Day 6 - Self-titled - Methods of Mayhem (1999)

Sometimes I look at a CD in my collection and think "I wonder what I'm going to write about for this one?".  In this case, my worry is that I have too much to write about to fit it all in one blog post. Let's dive in.

Find it on the iTunes store here

Yup, this is the first (but I am sure not the last) album I own which is too esoteric to appear on Spotify.  My guess is that 99.9% of the people in the world reading this have no idea who or what this band is.  Here's the pitch:-

It's 1999; you're Tommy Lee, the drummer from Mötley Crüe (yes I did have to look up the Unicode characters for the ö and the ü there, but it's important to do these things right), co-star of the ground zero of celebrity sex tapes with your then wife Pamela Anderson, you're going through a divorce and you just got out of prison.  You're also an LA resident and you know a whole bunch of people in the West Coast Rap game.  What do you do?

The answer, of course, is you recruit a bunch of your friends, people in the Rap/Metal business already, and you record an album about all the shit that's happening in your life at that point.  Then you go on tour with that album.

Now I know that I've shown already a propensity to buy Rap/Metal albums from the late nineties, but there's far more of a story behind this purchase than the others.  However, before I dive into that, I'd feel remiss if I didn't share with you the CD image itself, as well as the album cover.

So you don't have to tilt your monitor to read the text, it says

"WARNING: This CD is nothing but worthless plastic unless played loud as fuck.

So take this shit straight to your head - because it's quiet when you're dead"

Words to live by.  Also you have to be impressed they got all the apostrophes in the right place.

So why did I end up owning this album?  It's time to talk about my friend Alex again.

There was a seven year span in my life, from 1997-2003, where instead of having what you might call a "proper holiday" I spent my summers going to music festivals, which were like the holidays other 20-somethings were taking at the time, in that they were expensive, you were often drunk most of the time and made several dubious decision during them, but with the added bonus of also being wet, cold, muddy, and uncomfortable.  Also there were no showers for the whole duration and you basically slept on the floor.  

I miss going to festivals a lot.

The year 2000 was the first time I branched out and started doing two festivals in one summer.  In this case, I'd desperately wanted a ticket to Glastonbury that year;  people I knew were going, and Nine Inch Nails were headlining the Other Stage on the Saturday Night.  I'd been desperate to see NIN since about 1994 but they'd never toured in the UK, so for me it was a done deal.  I didn't really care who else was on the bill, I would go, hang out, see Nine Inch Nails, and be happy.

Alex had never been to a festival before, but I'd certainly talked enthusiastically about them enough to him to make him interested in going.  I'm not sure whether NIN was the same draw for him as it was for me, or just that he saw the opportunity to go to a festival for the first time, but we both got tickets, and arranged to drive down with my friend Libby and her flatmate Rob who were also going. Lib's family had been going to Glastonbury for years, so we were guaranteed a large group of people to camp with when we got there.

There's are a lot of great stories from that weekend, but I'm going to focus on the issue at hand otherwise this might end up as a short novella.  There was a point that weekend when Alex, who was sharing a tent with me, was laughing so hard but trying not to be heard laughing I thought he was going to pass out.  

£87 for a weekend camping ticket in 2000.  Suck it, millennials.  

Also please stop buying all the Glastonbury tickets before I can every year, you're killing me.

 Like I said, Alex had never been to a festival before, so in the lead-up to going I'd provided him a list of things that I, a 3 year festival veteran, had found to be essential parts of the festival experience.  Alex, because his decision making processes are slightly less effective than neon pink camouflage gear, decided basically to ignore that and instead have none of those things.

In order to save himself the inconvenience of having to pack clothes into some kind of bag to take to the festival, Alex's solution would be that he would just wear every single item of clothes he was taking down there at the same time, thus converting his body into a handy suitcase.  A plan with literally no flaws.

Once we'd arrived at the site, it became apparent the car park we were in was a good 25 minutes walk from car to our campsite.  So, along with Lib & Rob, we lugged all our camping gear down there, set up the tent, and then me and Alex took the long walk back to the car to fetch the cases and cases of beer we had brought instead of packing anything useful or essential.  

