It all started several months ago in a spree of collaborative revelations amongst the ultra-elite (haha) of the StonerRock.com Community Forums members. Through many late night forums posting sessions nutting out details a great many of us from all around the world realized that it was in fact possible and, yes indeed, worthwhile and, very likely necessary for each of us to attend Emissions from the Monolith IV even though it was in Youngstown-fucking-Ohio.

They came in pairs, they came in small groups and they came alone. Many were travelling with new friends that they had only met online in the StonerRock.com Forums prior to jumping in a car together for long drive or like myself, jumping on a plane with sapling from Vancouver, BC, Canada to Chicago, spending an evening sightseeing down at Navy Pier in Chicago with a complete stranger (Sweet Heather) and then spending 8 hours each way to Youngstown in a utilitarian rental van with 9 other nearly-complete strangers! The Van of Doom crew consisted of MadJohnShaft (Chicago), psofire (Chicago), Sativa71 (North Carolina), El Danno (me!) (Vancouver, BC), sapling (Vancouver, BC), Randolfio (Portland, OR), m2 (Chicago), Goth Chick (Chicago), Tony (Chicago) and on the way back jeff kupferburg (Minneapolis, Maduro Records). Huge thanks go out to MadJohnShaft for renting the 15 seater van and even bigger thanks to Sweet Heather for getting 4 of us cheap airfare. Without the organizational skills and generosity of these two angels-from-below we may not have succeeded in our mission! I thank you both 1000 times!!

I`m getting ahead of myself here though. My own emissions weekend, and the several consecutive nights of very little sleep, began at 2am on Thursday morning when I woke up from a 3 hour power-sleep and hopped on a plane with sapling bound for The Windy City. Sweet Heather strictly warned us that sneakers weren`t allowed in first class. sapling wore sneakers. I did not. I got first class and sapling did not. sucked in!

The flight was uneventful and Sweet Heather, someone whom we hadn`t met before and who got us super-cheap airfare, was there at O`hare Airport to pick us up and drive us to our hotel, just like she said she would be. Amazing! ...and the first thing sapling and I do is get drunk on strong Margaritas in the Mexican restaraunt down the street from the hotel. Of course, after we had a slight buzz on it seemed logical enough to pick up some beer on the way back to the hotel where we found Randolfio napping after his flight in from Portland. Somehow he got them to give him a key even though he wasn`t registered to our room at all!!! I guess it`s that easy to trick yourself into someone elses hotel room while they`re out! We sat around drinking beer for a couple of hours and then headed downtown. We had dinner at a jazz club on Navy Pier and absorbed some killer live jazz while we ate popcorn shrimp and drank local draft beer in pint glasses. We then spent some time being toursits at Navy Pier - see photos in right column for examples of what this entailed. :0) Anyone who`s been reading the forums will especially like the Randolfio fisting photo :)

Not surprisingly we had a good buzz on by the time we headed downtown for the Emissions Eve ceremonies at Estelles, a small bar near the Double Door where we would soon be witnessing Orange Goblin, Alabama Thunder Pussy, Tummler and Behold the Living Corpse tearin` shit up! This is where we met psofire and Sativa71 for the first time. MadJohnShaft was also already there and in a completely unrelated incident I talked to Bongzilla at the bar. I tried to buy some narcotics from them but they weren`t selling... The atmosphere of the StonerRock.com table of strangers was that of the oldest of friends catching up after not seeing each other for many years. Sativa71 and sapling are both funny motherfuckers and immediately had an affinity with one another - they teamed up several times over the course of the weekend to laugh anyone near them to the virge of emotional collapse. Sativa71 reciting entire scenes from Silence of the Lambs in Terrence and Phillip voices on request until around 7am Sunday morning was the highlight of hilarity. Watching Lobster Magnet on luna loca`s (Utrecht, Netherlands) laptop computer 10 times in a row that same night was a close second though!

But that was later on in the story. Right about now we`re on our way over to the Double Door for the show. Here is where things get a little hazy. Here is where I started smoking some strong bud with Muleboy in the audience. I remember that the sound was amazing for all the bands and the place was packed! It`s a big venue too. I was impressed. It was a complete success of a show!

Behold the Living Corpse was big, heavy, loud, slow and evil sludge-core with dual bass players - one with only two strings - and a drummer. No guitars. I enjoyed them. It was an interesting way to begin a night of heavy rock!

Next up were Tummler and they fucking laid down the spacerock like nobody`s business - it sounded like the leads were being played in a wind tunnel or a black hole or something - out of this world swirly psychedelic goodness!! I`m glad I caught their entire mind melting set this time because they ended up being one of the few bands that I missed altogether at Emissions IV.

