Just a couple days after Glenn Branca premiered his latest in Paris, one of his former ensemble members and a guitar legend in his own right, Page Hamilton, performed with Helmet back home at Saint Vitus.
And it was a homecoming, indeed: after snaking through the crowd to get to the stage and killing the first three songs from Betty (Helmet played the album in its entirety in honor of its 20th anniversary), Hamilton quizzed the room to see if anyone knew where the band played its very first show. Someone answered CBGBs, which was a good guess: later in the show, Hamilton busted out the magenta ESP axe that he wrote In the Meantime on and said he wanted to be buried with it. “When I showed up at CBGBs with this, [where] everyone had ripped jeans and beat-up guitars, it looked so fucking badass,” he said. “Don’t you think? It was so much more punk than everybody having the same guitar.”
But it was at Lauterbach’s, a long-gone Brooklyn bar, where Helmet made its debut 26 years ago. “Comes full-circle, doesn’t it?” Hamilton said before launching into “Milquetoast.”
There’ve been some changes in those 26 years. For one thing, Hamilton is the only remaining original member, as was obvious from his repeated hat tips to Dan Beeman on guitar, Dave Case on bass, and Kyle Stephenson on drums. But the song remains the same. Except for some squealing, free-wheeling improvised guitar solos, the band executed Betty flawlessly and faithfully, with the same fuzz-pop tone that producers Andy Wallace and Butch Vig instilled not just in that album, but also in other early-’90s classics: Nirvana’s Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream.
I can’t say that clean, chunky sound has held up well over the years — while Helmet’s syncopated riffs used to sound crushingly heavy, they now remind me a little too much of the cheesy pop-metal of 311.
But Helmet remains an awesome live band. Last time I saw them, at Irving Plaza in 2011, the pit swirled all night with beefy dudes who looked like they grew up on LIC hardcore. The crowd at Saint Vitus was a decidedly mixed bag of Brian Posehn lookalikes and young women who were probably in diapers when Strap It On was released back in 1990. The pit opened up briefly for just two songs.
While there didn’t seem to be many die-hards in the audience (perhaps because the band had already crushed two shows at Bowery Ballroom), someone did respond to Hamilton’s post-Betty request for a single-malt Scotch by asking him to play the bonus tracks from the album’s vinyl release. “I’d rather pay you for the drink than do those songs,” Hamilton joked (the band didn’t know them) before going on to reveal that Pariah was inspired by a college classmate who had a fruit fetish. He described spying on the kid through a hole in the wall: “He gets in a silk robe and he gets nekkid on his bed on top of, like, grapefruits and oranges and lemons and stuff and he jerks it.”
So yeah, the song was based on “that and, of course, all the Flaubert and all the amazing poetry that I read,” Hamilton said.
Here’s the set list of non-Betty songs that followed, if you’re keeping score. You can find more videos over at Dean Keim’s YouTube channel.
It’s Easy to Get Bored
So Long
Renovation
You Borrowed
Diet Aftertaste
Bad Mood
Future Business Leaders of America (Strap It On version)
Unsung
On Your Way Down
In the Meantime
