Copps Coliseum
Hamilton, Ontario
August 21, 2011

So the redeemer show finally arrived for me to shoot n review a band that I’ve been waiting 5 long years.  One of my favourite metal bands to grace a stage gave me the nod to shoot em up real good and in a relatively small and intimate venue.  Copps Coliseum isn’t normally a small and intimate venue but this show was laid out as it was for Rob Zombie’s “Sinister Urge” tour.  Sideways.  The stage was set up on centre ice and the seats of the lower section were all pushed back leaving an area about 30’ from the front of the stage to the side boards.  This area was packed with Godsmack fans ready for some heavy sport and the seats above in the 200’s were brimming with a hoard of rockers not fortunate or brave enough to face the pit.

Last time I saw Godsmack back in 2006 in Toronto at the historical Massey Hall, I was stuck with a late arrival and seated at the back of the floor much too far away for decent photography.  On top of that, I still hadn’t acquired my first Digital SLR so I was at the mercy of ONE 24 roll of 800 ISO Fuji film and a manual Canon AE-1.  Not a bad camera, but like I said, way to far back to get a great shot.  As many of you already know, I’m a photographer first, a writer last and I love discussing the photographical technicalities of any show with anyone who’ll listen.  Sorry if you don’t understand what I’m about to write but for those of you into photography, here’s another one of my photography tangent rants… C3P0 style.

This time shooting Godsmack, I got exactly what I had hoped for.  Kick ass camera.  16 Gig memory card.  Beauty lens.  8 frames/second.  ISO 1600 and a photo pass.  I trudge into the pit, snap off a thousand shots and after deleting the total crap I have about 600 decent shots to sift through in search of a few gems. Do any of you have any idea how different it is to shoot a band with today’s cameras as opposed to the old film beasts we used to use?   Let me explain whether you give a fuck or not.

First off back then you had umpteen rolls of film to deal with.  36 being the largest roll.  Try carrying around 10 of those, an extra lens, a light source so you can see what you’re doing with your settings and roll changing and whatever other shit you’re used to toting around. 

Now let’s run through the drill.  Same rules applied back then.  3 songs, no flash, from the pit.  You guess-timated your settings at F2.8, 1/250th shutter speed and ran through your first 24 shots in about 60 seconds and then time to change your first roll of film.   I never bought the 36 rolls.  I was too poor… cuz remember not only did you hafta buy the film, you hafta develop the bastards too.  So that first roll, you were just barely getting used to the lighting and you had no preview to judge your results so you shot at one setting,  switched the roll, shot at another setting, switched again and again and again, each switch taking a good 30 seconds of precious time out of your first 3 songs to shoot and you MIGHT have ended up with 5-7 rolls shot, maybe more depending on the length of the tunes you were shooting… and then you HOPED that one, two or maybe even three of those rolls hit the nail on the head if you were lucky enough to be dealt with some consistently decent lighting.  You just hoped nothing too cool was happening in the middle of a roll change or you’ve just missed out on what would have been your best shots of the night. But that’s not all.

These guys are MOVING in the first 3 songs unless yer shooting geezers.  The lighting is often RED for a whole song just to fuck with the photographers cuz they know red light is the antichrist of photography and they USE that fact as a control measure.  They know the more they fuck with ya, the fewer beauty shots are coming out of that pit and they don’t care at all.  They don’t care if you’re shooting for Rebel Reviewer or the Toronto Star.  But they also know whoever is shooting for the Star has the best equipment and that dude KNOWS how to use it and when to shoot to get the best shots.

So after the show you have to take those rolls of film to get developed.  Hope you have a consistent printer.  If you did, they probably charged a premium like $10/roll to develop at least.  Colour corrected and ready to scan.  But more than likely you take em to a place where they fire the rolls through an automated process with no human intervention whatsoever and you get what you get which is 75% of the time pure shit, AND you’re waiting til the next day to do this cuz nobody is processing film at midnight when you get out of the show.

So you take your 6 or 7 packages of photos home and start going through them like you’re dealing a deck of playing cards, and it’s literally that fast… shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit GEM.  Ah there’s 2 good shots on a roll, times 7… 14 nice shots out of the whole night.  Not bad.  Now you gotta scan em, colour correct and crop em, watermark em if you’re that advanced, and get em online.  Another couple hours of messing around.  All in all, you see, it was generally a giant fuckshow just to get something online.  Now, compared to that rigmarole, it’s virtually instantaneous.

Anyway… Back to Godsmack.  Right from the self titled debut released in 1998, I found myself heavily attracted to Godsmack’s offerings.  Their crunch, their leads, the songwriting and coolness factor that Sully wraps the whole package in creates something a lotta people latch onto and fuel with support.

I’ve heard Godsmack referred to as Metallica’s protégé at one point in their careers and like it or not they really benefitted from their 2004 opening slot on Metallica’s “Madly In Anger with the World Tour” which propelled them from opening side dish to a headlining full meal deal.

