November 19th, 2009
Skinny Puppy In-Store This Afternoon
It’s true: I’m a Skinny Puppy fan. Perhaps I don’t listen to them these days as much as I did, say, 20 years ago, but as far as industrial music goes, for me it pretty much begins and ends with the veteran Canadian band. In fact, they were the very first band I interviewed for a published article (it was for my college newspaper back in the early ’90s, but whatever). I’ve since chatted with them on a few more occasions since becoming a “professional music journalist,” and while their music has been fairly creepy, scary, and unsettling over the years, its members — frontman Nivek Ogre, multi-instrumentalist cEvin Key, and the late keyboardist Dwayne Goettel (who died of a drug overdose in 1995) — are about the nicest, most intelligent, most personable musicians you’d ever want to encounter. Actually, that’s usually the case with the musicians who make extreme music. In my experience, it’s the people who make the gentlest music who tend to be the biggest assholes. It’s weird like that.
Anyway, if you’re interested, you’ll have a chance to meet the Skinny Puppy guys today — they’re doing a meet-and-greet/signing over at Digital Ferret record store (732 S. 4th St.) from 2:30 pm until 3 p.m., after which they’ll head over to soundcheck for their gig tonight at the Troc, which we highly recommend checking out as their shows are usually quite the multimedia sensory overload. To this day, one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen was Skinny Puppy at the Troc back in ‘92; 17 years later, they’ll hopefully bring the freaky fury back to the room.
