Ozzfest: July 5,1999, Tinley Park, IL
Ticket stubs are antiques, ready to be mothballed and put in the window of a little shop in some vacation town. I collected them in the days before smart phones took over. This one is old enough to walk into a bar and buy a beer. I had it signed by all four members of System of a Down, which felt like a big deal at the time. Ozzfest had assembly line signature tables for the bands. We waited in line a long time. This was before the days of concert tiers and expensive VIP passes. The monetization of the experience was less advanced and once you went through they gate you were more or less given full access.
Two friends and I wanted to make the journey up to Chicago, a three hour drive from Pekin, to see Ozzfest. We were so disorganized we still didn’t have tickets on the day of the show and it was sold out. We somehow convinced my friend’s stepdad to drive us up there anyway. A scalper stopped us before we even got out of the car offering us four tickets 11 rows away from the stage, dead center, as if by some sort of miracle. We gladly handed over our money. The original lineup of Black Sabbath was headlining that year.
Our freshman year of high school had just ended. I still get residual anxiety thinking about it. I can feel the creeping fear that any misstep, no matter how trivial, could get you relentlessly mocked. We were weird, nerdy kids young enough to still be trying on different identities and seeing what stuck. Late 90s nu metal culture was waiting for us like a Hot Topic kiosk. I hated school even though I was good at it. Nothing about it was any fun and aligning myself with what was obviously a second tier clique felt like an upgrade.
Around the Fur was the first Deftones CD I bought from the only indie record store in town. I played the hell out of it. Then I went bought Adrenaline and listened to it just as much. The guys working there spoon fed me a lot of music and my taste still owes them a debt. I had a paper route in junior high which paid barely enough to buy a CD every week, and that’s where most of the money went. I made a cassette tape dub of Around the Fur so I could listen to it on my water resistant walkman while detasseling corn. Portable CD players were already on the market, but even with anti-skip protection they didn’t work well when on the move.
If you are unfamiliar with detasseling corn, when farmers cross pollinate the plants they create roughly 6 “female” rows by removing the flower at the top, leaving one “male” row of a different strain on either side. They sent in machines which removed most of them, but they weren’t perfect, and we earned minimum wage by pulling the rest by hand. It was hot, shitty work, and you had to cover every part of your body while walking down the rows in spite of the heat. Corn leaves are a little like paper and they leave all these little cuts that get painful and itchy, affectionately known as corn rash. I did that every day for a month during the summer for spending cash. It’s still the hardest I’ve ever worked.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine that April which didn’t do us any favors. It is a sad state of affairs that school shootings happen with such frequency now that they don’t even stay in the headlines for a week, but back in 1999 Columbine was all anyone talked about for the better part of a year. It made everything harder for anyone who didn’t want to participate in the standard issue teen pop culture of the era, even if nu metal was just that done differently. The stigma strengthened our resolve. We had already crossed a line and there was no use turning back now, all the better to embrace our role as outsiders.
The summer of ‘99 was like passing through the eye of a hurricane. We still had never drank or gotten high. It wouldn’t last. That fall I bought weed from a skinny kid who was obsessed with Alf and the rest is history. Weed was significantly easier to get than alcohol at the time because the people selling it it weren’t exactly checking IDs.
Val Air Ballroom: June 27th, 2000, Des Moines, IA
I moved to Marion, Iowa with my family the following summer. It didn’t go well. Moving halfway through high school would have been hard for anyone, but for a weird nerd like me it was a disaster. The next two years were a whirlwind of isolation, marijuana, shifts in an Olive Garden, and dreaming of leaving. I hated Cedar Rapids and still kind of do if I’m really honest, even if I know that’s unfair. I associate it with those two miserable years of high school far too much to ever think about it in a positive light.
Marion was way more run down than I remembered last time I visited. I remembered it having a high opinion of itself as an upscale suburb. I can’t tell if the last 20 years been hard or my memory is deceiving me, but it was in rough shape. We had a nice house, the largest my family ever owned, complete with my own room on the lower level and a personal bathroom. My childhood was an upward financial trajectory, going from a decrepit house my parents rebuilt DIY to this. I didn’t care about any of that. I just missed my friends.
