Blog Megadeth at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton

I hadn’t been a bus to go see a concert since grade 11. This excludes a few sojourns to Montreal from Toronto, or New York from Montreal, where going to a concert was part of a larger weekend itinerary. I’m talking here about getting on a bus, going to a show, then getting back on another bus and going home in one night. Like you had to do in high school before you had friends in different places whose couches you could sleep on. 

But then a friend scored me two tickets to Gigantour, the irregularly plotted Megadeth-based tour currently working its way across North America. Its Wikipedia entry has a whole sub-section for “Notable Incidents,” indexing Gigantour-related bouts of light violence, barricade-crashing, and chucked beers. And the prospect of bearing witness to a certified Notable Incident was enticement enough.

Maybe because Megadeth played Toronto’s HeavyTO fest last summer, or maybe because they couldn’t conceivably pack out one of the city’s biggest stadiums, Gigantour circumvented Hogtown entirely. Instead, Megadeth (along with openers Motörhead, Volbeat, and Lacuna Coil) played Toronto-flanking dates at the General Motors Centre in Oshawa on Tuesday, and at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton last night. So Hamilton it was.

When you’re a kid growing up two-ish hours outside of Toronto, going to concerts in the Big City becomes a ritual—saving for tickets, waking up early and driving 40 minutes to nearest TicketMaster outlet, circling the date, and hatching a plan for how to get there. You worried about getting a ride to the bus station, getting on the right bus, finding your seats, and then leaving with enough time to get back on the bus and do the whole thing in reverse.

When you have no real responsibilities beyond keeping in step with a bus schedule, pulling off one of these adventures is exhilarating. You'd return to school the next day and talk with friends about set lists and how much you got gouged on a tour T-shirt. The air of ceremony and the crackerjack scheduling is deflated when you live in the Big City: All you have to do is get on a cross-town bus, or maybe walk a few blocks, to get to a venue. Then afterward you can go to a bar, where you drink away the specialness of the concert experience. Maybe it’s a bit naïve to think you can recapture it by taking a one-hour bus ride to Hamilton. But it’s worth a shot.

Hamilton, at least, is a worthy host for Gigantour. It's is a kind of mirror-universe image of all those other half-metropolises bored Torontonians wet the bed about. Instead of everything being magical and French, Hamilton is derelict and sweaty. But you can rent a pretty nice apartment for like $600, which you’ll have a hard time doing in Toronto without moving to some unfinished basement in Mimico.   

Copps Coliseum is forbiddingly concrete and impersonal, even for a hockey arena. Impersonal’s the name of the game, though. This isn’t some indie-rock what-have-you where you try to one-up the other music bloggers by finding the most precious, most bearded singer-songwriter or the “solo project” that manages to incorporate washboard scratching over volleys of electronic drum loops. This is Dave Mustaine playing a double guitar and singing songs about aliens and making the same patter he makes every night with the same interchangeable audience. (Ditto Motörhead’s Lemmy, whose smoky-gruff vocals have weathered into what might as well be a series of unintelligible Tim Allen-esque grunts.) This is $40 tour shirts and $10 beers. The excess is the occasion. 

This is what $7 worth of Molson Canadian looks like.

As for the concert itself? It was fine. The Motörhead set was kind of a bummer, not only because it’s impossible for Lemmy to hide how old and beat-up he is, but because some guy behind us kept telling my friend and me to sit down. It almost turned into a Notable Incident after I told him, “this isn’t a soccer game,” but this guy was like 30 feet tall, so we just kept standing and ignored him. Luckily, he left by the time Megadeth took the stage. They played “Foreclosure Of A Dream,” and “Hangar 18,” which is really fun to sing along with by just saying the words “Hangar 18” over and over.

Megadeth is always a fun band to watch, and not just because they’ve got three legitimately excellent albums, but because Dave Mustaine’s status as “frontman of Megadeth” will always be overshadowed by his status as “former guitarist of Metallica.” Megadeth is basically the “Born to Runner-up” band from The Simpsons. Where Metallica can put together their own two-day music festival and attract hordes of fans, Mustaine has to get on the bus and tour to half-empty junior hockey arenas. No matter how big Megadeth has ever been, they’ve always been second best.

This probably sounds snarky and mean. But really, I prefer Megadeth to Metallica, which I’ve never paid to see live. The second-best status invests Mustaine, and his band, with a rare drama. No matter how hard he snarls and grimaces and calls out people in the audience to come onstage and fight him, Mustaine will always be the underdog. It’s more compelling to see Mustaine grapple with his own sense of inferiority than it is watching zillionaire dicks like Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Easily. 

As the band left the stage my friend and I filed out, worried that there would be some mad dash to the bag check and that we’d end up missing the last bus out of town and spend the night stranded in Hamilton. There wasn’t and we didn’t. And we even had enough time to order 24 chicken wings (and an order of garlic bread) that we made short work of on the bus ride home, to the discernible annoyance of our fellow passengers.

Obviously you can never go home again, and you can never recapture what it feels like to be a stupid teenager busing to and from a heavy metal concert like it’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done. The nostalgia impulse, that rose-coloured Heisenberg principle of the heart, ruins this. Still, it’s pretty hard to ruin eating a bunch of sloppy chicken wings while cruising down the highway on a bus that’s doing 110 kph. This must be what Dave Mustaine feels like when he eats wings.