Now Glastonbury has some famously changeable weather.  So much so, that in the 20 minute span of us walking back to the car, the clouds had rolled in above us, dark and full of portent.  Me and Alex, each holding the straps of a bag struggling under the weight of enough cheap alcohol for us to set up our own Bargain Booze franchise in Glastonbury, were moving slowly back towards the tent when the heavens opened.

It was less of a rain shower and more like a vengeful god had upended up bucket over the entire festival site.  It came down in sheets so hard I remember it stinging my face and hands as we were pelted, and all around us, more sensible people ran for cover.  But we were in no man's land - too far from the car to go back, but still at least a mile or so from the tent.  So we soldiered on, fighting through the driving storm, precious alcohol cargo in tow.

By the time we made it to the tent, the worst of it had stopped, but the damage was already done.  I was soaked to the skin, like I'd been dunked into a lake.  So was Alex, every single layer of every piece of clothing he'd brought to wear for the entire three days was adhering to both him and each other in a sodden mess of terrible decision making.

We did what anyone would do in our situation;  we got into our tent, tried to dry off as best we could, and got thoroughly drunk.

The following day was the first day of the festival proper, and Alex's clothing situation was going to be a problem.  I loaned him some spare combats (it was the late nineties) I had and he slapped on a still sodden T-shirt and we walked down to the festival site, our first goal - locate a merch stand to buy Alex some new clothes.

We rolled into the merch area of the main stage, hungover and slightly overwhelmed.  The merch stall was set out with the appropriate t-shirts for the bands who were either playing at the time, or were about to come on.  Alex bought a yellow Methods of Mayhem T-shirt because he liked the logo, changed out of his damp shirt on the spot, and since we were there already, we wandered to the main stage as Tommy Lee and crew were coming on.

Looking at my old programs now is profoundly annoying in hindsight.  I missed A Perfect Circle, who I love, playing at like 1pm because in 2000 I had no idea who they were.

I've never been to a music festival where I haven't come away with an appreciation for a band I'd never heard of before, and this was no exception.  In the glare of the unexpected sunshine, with a raging hangover, in front of a relatively small crowd, Tommy Lee & crew came on and went crazy on stage.  

I have a long-standing beef with British concert goers - they're very stuffy and non interactive, and I think bands find crowds in the UK hard to warm up.  Not a problem for these guys, who had the crowd jumping, crowd surfing and going crazy almost immediately.  Then they played "Get Naked", and Tommy Lee took all his clothes off on stage and sang the song naked.  

I was not prepared, mentally or emotionally, to deal with Tommy Lee's dong at 3pm on a Friday afternoon, with a raging hangover, and in the blazing hot sun.  It obviously had a profound effect on me, because after the festival was over, one of the first things I did was to seek out and buy this album.

On listening to it again, and you know what, it's pretty ok.  It's got a ton of guests on there - Mix Master Mike from the Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg, Wu Tang, George Clinton, L'il Kim, so the Rap parts are pretty on point, and the rock side is pretty good too.  I mean, it's still Rap/Metal, but it's (I think) a step above other stuff at the time, even the big boys like Papa Roach & Limp Bizkit weren't on their level;  they were just more popular and had a bigger audience.

Songs on here go back and forth from Tommy talking about mistakes he'd made in a kind of "I know I f'ed up" to angry invectives against the media, politics, and everything else that must have been frustrating the hell out of him back in 1999.  It's not deep or edgy, but it's a strange mix of some surface level "fuck yeah, fuck the world" stuff and some raw emotional outbursts.

MoM disbanded in 2000, so I guess I was just in the right place at the right time to see them, but I was surprised to learn they reformed and released a second album, in a totally different style in 2009. I'm not a huge fan of Tommy Lee (as I am generally not of anyone who has domestic abuse convictions) as a human being, but this album is a weird artefact of a strange time in both his and my life.