They Made Canadians Riot

Somewhere in the nation, a dark caravan is winding its way along the highways. It makes a stop each night to raze another unsuspecting city, pouncing quickly and bringing the daily happenings to a halt. It then raises a horrendous racket and proceeds to brutally pummel the populace, pausing only to consume the entirety of its supply of beer and liquor. Then it moves stealthily on to the next town.
Yeah, you guessed it — it’s a metal tour. In fact, it’s the MTV2 Headbangers Ball, the cranky granddaddy of metal tours, and from the news coming from ground zero, there’s nothing but devastation in its wake. The tally after the first week: one near riot, two freak car wrecks, unnumbered brawls and at least four busloads of metalheads who like to drink, go downtown and break things. Good thing it’s all in the name of pop-culture TV.
Taking turns headlining the tour are metal moguls Lamb of God, Shadows Fall and Killswitch Engage, with one opener. Phoning from the pre-concert spread of Columbus, Ohio, Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler paused in his endless search for Newcastle Brown Ale to summarize the tour so far.
“This is the best tour we’ve ever been on,” he said. “It’s like a Friday night every night.”
Though he couldn’t go into some of the more illegal aspects of the past eight days, Adler was able to give a brief taste of the festivities, violent, nonviolent and super-violent. For example, the riot that almost ensued in Toronto after Lamb of God closed their set.
“We were kind of not really allowed to come back and do an encore,” he said, explaining that each band had the same time limit. “People stuck around for, like, 30 minutes and were just freaking out.”
The Pittsburgh show four days later did not bring the same brand of chaos, though there was no shortage of genuine metalhead mayhem; the lack of stage security or any kind of effective barricade granted free stage access to anyone who knew how to jump.
“We had kids all over the stage having fun with us, spilling beer and going nuts,” Adler said. “It’s all good times.”
Shadows Fall lead singer Brian Fair said he even stopped the show briefly to instruct the reckless teenage mob on the proper use of a rock stage.
“I had to give stage-diving 101, because kids were trying to dive straight into the crowd,” he said. “I was like, ‘no, you gotta jump up first, then out.’”
But the fun doesn’t end at the edge of the stage — typical rock band disasters seem to follow the bands around even offstage. The Lamb of God tour bus was sideswiped in Pennsylvania, forcing the band to go through the whole mess of calling the police and filing an insurance claim. Shadows Fall was kept out of Canada for the first couple of tour dates due to paperwork problems coming from a pending court case. During a photo shoot in Philadelphia, the three lead singers — Fair, Howard Jones of Killswitch and Randy Blythe of Lamb of God — witnessed another collision as a speeding truck rammed a brand new BMW on a crowded street. According to Jones, the truck just kept going.
“That kind of disrupted the photo shoot because we were laughing so hard,” he said.
In fact, in an unofficial, and most likely unfounded, poll done with their peers, Jones and Blythe were voted the “walking party” of the tour caravan, due to the trouble they tend to find “usually involving alcohol and broken things,” as one commenter put it. Incidentally, the same poll dubbed Killswitch guitarist Adam Dutkiewics the honorary asshole of the tour, for similar reasons.
But for tipping the scales in terms of mayhem, the band members say the trophy goes back to the crowds. Each new city scores a higher mark on the meter of testosterone-fueled, angst-driven fury, making this three-week trek across the country a testament to musically inspired teenage violence and blissful recklessness. A guy gets knocked out cold during the last song in Pittsburgh; longhairs fight hardcore kids fight thrashers at every show; thousands of people all go crazy in the same room, pumping their fists in unison and screaming right at you. Shadows Fall’s Brian Fair called it “completely insane...a super-violent and energetic crowd every night.” To Killswitch’s Howard Jones, it can actually be humbling at times.
“After a song I just went to the front of the stage and just gave them a little applause, just started clapping for them,” he said. “And they just started clapping with me ... I’m like, ‘this is insane.’”
Besides the constant drill of attention from the crowd, the bands are also under fire from the cameras of the MTV2 film crews, who show up every once in a while to add to the documentary they will eventually make out of the tour. These things have a way of getting into your head when you’re onstage, Lamb of God’s Chris Adler said.
“It’s weird — I mean, you’ve already got 2,000 kids looking at you like, ‘what are you gonna do now?’ and then all of a sudden there’s just six cameras surrounding you, watching every step…if you start thinking about it you start messing everything up.”
So to unwind and regroup, the bands relax offstage by playing card games, watching DVDs and…listening to mellow music. Fair commented while listening to some super-old Grateful Dead: “With a tour this brutal you’ve got five hours of nonstop metal every night, so afterwards it’s time to chill.” Jones agrees with the mellow music idea, but prefers the soothing vibes of the newest Deftones for relaxing.
“It’s mellow to me,” he said.
But as much as they enjoy relaxing in their off-time, and as low-key and civil as they sound over the phone, Adler, Fair, Jones and the rest of the caravan probably aren’t on the Headbangers Ball tour to play cards. If their music, and their exploits, are any reference, they each have their own reputation for putting boot through skull. When they come to town, just make sure it’s not yours.

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