by TINA LOLLOCADENKA, Alternate Reality News Service Music Writer
Tragedy struck a Buffalo area nightclub when a musician repeatedly set himself on fire as part of the show. Owing to a little too much lighter fluid and too few extinguishers and fire exits, Club Burning Desires fulfilled at least part of its name by burning to the ground, killing 14 and injuring 27.
“Talk about – cough cough – going out in a blaze of – HACK! – glory!” Deedee Devilliers, a surviving fan of the band Bee Bopp and the Plangent Five, enthused. “I’ve got a – cough cough – pocket full of – cough cough – ashes to remember the – HACK! – concert by! I’ll never wash those ashes as long – WHEEZE – as long as I live…”
Bee Bopp and the Plangent Five were one of a growing number of Blaze Thrash bands. The lead singer – in this case, Johnny Brandon (born: Brandon Jonakowski) – wears a full body sound suit. Sensors embedded in the suit are connected by a wireless network to a bank of synthesizers; by patting various areas on the suit, the person who wears it can play it like a musical instrument.
The body sound suit has been around for decades, long enough to become a staple of Abba tribute bands. For years, musicians have been looking for ways to revive the fortunes of the instrument by adding spontaneity to it. Punching Bag Blues, where the lead singer invited fans onstage to activate the music by beating him up, didn’t go very far: depending upon the crowd’s enthusiasm and improvisational skills, the singer usually had to be hospitalized for anywhere from two days to three weeks after every concert, making tour planning difficult.
Then came Blaze Thrash.
Legend has it that Johnny Batagliano, lead singer of the Thrash band Maudlin Incinerator, had been playing around with a body sound suit in the studio when a spark from a poorly rolled joint set the fabric on fire. Frantic to get it out, Batagliano hit himself all over, sending a cascade of random sounds to the control booth.
That would likely have been an isolated, long forgotten incident if some unknown technician, possibly under the influence of the aforementioned controlled substance, hadn’t forgotten to stop recording when the band had broken for lunch two hours earlier. When he got out of intensive care, Batagliano loved the sound, and insisted on putting it in what would become the classic Blaze Thrash ballad, “Help! Help! I’m On Fire…For Your Love!”
“Inasmuch as no two fires blaze in quite the same way,” Marcus-o-matic 31,234, a digital emulator of rock critic Greil Marcus, enthusiastically wrote, “Blaze Thrash introduced true randomness of sounds and chord progressions into the process of musical creation. It also brought danger back into rock and roll, which had, by that time, become as dangerous as a tofu enema.”
As Marcus-o-matic 31,234 explained, death onstage seemed to be confined to the 90 and 100 year-old rock stars who kept going out on one last farewell tour (The Who, to use but one example, were on their 237th when Pete Townshend cut his finger on a broken guitar string and immediately bled to death). Blaze Thrash, by making it possible for young musicians to die onstage, ironically brought new life to popular music.
Although many bands imitated Maudlin Incinerator, none caused the kind of havoc of Be Bopp and the Plangent Five. Johnny Puke, lead singer of the band CEO Mewlers, was briefly hospitalized with third degree burns over his chest, arms and groin. When he was told he wouldn’t be able to have children, he joked, “Yeah, well, the drugs and alcohol have made my sperm lazy bastards, so that wasn’t gonna happen anyway, thanks.” Johnny Spumoni, lead singer of the group Abba-toir, set fire to the stage at the Holiday Inn in South Poughkeepsie, but the owner agreed that it actually improved the ambience of the performing space. The Be Bopp and the Plangent Five incident was the first time anybody actually died at a Blaze Thrash concert.
You might expect the pioneer of Blaze Thrash to be sympathetic to the plight of Be Bopp and the Plangent Five. You would be wrong. “Amateurs!” he snorted when asked about what happened at Club Burning Desires. “You have to save the fire for the climax of the show. But, bands that came after us were always trying to outdo us, and they would throw the fire earlier and earlier into their sets, and do it more often.”
The problem is that the flame retardant gel that is smeared on the suit before every performance will burn off if set on fire often enough. Bo Bopp had reportedly played six consecutive Blaze Thrash songs without a break to regrease the suit.
“Ouch,” Batagliano commented. “Stupid ouch.”
Members of the band that survived the blaze at Club Burning Desires have indicated that they may continue the tour under the name The Plangent Two. “It’ll be our little tribute to Bo,” zitherist Mikhail Molotov stated. “Only, we’ll go back to being a Russian roots band. We’re done playing with fire…”