LOVE this post. BAM! Preach it. Your view of the metal scene from the mosh pit is fundamentally different than mine... yet oddly the same. I remember when the punk tradition of moshing crossed over to metal, and it destroyed metal shows for me. It was at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, at a Primus show for their second album... probably 1990. People started a mosh pit, and Les stopped the show. "What the fuck are you doing?! Stop it man. This ain't no punk show..." and counted the song back in, and they began playing again. But that was the year that you stopped being able to get anywhere near the stage, and had to turn the room over to the pit. Despite that change, metal was still metal, and seeing someone else wearing a metal shirt, or with hair down to their shoulder blades resulted in eye contact, and that chin-up head nod. "Yo." The closest thing to a "metal" show I have been to in the last five years was Blue Oyster Cult at a fucking casino, man. But I have spent my time in a tent at an outdoor festival with Napalm Death, seen Rammstein in Slovakia, hung out with Eluveitie the one time they came to Seattle, and wished like hell I'd gone to the Anthrax/Public Enemy show that I missed. And everything in your post - including the mosh pit - still fills that metal part of my heart with happiness. There is just something universal about metal. \m/ People talk about metal fans, but never with them in articles like this.
AHAHAHAHAHH I was at that concert! It was late 1989 after the Loma Prieta Earthquake during the World Series. We got a check to pay for damages to our stuff inside the house, and as young people should do, we spent the money on parties and concerts. Primus was right after Christmas and my family was pissed that I was going back to San Fran because there was work up there. If you remember the rowdy crowd of angry, mean looking punk jerks in green Ireland shirts who kept starting the pit back up, that was us.I remember when the punk tradition of moshing crossed over to metal, and it destroyed metal shows for me. It was at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, at a Primus show for their second album... probably 1990. People started a mosh pit, and Les stopped the show. "What the fuck are you doing?! Stop it man. This ain't no punk show..."
WOOHOO!! Amazingly small world, innit? Yeah, I was up a level in back, off the floor. So wasn't in the pit. For a couple years I'd been watching Primus play for free every Wednesday night at the I-Beam on Haight Street, with about 15 other people. So I went to the Warfield show mostly out of solidarity for the band. Not because I was going to see anything different or unusual. But then the moshing started, and ... well, I guess I saw something new! :-)
It's funny how different your experience was. Primus getting cranky over moshing because Primus ain't punk. By way of comparison when I saw the Sundays in Santa Fe in 1992, Harriet was horrified that people were moshing because holy shit people this is upbeat dreampop! But... you know... us outsider nerds didn't really know how to go to a concert and not mosh. It's all we knew. Seven years in Los Angeles cured me of seeing any and all shows (although I mixed a couple songs for Eagles of Death Metal). LA has got to be the least metal metropolis in all the world. I will say that I was one of the many people old enough to know better the last time Ministry came to town.