Mike Patton i ZU Quartet, Belgrade, 15. Jun 2008 (english version)

19 years of a long wait to hear the legend live? “A boyhood dream come true”? a bit of everything : )

First, I must say one thing that is always present in the SKC hall: terrible sound. I’m more than used to this calamity, so I didn’t think, not even for a minute, that everything would be fine and as it should be for bands like this. When they had the brains to put such a huge star as Steve Vai in here… nothing has surprised me since.

Second: I hand it to the Italians who make up the band ZU, which is for the second time in Serbia, and has proven to be an exceptional live band; however, it’s good ol’ Mike who attracted the crowd. Those who knew what to expect – fine, those who didn’t, were more than surprised. Naively and foolishly, they expected some old ‘hits’ and …. they left within the first few minutes : ) Funny for me, but pity for them. This was the night for all those long-time fans and followers of the bands Mr. Bungle and Fantomas and the real Pattonesque sound reflected in his 2 solo albums for Tzadik and also in all earthly possible and impossible variants and collaborations with John Zorn (Naked City, Moonchild, Hemophiliac etc.), Merzbow, Melt-Banana, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Dub trio and…. there’s no need to list any more!

Now we’ll tell you what it was like! READ ON!

What no one expected was that the concert would be that late. A girl standing next to me misunderstood my story that “I’ve been waiting for Patton since 1989” as if “I saw Patton somewhere in 1989” and she excitedly asked me if it was true and where that happened. I just laughed and said “Oh, God”, ‘cos I think she wasn’t even born then, and now we’re waiting together for his concert. 😀 Well, you’ve gone too far, Mike…really! In the meantime, the crowd had started having fun singing along with the refrains of the background music while waiting for the concert to start. We sang “74-75”, and a bit of “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran, and so on. Who the fuck puts that music on? Instead of getting us heated up with music that at least faintly resembled the music of ZU, they could’ve even played Britney to us. When all that started bordering on pure rudeness, some heavy-metal pussies started a chant, “Patton will get fucked”. Suddenly, ZU ran onto the stage, and what followed could be described as follows:

The sound wall that exploded slammed our stomachs right onto our spines, and then all the little rocks in our kidneys began being crushed into sand. The specks of dust drifted towards the wall opposite the stage and after a few minutes settled in one place. It started so fiercely that I wondered whether anything would remain of the loudspeakers. Lost and uninformed “Easy-Evidence” audience started withdrawing in panic to the back, while the lines “I’m easy like Sunday morning” were evaporating from their heads, they swore and cursed because they hadn’t visited YouTube for the last couple of days and downloaded some mp3 file instead of wasting gigabytes on porn. Also, I thought that ZU could sand walls? The adjustment lasted for a few minutes, and then I could make out certain instruments. All this reminded me of the genius Douglas Adams and his description of the loudest galactic band “Disaster Area”! 😀

Massimo, bass player of ZU, is a man who plays the bass just as Jack White plays the electric guitar, while Luca, saxophone player, sounds as if he’s just stepped out of John Zorn’s craziest nightmare. Everything sounds much more extreme than on their albums, with additional toughness and fierceness. It has to be experienced – even when there’s the ‘sound’ of SKC. I suddenly realized that those heavy-metal pussies next to us started moshing, and I felt that things were moving in the right direction. The crowd responded positively to the first shock, although most of them knew ZU’s music just as Patton knew Ceca’s (Criminal Serbian folk version of Madonna) discography . How nice!

And then the moment that Dule, Cvele, Aca, and Djole had been waiting for soooo many years : ) Mike appeared behind his ‘instrument’ – a notorious table with all possible effects, mixers, and other gadgets and gizmos! A standard “Aouueeioouaaeeuuuisqueeeaaaiii!!!!” follows as a greeting, and the hall exploded at that moment in a leap of pure happiness – YES THAT IS HIM!! 😀

While I’m acting as a typical teenage girl, with an idiotically blessed grin on my face, I begin to understand why I love this man so much. Sorry for a little digression: I’ve listened to loads of bands with the most various musical styles and on the royal throne of an eternal and endless list of the most loved “something”, there have been different crazy things that make my life happier. But naturally, after some time, that “something” begins to fall to lower places and then finally stops at some honorary place as a characteristic monument in your soul of the time it took place. Well, this man simply doesn’t allow me to put him in history, and that’s the trick! It’s no wonder that my favourite bands of all time are FNM and Mr. Bungle. And after them, he didn’t stop but continued pushing onward. I don’t like everything he does, of course, but…the only thing certain about him is that the next thing he does will not resemble the previous. But, let me continue… 😀