Alabama Thunder Pussy were the best that I`ve ever seen them by far.. I`d only seen them twice previously and both times were at the Satyricon in Portland with a bad sound guy. The sound for Alabama Thunder Pussy`s set at the DD was immaculate! Mark from Marksound was there doing the sound for this show though, so that would explain it. They also had both a new lead guitarist and bass player since the last time I`d seen `em and I gotta say they were much better for it. The buttery southern fried leads laid down by new guitarist Ryan Lake added a whole new dimension to the Alabama Thunder Pussy sound and there was a lot of open space in the music as opposed to the wall of deafening sound they`d eminated on the other two occasions that I saw them..

And holy fuck. After Alabama Thunder Pussy finished the time had finally come for my first encounter with the mighty Orange Goblin over for their first ever U.S. Tour (with Alabama Thunder Pussy) and I cannot easily express how much they exceeded my expectations. From previous reviews that I`d read I had expected them to be a drunken and loose party band. But that couldn`t have been farther from the truth! Mostly they played intense, driving and precise space rock ala Superjudge era Monster Magnet and they did it damn well! It`s psychedelic, it`s heavy, it`s fuzzy, it`s trippy and it`s my favourite kinda stuff! But that`s not all that Orange Goblin is about. Ben Ward, the hulking gotta-be-near-seven-feet-tall front man was all over the stage despite his height and the Orange Goblin sound often alternated from their signature spacerockin` sound to punk-rock angst, metal ferocity and rock `n` roll soul. Orange Goblin are a top-shelf band that I will see at every opportunity that I get. It`s a good thing that I got so many photos at this show because I didn`t get any of either Tummler or Orange Goblin at Emissions IV!

At some point during this evening we finally met m2 and possibly Goth Chick and very possibly others who I can`t remember (sorry, it was a whirlwind of a weekend!) and I was so stoned from Muleboy`s weed that everything became very surreal. Oh, and did I mention that I was still attempting to quit smoking during this weekend? I actually made it through the entire day and evening (with a 7mg nicotine patch on) and gig without having a single smoke! At this particular moment in time I`d gone just over 7 weeks without smoking (well, maybe one or two! :). Of course I had to have a congratulatory smoke after my gigantic cheeseburger at the late-night restaraunt (Denny`s? Cracker Barrel?) on the way back to the hotel from the show. I believe I may have also had a second congratulatory smoke. Still quite the accomplishment considering my surroundings and companions :) I guess psofire missed Orange Goblin`s set due to some over-indulgence consequences that had him getting intimate with the pavement in the alley behind the club. That`s ok.. We were seeing them a second time in a mere 3 days.. If we could make it through the next 3 chocker-block days of rock alive!!

The next morning had us up early and waiting when MadJohnShaft showed up at around 10am to pick-up Randolfio, sapling and myself in the 15 seater Van-o-Doom. I felt surprisingly fresh like a dew covered rosebud on a sunny spring morning. It`s too bad about the health benefits I get from not smoking 2 packs of cigarettes at a rock show - if it weren`t for these I wouldn`t have any reason to quit. I really would prefer not to quit actually. I love smoking! But.. I digress. We spent the next 2 hours circling Chicago on the freeways picking up our crew of 9.

It seems like we smoked weed constantly during the 8 1/2 (?) hour drive to Youngstown and had a good sized amount of sit-down-and-get-to-know-ya kinda time on our hands. It`s a good thing we all got along. Not a single annoying-fucker in the bunch. Excellent!

Unfortunately we spent more time than we`d expected fucking around Chicago picking people up and it turns out that we also forgot to take into account that we were entering a new time zone and losing a very very valuable hour. We showed up very high and several hours late and all told we missed 4 bands that I really wanted to see: Black Manta, Wooly Mammoth, Red Giant and Porn - AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!! What a tragedy :( - I heard that Wooly Mammoth turned out to be the big surprise band of the weekend. I never heard anyone talk about Wooly Mammoth without raving about how good they were.. Red Giant is also one of my all-time faves and being that I had only seen them once before at last year`s emissions I was eager to see them again. And Porn always slays live. I`ve seen them several times before and they`ve never let me down. One of the best live bands out right now (not that they`re ever the same band twice, at least Moss is always there!). I really wanted to catch their set at Emissions because I`m sure they turned it up a notch and really unleashed the full-on Porn experience! Enough people raved about them over the course of the weekend that I`m sure my assumption was correct. Besides, they`d already agreed to play a second set on Sunday because The Brought Low BROKE UP!! (fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!!! I fucking love these guys. I hope it`s not a permanent break-up. I NEED a new Brought Low release!!) So Porn drove all the way to New York for a Saturday night show (450 miles or something like that) and then back to Youngstown in time for a mid-afternoon D-set performance! This was life-affirming news to all of us who really, really, really, really, really wanted to see Porn earlier in the evening but missed them because out of 9 of us we weren`t capable of planning a simple drive between cities where we would end up in the destination city on time!! (hehe)

