to meet Danzig’s demands, including bringing in metal-detectors for security — which Aukes said was a first at the West Bank mainstay venue. Theories were that Danzig still wasn’t content with the security setup, or he thought the stage was too small and the ceiling too low.

“‘It’s a bit of an odd-shaped room, I admit,’ Aukes said. ‘But his booking agent and management knew exactly what to expect — and he would have, too, if he and gotten up off his butt and come down here earlier instead of making his crew set up all their gear for nothing.’”

And before you assume that this is all just covering-up for a ticket sales issue, the article claims that advance sales AND walk-up sales were both pretty healthy, and that “Danzig probably would’ve stood to make $12,000 or so off the show.”

So what happened? Did Danzig really think the frickin’ stage was too small, or that the ceiling was too low? Isn’t that, as Aukes says, the kind of thing that easily could have been anticipated way, way, WAY in advance? It’s not like the venue was built the day before Glenn showed up.

And, really, how bad could the venue have sucked that Danzig wasn’t willing to man up and put on a show for his fans anyway? Was it really better to leave all those people in the lurch — not to mention leave all that money on the table?

In any case, bravo to Aukes and the Cabooze, who apparently paid the opening acts (Which included Toxic Holocaust and… oooooohhhhh, I see. It was MARDUK, not MODUK. Does that mean there’s no performing corpse paint? Bummer.) to perform DESPITE the fact that they had to refund all the concertgoers’ money ’cause of Danzig’s cancellation — in other words, they basically ended up putting on a free show.

Hopefully some more info on what actually went down will emerge soon. In the meantime, watch out for the Guns N’ Roses/Danzig/W.A.S.P. “Cancelled for No Apparent Reason” tour in the spring of 2011.

-AR

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