The same two friends from Ozzfest made the journey to Iowa to see the Deftones with me. We proceeded to drive hallway across the state to Des Moines for the show. Glassjaw opened for them. They were an early 00s screamo band, way ahead of the curve for what would dominate the MySpace era of music. Chino talked about how much he liked Weezer and the Deftones covered “Say It Ain’t So” during their set. One of my friends took acid with a picture of the sun on the blotter paper. I have good memories of the Val Air Ballroom. It was fun venue and I’m glad it still exists today.
I went back to Pekin only a handful of times after that. On the final trip, my friend’s dad got out of the car and said “You’re cool, aren’t you?” as I walked up the driveway. His mom had left him and in the following months his coke habit went from functional to raging. The house was now one of those sad party houses most of us remember from high school. If you know you know. A parade of strangers shuffled in and out for the rest of the evening. I remember one guy who was pushing 40 walking into my friend’s room with a case of beer, cracking one open, and sitting down to drink it next to us as if he did this every day. It was a bad scene. We were 17.
I played White Pony on the stereo during the ride back to Iowa. There’s no other album I associate with my teenage years more. It’s not even close.
7 Flags Event Center: July 2nd, 2003, Clive, IA
I stayed behind in Ames after my first year of college, renting an apartment with a friend instead of going back to stay with my parents. I was so resolute about never returning to Marion that I spent a summer working as a janitor just to pay rent. Somehow I set aside the $30 necessary to buy this ticket, which was a luxury I could not afford at the time.
I met a girl at a kegger earlier that summer and managed to get her number. I ineptly asked her to go to the concert with me and she flatly declined. I was a drunken mess and horrible at dating, so I can’t say I blame her. I had previously driven way out of town for some party she told me about and spent the night on a couch in the living room. I think she talked to me for a total of five minutes. Somehow I was still incapable of putting the pieces together. I had chronically low self esteem and assumed that was about as interested in me as girls were going to get.
My loathing of Iowa hadn’t abated while in college. I wanted to go to Tulane and spend my college years living it up in New Orleans, but it was a private school and they offered me no scholarships. I was devastated when I realized I’d have to accept four years in Ames for the cheap in-state tuition. It was a blessing in disguise, because Hurricane Katrina hit and Tulane would have been underwater while I was studying. It also spared me the burden of crippling college debt. None of that made Iowa feel like any less of a prison sentence.
I decided I would deal with being miserable by drinking as much as possible. I got black out drunk nearly every weekend for most of my freshman year, even ended up in the hospital once. People romanticize their time in college, but for me itsucked. I can look back on my childhood in Illinois and get wistful, but when I think about Iowa my kneejerk reaction is to wince. There were plenty of good times, sure, but they never got close to outweighing the bad. I had a moment during my second year where I decided I either needed to sober up and stop wasting everyone’s time or drop out. I chose the former and did pretty well from then on out, earning a BA in English literature by 2006.
I think the self-titled Deftones record was their best work in spite of its poor sales. It’s packed with bangers like “Good Morning Beautiful,” “Battle-axe,” “Deathblow,” and “Needles and Pins.” The band was playing in lower tunings, the influence of Fear Factory and Meshuggah more apparent than ever. It wasn’t particularly innovative or a departure from their previous output, but it is where they perfected their sound. The band was at their absolute best in 2003 and it’s a fittingly ironic that this is the record most people forgot.
Roseland Ballroom: June 9th, 2007, Manhattan, NY
I spent the summer after college living with my parents, working in a call center, eating Mexican food, and playing Civilization IV. By August I boarded a plane to Brooklyn with my worldly possession in a single suitcase and was out of Iowa for good. Living in New York, even enduring grinding poverty, sounded a lot better than answering phones in Iowa City. I landed at LGA, took a cab to house shared with several strangers I found on Craigslist and that was that. They would eventually kick me out for passing out drunk while cooking pasta on the stove, burning it black and filling the house with smoke.
