The Spin

Blood, sweat, bleeding ears

We knew things were getting off to a slow start at the Springwater on Halloween when rock o’clock rolled around and there was hardly a soul stirring, besides the door guy and a menacing bunch huddled around the pool table. But after dipping out momentarily, we returned to find the bar packed with festively disguised regulars and too-cool-for-costumes hipsters, but still no band. Elbow room was in short supply as we inched over clusters of broken glass and through a permanent haze of secondhand smoke, all the while humming along to the obligatory Halloween soundtrack of The Misfits’ horror-punk classics. Tim Chad and Sherry finally got things started. Sporting three more members than the name would suggest (including guitar hero William Tyler and familiar sideman Loney John), TC&S commanded our immediate attention with a punked-up rendition of CCR’s “Rolling on the River” (the Ike & Tina version). The group captivated with a dozen or so psychedelic, blue-eyed-soul originals, treading somewhere between the funkier side of Ween and the dirty-white-boy R&B of early J. Geils Band. Things shifted gears as The Pull the Strings Players set up to perform an X-rated puppet parody of the Peanuts’ Halloween special, “This is Some Fucked Up Shit, Charlie Brown.” Full of predictably potty-mouthed humor and scored with the original soundtrack (remixed by The Privates’ Dave Paulson), the Players had us alternately chuckling and cheering, and ended with a cameo by Alcohol Stuntman Chris Crofton as the benevolently twisted Great Pumpkin. Midnight came and went as working stiffs trickled out and the harder of core stuck around for Monotonix. This Israeli ragtag trio wasted no time in dousing their drum set with lighter fluid and setting it ablaze just before launching into an ear-bleeding, rough-and-tumble assault of primal blues and face-punching rock ’n’ roll. They whipped the crowd into an orgiastic frenzy, pummeling both us and their tattered gear with a barrage of noise, blood (yes, real blood), sweat, fire, water and danger—a much-needed element in the garage-rock revival.

LaVery cool