Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [70]
Let me hear you scream!! I cut my hair short the day after this 2004 gig in NYC.
I’d just wrestled a grueling match and managed not to get hurt, then tweaked my knee thirty seconds into a Fozzy gig.
Rock and roll is a dangerous game, kids.
That statement became the ghastly truth on February 23, 2003, when we played a show in Albany, New York, at a club called Northern Lights. Even though there was hardly anybody there, we still treated it like we were playing in front of 25,000 at Bang Your Head. We ran around the stage like lunatics, coerced the crowd to sing along, and finally got them to cheer when we set off our usual pyro. We tried to use as much pyro as we could during each show even though it was expensive, because it added a lot to our overall presentation.
That night Rich tried a new device that shot flames from the end of his guitar when he activated a little rocket on the headstock. It was a great gag and the sparse crowd gave us a smattering of applause in appreciation.
However, when he shot off the sparks, they spouted straight up to the ceiling, causing a small wave of fire to briefly fan across the tiles.
“Did you see that?” I asked Rich, laughing. “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!” he replied, and we launched into the next song. After the gig we drove to Reading, Pennsylvania, and Rich and I were sharing a room. I was flipping through the TV channels and stopped on CNN when footage of a fire caught my eye. We watched in horror as a grisly report unfolded of how L.A. metal band Great White had just begun their show at a club called the Station in Rhode Island and their opening pyro engulfed the place, killing a hundred people. It was one of the worst fire-related tragedies in U.S. history, and Rich and I were horrified. We’d been laughing to each other only hours earlier when the same thing almost happened to us. We haven’t used pyro since.
We had a terrible crowd the next evening in Reading as nobody was interested in seeing a band play the night after the Station tragedy. But the night after that we had a great crowd and show at the legendary Brooklyn venue L’Amour. Everybody from Dream Theater to Metallica had played there, and it was a good morale booster.
Earlier in the day we did an interview for WSOU, a college radio station, which was the third biggest in New York City, and Happenstance was number one on their charts. It was the first time we ever had a number one record anywhere and was quite the froot milestone, made even sweeter by the fact that number two was The Blessed Hellride by Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society.
* * *
The New York area was our best market by far, and we played half a dozen gigs there on the Happenstance tour alone. We accepted an invitation to play the March Metal Meltdown at a place called the Cricket Club in Irvington, New Jersey. I was excited because not only were we sharing the bill with such platinum sellers as Anal Cunt and Goatwhore, but also with Raven, one of my favorite bands when I was in high school. Headlining the festival were England’s Status Quo and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal All Stars, which included Dennis Stratton, one of the original guitar players of Iron Maiden.
With the caliber of bands on the show, I was expecting a big crowd and a nice venue.
I was wrong. The Cricket Club was one of the biggest shitholes I’d ever played in. This place made some of the dumps I’d worked in Mexico look like the Taj Mahal. It was in the middle of a dark and dirty ghetto, surrounded by a huge chain-link fence lined with barbed wire on the top. It reminded me of something out of Escape from New York (You are the Duke! A number one!). It was a firetrap and the first thing I did when we hit the stage was look for the exits to plot my escape in case