I attended the Clearwater stop on low-budget horror-film production company Full Moon's Horror Roadshow tour last Friday, with the hope of making both some new horror-scene friends and some industry contacts. Or rather, I attended the event for about an hour; Becks and I left, feeling more than a little grimy, when it became obvious that noted cult director Charles Band's underlying goal was to engage the crowd in some tacky symbiosis: He'd get some local chicks up onstage to take their tops off and make out, and the crowd would thank him by buying a shitload of his merchandise. Which really isn't extraordinarily sleazy in and of itself — until you factor in that several of the girls present (including the one who indulged in a full-on breast-bearing) had giant Xs on their hands denoting their underage status, and that he fed at least one of these underage girls a couple of shots, onstage, before exhorting her to grind on two of her peers during an improvised scene including a monster, a hero, and three conspicuously uncomfortable straight ladies being screamed at to attain various stages of lesbian interaction (i.e., "Lesbian factor four," "Ten! Ten! We want to be at factor ten now! C'mon, tear your tops off!").
Look, I love breasts as much as the next guy. Probably more, unless the next guy happens to be Russ Meyer, or somebody who's been turned down for gender reassignment based on his psych profile. And Band can surely rationalize that the responsibility of keeping persons under 21, or at least under 18, out of the club (in this case, downtown Clearwater's beautiful Majestic Lounge) lies with the club's management. And true, those big Sharpie Xs only mean the wearer is younger than the legal drinking age. But it just seems prudent to err on the side of caution, and only humiliate women with low self-esteem who are old enough to numb themselves with liquor first. As for feeding an underage girl straight liquor onstage, well, that's just fucking stupid, and could've come back on one of the few nightclubs that books local music on a regular basis.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 4, 2006.