The most important thing you need to know about an Insane Clown Posse show is that the band (can we even call them a band?) have an entire crew on tour with them — maybe 3 or 4 dudes — whose sole job it is to make sure Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent Jay have several 2 liter bottles of Faygo on stage within arm’s reach at all times. These guys — let’s call them Faygo Stocker Dudes — are essentially the equivalent of guitar and drum techs; with the absence of any real instruments, Faygo essentially IS the instrument, the crucial element of an ICP show. At pre-determined climactic moments, the Faygo Stocker Dudes themselves join in with the soda-spraying madness and drench the audience in diet root beer along with ICP.

That gigantic semi trailer parked outside the venue? No instruments, no stage props, no scrims… JUST FAYGO. Thousands of 2-liter bottles of the stuff. All diet root beer, natch.

Oh, and every wall and speaker cabinet in the entire venue was wrapped in soda-repelling plastic.

Does that set the stage for what I witnessed last Friday in NYC?

What the fuck was I doing at an Insane Clown Posse show??? Fine question. ICP decided to grace NYC with their presence for the first time in 10 years, and good friend of MetalSucks Juggalo Bob offered me a free ticket, an offer I couldn’t refuse. The show was at Gramercy Theater, at 600 capacity 1/5th the size of a venue they could sell out, but booked as a special die-hards-only precursor to their performance last weekend at the Bamboozle Festival.

Going to an Insane Clown Posse show is like going to a Gwar show; you have no choice but to be completely immersed in it, and you’ll inevitably be soaked head-to-toe in Faygo afterwards. It’s all about the Faygo; Shaggy and Jay must’ve gone through 100 bottles of it, if not more. Unscrew it with one slick motion, plug a finger in the bottle’s mouth, shake it up, and BAM! either a) release the thumb and let the sweet juice spring forth onto the audience’s heads, b) keep the thumb partially covering the mouth to create a controlled spray, or c) turn it upside down and launch the bottle like a rocket grenade (I saw several bottles go 50 feet or more).

How does one even get hired as a Faygo Stocking Dude? Does ICP hold try-outs in which would-be Faygo Stocking Dudes display their Faygo-spraying finesse? Is there a totem pole up which any aspiring Faygo Stocking Dude must climb? Are there an army of Faygo Stocking Dude interns shadowing the veteran Faygo Stocking Dudes like a new waiter hiree in a restaurant? Do Faygo Stocking Dudes receive benefits and have social security tax withdrawn from their paychecks???

In this video I found of the show on the YouTubes you can see all the Faygo bottles lying in wait, perched by the dozen on stands. Around 0:25 you can see a Faygo Stocker Dude doing his Faygo Stocking thang. Then at 0:50 five masked Faygo Stocker Dudes come out of nowhere and wreak havoc upon the audience! And when the chorus ends they vacate the stage just as quickly as they appeared, and Violent Jay gets jiggy with some Faygo spray:

Faygo notwithstanding, everything else at the ICP concert was basically a side-show. Yeah, there were lots of juggalos — maybe 5% of which wore facepaint — but they were a surprisingly tame bunch and not unlike the crowd you’d expect to see at, say, a Korn show in their overall aesthetic (braided white-boy hair, baggy black cargo pants with superflous chains and zippers, etc). They’re also wimps. Bob took me into the pit for the end of the show and I was pretty much the toughest guy in there, which says a lot because I am definitely not tough. I guess ICP fans were more concerned with loudly singing along to their favorite songs than moshing. Me, I just wanted more Faygo.

So, in conclusion, getting sprayed by Faygo for an hour and a half was pretty awesome. I don’t know that I’d do it again, but I sure did have fun!

-VN