"So... What Do You Guys Like to Do in Poughkeepsie?"

Flashing back on Slayer and Motörhead's 1988 show at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center

It’s the time of year for scary music and stories of the supernatural — but a certain upcoming anniversary also has me pondering the question: What’s the scariest concert you’ve ever seen?

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I have been to shows by Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, Cradle of Filth, etc., but I’m not talking about horror-themed performances. I’m talking about shows where the situation — either due to the act, the fans, the venue, or all of the above — has you seriously questioning whether or not you’ll make it out of the place in one piece.

In my forty-plus years as an active concertgoer, I have certainly seen some ugly shit. I have witnessed some hideous hand-to-hand audience combat and stepped gingerly over passed-out wasteoids at way too many shows to count. I saw one late-’80s Pogues show in NYC where a group of forty-something Irish immigrants were going so hard in the pit as to put visible fear in the eyes of mohawked punks 25 years their junior. I watched a heavily-pregamed guy projectile vomit the entire length of his row before a Tom Petty concert had even started. I have been sitting on (or standing below) balconies that were bouncing so hard in time to the music that I thought the whole thing was about to come down. But never have I felt less safe at a show than (almost) 35 years ago tonight, when I caught Slayer and Motörhead in concert at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, New York.

I would go on to see both bands numerous times over the next three decades, but this particular night — November 2, 1988 — was my first time for both. I was definitely more excited for Motörhead; I’d been a fan since the summer of 1981, when a friend introduced me to their Ace of Spades album, and frontman/bassist Lemmy Kilmister was already a legendary figure in my mind for how he mightily bestrode both the hard rock and punk worlds like a leather-trousered, mole-encrusted colossus. But I was also pretty into Slayer; their breakthrough 1986 album Reign In Blood was one of the records that really got me interested in thrash metal, and I liked their 1988 followup South of Heaven even more. The newspaper clip below (which I stumbled across yesterday while doing searching for photos to go with this JTL entry) notwithstanding, I thought that album showed some impressive musical growth — as well as some nice nods to forebears Judas Priest and Black Sabbath — while still sticking firmly to the band’s pitch-dark worldview.

(And yes, the same SC Sentinel critic who wrote the above Slayer slam used the same column to jizz all over Jimmy Page’s Outrider LP, an album which absolutely no one asked me to write a 30th anniversary retrospective about in 2018.)

I’d heard that things could get pretty rowdy at Motörhead shows, and I of course assumed the same with Slayer. But this being the late 1980s, a time when metal press coverage was pretty much limited to monthly mags like Circus and RIP, word had not yet spread to my world about the fan riots a few months earlier that had caused Slayer to be banned from both the Palladium in L.A. and the Felt Forum in NYC. I was therefore woefully underprepared for the carnage and bad vibes I was about to experience.

New Jersey thrashers Overkill were also along on this tour, but my college friends and I rolled up to the Civic Center that night too late to catch them. (Not that I particularly minded; I’d seen their new video for “Hello from the Gutter” on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball, and thought it was pretty cheesy.) I have no idea how Overkill’s set went over with the crowd, but I could tell that the vibe was bad as soon as we walked in. There was no sense of anticipatory giddiness in the air like I’d experienced at so many concerts, no celebratory “gathering of the tribe” feeling. A significant portion of the assembled multitudes simply seemed like they were there to seriously fuck shit — and each other — up.

The Civic Center, a multi-purpose arena whose soulless brick-and-concrete architecture made it look like a high school gymnasium on growth hormones, probably already looked outdated when it was opened in 1976 as part of an unsuccessful attempt to improve the economic fortunes of downtown Poughkeepsie. Having been cleared of seats tonight to keep those in attendance from throwing them, the arena floor felt like a prison yard. There were fistfights happening in just about every direction — I vividly remember watching a particularly bloody beatdown being administered by a burly guy in a sleeveless denim jacket with a gigantic Celtic Frost logo affixed to the back — and you didn’t want to look anywhere too long, for fear of catching someone’s eye and a “What the fuck are you looking at?” challenge.

My friends and I knew well enough to stay the fuck away from anywhere near the front of the stage, but since the 3,000-seat venue was far from sold out, we figured we could safely and comfortably stand about two-thirds of the way back in a less populated area of the floor for Motörhead’s set. But about 10 minutes after Lemmy and the boys — guitarists Würzel and Phil Campbell, who’d joined the band together in 1984, and legendary drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, who’d rejoined Motörhead for 1987’s Rock ’n’ Roll LP after a three-year absence — opened their show with “Doctor Rock,” I saw a flash of light a few yards to my left, which was followed quickly by a loud bang. My attention was then snapped back to my right by the same sequence of events. I quickly realized that two rival factions of headbangers had positioned themselves on either side of the arena floor, and were throwing lit firecrackers at each other over our heads. I grabbed my girlfriend (who was, by our count, one of maybe ten women in the entire place) and we headed for higher, safer ground — namely, the mostly-empty risers at the far end of the arena floor. If there were any security guards in the place other than those at the front of the stage, we sure didn’t see them.