Sully made a couple comments after opening the show with “Crying Like a Bitch”, and “Awake”. One: It’s a totally stripped down show with no fancy shit.  No video screens, no bells n whistles, none of that shit.  Two:  He’s sick.  Sully told us he’d been sick as fuck and that his lungs were all fulla crap.  Funny he mentioned that cuz when I saw Rob Zombie on that very stage in that very venue back in 2002 he said the exact same thing.  Sick as fuck… lungs all caked in butter… Coincidence?  Whatever…

Well for being so sick, I don’t think anyone in the building would have known if Sully hadn’t mentioned it.  The band is so tight live, their music never sounds bad and the vocals are so heavy that it sounds great with a little more kife thrown in.  During the show stopping dual drum solo where Sully jumps on his kit and plays alongside drummer Shannon Larkin, he didn’t miss a beat proving further that this is a band that separates the men from the boys.

The two solid drummers wove a solo together that wasn’t overly complicated but sounded really fuckin cool.  They fed off each other the whole time and meandered through a list of instantly recognizable drum pieces:  AC/DC’s “Back In Black”, Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, Metallica’s “Creeping Death”, Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung”, Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” and I dunno if they only did this cuz they’re in Canada but I love it when a band will show off some Rush as the guys did by pulling out “Tom Sawyer”.  Earlier during “Keep Away”, they fired it up by punching us in the face with the opening riff of Pantera’s epic “Walk”.  I so love it when a band throw props to their influences like that.

So I know I yapped more about the photography that night but aside from their kick ass music, my top priority is to get great photos of every band I get in front of.  It’s what I strive for.  What’s a review anyway?  MY opinion or half baked recollection of a show?  Who REALLY gives a fuck what a reviewer has to say about it anyway?  If you like Godsmack, I aint gonna change your mind about shit.  You already know they are an amazing live band.  If you don’t like em, or you never saw em before, I hope my 2 cents and pile of photos might help sway your opinion over just enough to check em out anyway.  If I have ever accomplished that, then my job is done.

Godsmack kills.  Get em in ya.

Massey Hall
Toronto, Ontario
June 13, 2006

Couple of firsts for me at this show.  First off, I never been to Massey Hall.  I know the ticket says Kool Haus on it but that don't mean shit.  I guess at the last minute someone fucked something up over at the Kool Haus and Godsmack couldn't play there.  Why?  Who the fuck knows but they called it a "technical difficulty" and moved the show to Massey Hall.  Well good.  That just means I finally got to see a band at the infamous and intimate Massey Hall.  The other first?  Godsmack themselves.  I never saw Godsmack before.  I have all their CDs and I REALLY like bitchin their music but every time these bastards happened by, I was broke as fuck so I never got smacked by God before.  I was totally impressed.  Sully, the lead singer, rhythm guitarist and kick ass drummer, commanded the audience without any effort at all.  He's the kinda guy who's got a shitload of charisma packed into his four foot nothin frame.  I think all that touring with Metallica really paid off cuz Sully's got a bit of the "James" in him now.  I had no idea what to expect.  I only saw Godsmack perform once on TV and I only caught a bit of that.  I didn't know Sully played guitar.  I didn't know Sully played the Peter Frampton tube in his mouth thingy with the guitar.  I didn't know Sully played the harmonica.  And I had no idea whatsoever that Sully is a kick ass drummer.  I didn't know Sully IS Godsmack.  Hell, I never met a guy named Sully before.  Only that construction guy on Sesame Street with the hard hat and eyes glued shut.    

Highlight of the show?  Sully comes riding out on a platform stage with his own set of drums and he and Shannon, their very competent motherfucker on the drums go at it toe to toe. Seeing as it's Toronto and you got a couple drummers trying to impress us with their abilities, they reach down and pull out a couple of Rush tidbits for us to see if we know our shit.  Well lo and behold we DO know our shit and we also know that Sully n Shannon did our buddy Neil Peart some justice by tandeming what I seem to remember as being a bit of YYZ (my fuckin memory could be deceiving me on this one) then burning through some other well known drum bits like Bonzo's Montreaux and then finishing it all off with another nod to Rush and Neil's unmistakable Tom Sawyer.  You wanna get a Toronto crowd bursting with pride?  Drop a tight Rush riff or two on us!  Saw Primus do that one time and they got the same reaction.  I don't suggest trying to lay some Rush on us fuckers if you can't play the shit though.  That might get ya killed in an increasingly popular, yet accidental, Toronto drive-by.  So let me clarify this loud and clear.  SULLY is the fuckin man!  Don't get me wrong, Shannon IS a kick ass drummer but for a part-timer like Sully to pick up and pull off Neil like a pro, my hat's off to the man.  All in all, I'm just real fuckin glad I made it to this show cuz it crossed another band off my list of "I gotta see these fuckers in concert before I/they get taken down by some psychotic fucknut with a semi-automatic"  I didn't get any good shots so don't fuckin bug me about that.

Godsmack Official Web Site