The very first band that we caught was Stinking Lizaveta and man am I glad we did! These guys are a mathy rock band that exudes creativity, passion and soul. Their songs are equally complex and intense and their performance was nothing less that all-out. Cheshire, the drummer, was playing so hard that I often feared that her head may spontaneously explode at any minute. Relentless!! Alexi adeptly played a very unique stand-up electric bass and Yanni had the persona of a gypsy and was extremely serious about his playing. The effect created by him screaming into the pickups of his guitar was especially trick!

I don`t know how I completely missed the very next band after we arrived, Disengage. They`re not really my thing and I was spending time meeting up with everyone who I already knew and already meeting a bunch of new people from the forums. The girls from Portland (boar, elia, XOtiff and mmefreak were already there and getting down. Nolan, also from Vancouver, BC, was already there as well. I was especially happy to catch up with my good buddies in The Rubes who I hadn`t seen since last year`s Emissions. And the Lone Brother: omie. I also met my fellow Canadians who were down from Toronto: Johnny Dark, Lord_13 and the stunning carsongirl. Who I unfortunately did not think to get any pictures of!

Totimoshi, all the way from San Francisco, headlined this short (for us) first night at Emissions IV. I guess they flew out out on extremely short notice just to play this one set! These guys don`t fuck around! Spirit Caravan was originally supposed to fill the headlining slot but they suffered the fate of so many bands lately: they broke up! (what an utter tragegy! I morn for Spirit Caravan`s demise). The Glasspack was then scheduled to fill this Friday night headlining slot but ended up not being able to make it. I`m sure everyone was extremely dissapointed when Spirit Caravan cancelled and then doubly dissapointed when the infamous Glasspack followed suit. I know for a fact that I was. Totimoshi had some big shoes to fill as far as what the audience`s original expectations for how`d they`d be spending this particular hour of their lives. And, against all odds, Totimoshi did not let us down. I have to admit that they had never really caught my attention the previous times I`d seen them live and the same goes for their CDs. I do know lots of people that rave about them so this is clearly just a personal taste issue on my part. Either way, Totimoshi delivered their Tool-meets-Nirvana rock assault in flawless fashion and converted me to a fan that will see them live every chance I get. At once fresh, technical and powerful. If there is anything that I can really appreciate it`s a unique band that`s doing their own creative thing. Totimoshi is one of these bands.

Even for such a long, event filled day I believe that I made it past 11pm before I had my first cigarette of the night. Not bad, not bad at all. And thereafter I proceeded to chain smoke until long after the sun came up! Actually, the only thing I talked to anyone about all weekend was the fact that I was trying to quit smoking. It`s fucking hard man! It consumes me. And once I have one it`s all down-fucking-hill from there. So, this is when I began bumming cigarettes incessantly! After the festivities were all over we ended up hanging out at the Nyabinghi until she closed. Luckily we thought to get a case of beer on offsales before we all piled into the van and headed back to the hotel room... This may have been the night when we forgot Randolfio (who we`d now started referring to as "Spider-man" due to his boyish good looks) at the club and he cleverly managed to find his way back without our help! (unless of course that was Saturday night! Hehe - we forgot Randolfio once and started driving away without Sativa71 another time! Editors Note: I am just now realizing that I am having a very hard time remembering which events happened on which day. DOH! I also just realized that I`m not 100% sure if I just spelled "happened" correctly - and dictionary.com is offline! Motherfucker!

Handily, there was a Denny`s in the parking lot of the hotel and several of us spent a good hour or more in a we`re-way-too-high-to-be-in-public laughing-fit calibre conversation. We also had fun tormenting our waitress. I was actually surprised that we weren`t asked to leave! But then I looked around and realized what the clientelle at a Denny`s in a hotel parking lot in Youngstown, Ohio after 3am on a Friday night was like and it turns out that we fit right in - or perhaps we were even less conspicuous than our fellow diners. Of course this could have easily taken place on Saturday night for all I know. :) I get the feeling that the old noggin is beginning to fail.

Well.. That`s the end of Part 1. Click here for a report on Saturday`s activities in Part 2!

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