The T-shirt MUNZE caused laughter and a kind of silly connection with the locals, that is, us. Through the rumble of ZU, his voice slowly found its way. As I was able to see in the first few minutes, he swore due to the sound on the stage, flapped his arms about, and tried to talk to the guys behind the stage, but soon he gave up and went on to fool around. Maybe he said to himself, “Serbia, dude… forget about being nervous. I came to get some money… to have some fun, I wanted to say”. The array of screams, yells, sounds, fast chatter, and some articulated tones alternated with the noise of ZU. After some completely crazy scream, he would smile at the audience or Luca and Massimo, so it was quite clear that the man was having fun with himself and the crowd… at least with the fraction that digs all this : )

“Hey, what kind of Serbian game is this?” Mike wonders…

I no longer find it strange that Zu found Mike, it must have been love at first noise : ) Although I don’t know ZU that well, I could recognize some tracks from their album Igneo, like “Solar Anus” and “Monte Zu” filled with Pattonnaise. Most of the things they played are new material and could be found in p2p networks and on that damned YouTube. They’re ready to get into the studio, and this will be excellent practice and a check of what goes and what doesn’t : ) and here are the best shots and videos …

a bit of scat

here’s your “Easy” …! and “Evidence” ! screeeeee !!

“turn off those lights – you’ll scare the drummer away!”

“tschak, tschak,tschak…tschak, tschak, tschak…tschak, tschak, tschak. EEEK! BOUM!!” – the spirit of Fantomas floats over SKC

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…….ktrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….. HONK! zzz… “You morons! It’s not a broken pot but artistic freedom!”

Now I’ll sing for real for a change….Aaaaa! There you go – enough for 1800 dinars (22€) and travelling expenses! 

I took the best photos from the front row… and at the same time, ended up without a few thousand neurons in the part of the brain responsible for hearing.

Luca, a heavyweight saxophone player

Massimo, aka pot-man : )

And in the end, one ‘ouweeeeeeeeeeek!’ dedicated to all FNM fans who had left an hour ago!

And so the concert ended! I’m 100% satisfied. Not disappointed in the least. None of us was. We knew exactly what we would hear; we had grown accustomed to all kinds of combinations with Mike and his experimental bands. The objection that it was too short is justified. But these experimental gigs usually don’t last longer ‘cos it wouldn’t be smart to listen to something like this for more than an hour – in the medical sense, I mean, the consequences are inevitable 😛 And people get tired, both musicians and audience, it asks for strength – racket like this, and home is faaaar away.

And here is the photo of the most loyal bunch in Serbia since 1989! Niš team. Here you have married and engaged, with kids and without kids, employed in the private and public sectors, and entrepreneurs, ex-musicians… everything! These are THE FANS!

After the gig, as a friend of this site and a respected lawyer from Nis, D. Veskovic said we started a photo safari after Patton. In a combined action, using perseverance, luck, and the hawk eyes of the owner of the loving site BULNGEOID.IN.RS, as well as the courage and intrepidness of Dule Cvetkovic, a renowned owner of the “TEA… Excellent” firm, to run past policemen, there was the culmination of the whole event! We were face-to-face with the main guilty party for the state of our music taste, which has been the same for years. I gave my camera to a little Italian who was carrying Massimo’s bass and asked him to take a photo, and he kindly agreed. First, I gave Patton my copy of the “Disco Volante” CD to sign.

“Please, Mr. Patton, sign this eternal masterpiece”. He looked at me like I was fucking with him, but then he took the pen and, very carefully – not to ruin the cover – started signing the white margin as if he were signing a bank draft, not some Nebojša’s CD. Great, I said, now you raised its price for $100 on eBay 😀 Kidding, of course, I wouldn’t sell it for anything in the world. He signed Dule’s ticket and then a photo of the decade was taken… As the flesh was recharging, there was a second or two pause, and Mike loudly asked:

“Make this fuckin’ photo, man, what the fuck are you waiting for…?”

So just as he was saying that, the camera clicked 😀 I died laughing. A surreal scene in which Patton cursed me over the camera has been documented 😀 Then we started asking. Dule said we were waiting for “Mondo Cane” with him, and he laughed, we saw he was glad we asked him that, and then I added to bring Fantomas to Serbia, and he replied “next year, maybe”, and I told him to say hello to the band mates. All in all, the man was nice, just as Gypsies say for Bruce Lee, “He was kind” 😀 I had thousands of questions and a multitude of things on my mind (what was the last thing he played on PC, did he play anything except consoles, when would the Mondo Cane album appear, etc.), but we’re just fans and he’s Mike, so he moves on. “Bye-bye, people, and thanks for coming…” bye-bye..

And so the wonder’s over. Filled with impressions, we set off to Niš and a return to Serbian reality, a province, among idiotic politicians and even more idiotic mayors …

<Great thanks to Nina <3 for the translation !>