Slayer fans are infamous for mercilessly chanting “Slay-er! Slay-er!” throughout the sets of their opening bands, with many of said openers viewing “getting Slayered” as a rite of passage on their way up through the metal ranks. I have since read that Motörhead suffered similar abuse on certain dates of this tour, even though the band had been around much longer than Slayer, and though Slayer themselves were big Motörhead fans. I don’t recall this happening at the Civic Center, however; a sizable crowd faction was clearly there to see Motörhead, as evidenced by the roars of recognition that met such songs as “Killed By Death,” “Ace of Spades” and their new-ish single “Eat the Rich,” which had gotten a fair amount of Headbanger’s Ball play.

Still, plenty of those in attendance seemed more interested in brawling than in paying attention to anyone not called Slayer. I had been so stoked to finally see Motörhead in action, but now it just felt weird watching the band from the back of the half-empty arena with churning, fighting scrums of metal fans filling the space between us and them. I felt completely disconnected from the performance, and from where we sat it seemed like the band may have felt the same.

Not that I would have blamed them at all for being so. At this moment, they were out flogging their new live album No Sleep at All, a muddy, dreary-sounding recording primarily made up of songs from 1984 onward, and in the midst of fighting a legal battle with GWR, the label that released it. The big “selling point” of No Sleep at All for Motörhead fans was “Just ‘Cos You Got the Power,” which had been a UK b-side of “Eat the Rich” but had never appeared on an album before; at the Civic Center, the song’s bluesy changes and angry lyrics were effectively deadened by the arena’s rotten acoustics, and thus probably inspired exactly no one to run out the next day and pick up the album. Würzel and Campbell ran back and and forth across the stage throughout the set, trading solos as Lemmy barked upward into his microphone, but no amount of exertion on their part seemed capable of galvanizing the distracted crowd.

But when Slayer finally took the stage, all it took were the first few notes and chords of “South of Heaven” to snap the arena floor to full attention. The band were playing in front of a backdrop painted to look like stained glass church windows, an obviously ironic touch given the band’s not-unenthusiastic connection with Satanism. (When I was first introduced to Slayer, a friend of mine had further piqued my interest by telling me that their name was an acronym for Satan Laughs As You Eternally Rot — which turned out to not be true, but seemed totally believable just the same.) And while I have never been the type to be put off or offended by things like pentagrams and upside-down crucifixes, I had to admit to myself that the energy in the arena now felt really fucking dark on a very visceral level.

Not that I could look away from the stage, or even wanted to. The band’s classic lineup — bassist/vocalist Tom Away, guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, and drummer Dave Lombardo — was absolutely on fire, thrashing away at the peak of their powers; I’d see Slayer many times over the ensuing decades with various lineups, on up to their final tour, and they would never again sound quite this tight, brutal or hungry. But I’d also never see them tap into something quite so cosmically malignant; it was as if with each new song, the air became thicker with chaos and malevolence. From where we sat, the mosh pit looked quite literally hellish, a roiling sea of limbs and heads and fury. And by the time they uncorked the doomy opening chords of “Mandatory Suicide,” it really did feel like the band was presiding over some kind of unholy mass ritual that was calling something nameless and awful into existence.

The evening’s only comic relief came in the form of Tom Araya’s between-song banter, though it was tough to tell if he was actually trying to be funny — and if he was, how many in the audience were actually getting the joke.

“Do you wanna die?!?” he barked into the microphone at one point. The crowd roared its assent.

“Do you want to…” — he paused dramatically — “DIE?!?”

Some guy up at the front vaulted himself onto another guy’s shoulders and flashed the “devil horns” right in Araya’s face. It was like, “Yes, Tom, I want to die! Pick me!”

It’s a time-honored tradition for bands to give a shout-out from the stage to whatever city they’re playing in — nothing gets an arena crowd going quite like acknowledging that you know where you’re standing at that moment. Back in the ‘80s, performers typically limited such bromides to how [insert city here] was such a great place to party, or how pretty the local girls were. Araya, however, took a different tack about two-thirds of the way through Slayer’s set.

“So!” he growled, flashing a menacing grin. “What do you guys like to do in PO-KIP-SAY? Is there lotsa… PUSSY LICKIN’?!?”

“UHHHHHH,” responded the 99-percent male crowd in unison, like an army of horny zombies.

“Oh, that’s nice,” winced my girlfriend. She looked like she was about to be sick.

I don’t remember much from the rest of the set, only that I couldn’t wait for us to get out of there. I loved Slayer, loved the brutal music they made, but at this point the atmosphere felt so rancid that I was practically counting the minutes until we could meet up with our friends and drive back to campus. I do recall Kerry King pulling out a double-necked guitar at one point (I can find no evidence of it on the internet, but I could swear it was a Jackson or ESP with matching pointy headstocks), which I thought was pretty cool; on a much weirder note, I also recall that the closing “Angel of Death” encore actually seemed to lighten the collective mood. Yeah, that’s how bad the vibe was — a song that begins with the lines “Auschwitz! The meaning of pain!” was the night’s closest thing to a feel-good moment.

I was worried we might get fucked with on the way to the car after the show, but everyone we passed while heading out of the Civic Center seemed remarkably mellow, and even happy. It was as if the Slay-tanic orgy of sound had drained the attendees of their negative energies, and all the fights and the firecrackers had been left behind them on the arena floor. All the same, I was just happy to get out of there alive.

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