I spent the next few months working as a prep cook (saucier if you’re fancy) in a high end Southeast Asian restaurant in Tribeca, owned by the same guy owned Nobu. Every single person there was a better cook than I was, and both the sous chefs would end up on television. One of them sold me weed and made me smoke it with him out of an apple in the walk in cooler. I’ve never worked in a restaurant where it was any different.
There are days when I look back and think I should have stuck with restaurant work, but my ego was too wounded by doing the same job I had before I went to college. In a doomed, Quixotic attempt to have something to show for my degree I managed to get hired at a personal injury mill in Bensonhurst. As much as it makes me cringe, I did the stereotypical liberal arts grad move where I convinced myself going to law school would solve my problems.
Working in that personal injury mill was an act of mercy. The guy running it was an abusive asshole and I was frequently the target of his tirades. He was a good lawyer, but I knew within a couple of months legal work wasn’t for me. I made a pact I’d last six months so I could put it on a resume, and that was exactly when I quit. I got as far as taking the LSAT, but my heart wasn’t in it and I didn’t even study a tiny bit for it. I very nearly didn’t show up at all, but a couple hundred bucks was a lot of money to me so I trudged in and went through the motions. My score was middling and I didn’t care.
By October I was hired at the job in pay-per-view television I’d have for the next decade. The company was the last link in the post production chain and I was getting paid better than I did at the law office to watch movies all day as part of the quality control process. I saw every major motion picture released for couple years, but PPV also included a lot of Bollywood, porn, and MMA. The only way you could get fired was by falling asleep, and it wasn’t easy to watch a three hour Indian musical while keeping your eyes open. I drank copious amounts of coffee.
I held on to that job (or the middle management promotion version of it) and its shitty pay through the worst recession since WWII. I started reading a lot of Marx and my long political drift to the left began.
Saturday Night Wrist was the last of what I consider to be the classic era of Deftones albums. It’s a little hit or miss, but a few of the band’s best songs are on it such as “Cherry Waves,” “Beware,” and “Xerces.” I don’t remember much about the show, other than than the venue being large and going alone. By this time point I had accepted that I’d be flying solo to most of the concerts I wanted to see.
It was the end of an era, one last dance with the nu metal of my youth. All the cool kids in Williamsburg were listening to indie rock and I wanted to fit in so I followed suit. The Deftones never made a bad album and I regret not giving Diamond Eyes a fair chance when it was released. By that point nu metal was a dirty word my insecurity was too strong to give it a chance. It would be a very long time before I saw the band again.
Target Center: August 29th, 2025, Minneapolis, MN
Being older than most of the audience was not something I had ever expected. I lost count of how many kids were wearing Around the Fur t-shirts, an album released before they were even born. I’d heard the band had a following on TikTok, but I was in awe of the power of social media. I don’t think I ever saw the Deftones pack this many people into a venue, even in their White Pony heyday. If you live long enough you get to see some of your teenage passions return as retro cool. It felt good.
I talked my wife into going even though she doesn’t like metal, and she was one of the only people in the stadium not wearing black. I tried to make up for it by going to a nearby French restaurant with her before the show. I actually like escargot. It’s mostly an excuse to eat garlic and butter. Target Center kind of sucks, with long lines and treacherously steep stairs in the upper sections. I can see why the Timberwolves are planning to replace it. I was high as hell off a gummy and got lost trying to find the merch table. My wife talked me into taking a second trip out to locate it, knowing me better than I know myself. She pre-emptively understood how disappointed I’d be if I let the opportunity pass. I shelled out an exorbitant $45 for a t-shirt.
I had an epiphany, stoned and watching the Deftones play for the first time in more than a decade. We are all ultimately playing for the next generation, a fact that only becomes more obvious as you get older. Each day brings us closer to death, and if a culture is to persist at all it does so by passing the torch. There is so much chatter disparaging Gen Z, but sitting there watching that concert I felt like I should have been out there with them all along. I thought back to the first time I saw the the Deftones in ‘99. Ozzy Osbourne, may he rest in peace, was already old by the late 90’s and Sabbath was decades past their prime. It meant a lot to us that they brought those nu metal bands we were into, which a lot of older metalheads hated, out on tour with them.
Things have really come full circle.