:: Grinder with The Legend Killers and The Chickens @ Call The Office by: (Monday, March 21) If a jock sings in a bar, and everyone’s too drunk to judge him, does he still suck? Maybe not if the music’s loud enough to drown out 75% of his vocals, but then again… This was the case Monday night at Call The Office when Detroit-based hard rock outfit, Grinder, took the stage in front of a sea of hockey rockers. “Whoa whoa whoa,” you say? Hockey and Call The Office in the same sentence? That can’t be right! I’m afraid so my friends. Gone were the rail-thin indie rockers, the tattooed and pierced freaky-freakies, the friendly neighbourhood day-glo-haired rock-and-rollers you know and love. Last night the Office’s checkered floor saw the jams kicked out by Nikes and high-waisted, boot cut jeans, as London’s displaced hockey fans clung desperately to some semblance of their former Monday night rituals –namely; watching from the boozing side of the bas, as former Detroit Red Wings right winger Darren McCarty thrashed around and incited riot. You heard me. The 32-year-old McCarty and his newly full-time band, Grinder, have been together since 1997, but were only able to embark on this, their first ever full-blown tour, when the NHL lockout left McCarty with enough time on his hands to really throw himself into music -his second favorite hobby besides golf. And full-force is the toss. Walking up Clarence last night you could barely see the bar (or any of York Street for that matter) for the Dutch Star tour bus/trailer/palace/monstrosity spilling out of same lot that normally drowns the taped-together vans of most CTO headliners. McCarty bought this beast for his band when tour details were finalized (really makes you feel for those underpaid NHL-ers), and it should carry them around Ontario and Michigan into the beginning of May. On this particular stop, London-based punk old-schoolers The Legend Killers opened the show with a fizzle. I heard they were supposed to be the shit of the London punk scene but they were about as punk as my Grandma’s slippers. The music was boring, the lyrics were unintelligible and the vocals seared my ears. The most punk rock thing they did all night was knock a panel of the Office’s drop ceiling out of the roof mid-set, and that was an awkward accident. The worst part of the whole charade was that it just went on and on and on to the point where I would have dug my own eardrums out with a rusty railroad spike if someone had offered it. Fortunately no one did, because that would’ve meant I would have missed Toronto’s The Chickens and they were the best of the three bands on the bill. The guitar was cleaner, clearer and sharper, the vocals were almost soothing after the opening set, and the riffs were catchy. Their music isn’t going to change the landscape of punk rock or anything, but they can play, they can entertain, and I was damn grateful they were there. By the time they closed their set with a Grinder-dedicated tune, the bar had filled considerably more than I, for one, had expected. Like I said it was mostly London jocks and hockey Dad-ish types, but they screamed like groupies when Grinder’s five members finally took the stage and hammered out their first song. Though most of McCarty’s vocals were buried under a whole lotta guitar I did make out the words “You look at me and you only see what you wanna see…I wanna, I just wanna be me…” Funny first of a dozen or so contradictions. If I was seeing what I wanted to see it probably would have been a show I would have been willing to pay a $10 cover for. Things didn’t get much better after the first few warm-up songs either. There was minimal and mildly uncomfortable stage banter from McCarty and he was fairly boring to watch since all he played was the odd finger-air-guitar chord on the mic head. As with the Legend Killers, Grinder’s songs went on and on and on, and the vocals blended messily and ridiculously during songs like “Out of Our Heads”, “Under My Skin” and “Bring Me Down.” This last one was one of my personal faves, as it had McCarty sing(yell)ing to some chick named Suzy, that he wouldn’t forget to put roses on her pillow. It was sort of hard to picture his beefy buffalo shank arms placing roses on anyone’s pillow…though if you’d asked me at the beginning of the night whether I could imagine that same tattooed arm following the overhead trajectory of an imaginary shooting star during a song by the same name I would have said no then too. But…that was before I saw it. Bizarre. Anywhoooooo, moral of the story is –Darren McCarty is way out of place onstage. His band on the other hand? I mean they’re not going to go down in Detroit Rock History or anything. The music is same-y, safe, hard rock, but the four musicians assembled behind all hundreds of pounds of enforcer played more than capably, offered impressive backing vocals, and were at their best during a cover of Nirvana’s “Breed” (at this point I’d like to say that I’d mention their names but I’m pretty sure there’s been a line-up change since the last Grinder web bio update, so I’d probably be wrong anyway). Either way –the crowd ate it up. They moshed like ’95 never ended (is it for real that people still do this?). They screamed for Grinder to “play more hardcore shit.” They spilled Blue on the stage, audience, and their own shoes, all in an attempt to fill the Monday night void left by hockey’s selfish and untimely death. Their out-of-control insanity eventually got McCarty into the music, where he pandered to the crowd’s requests for even more mosh-worthy songs. He said the word “fuck”, called himself “an unemployed asshole” and, during one guitar solo, bobbed and weaved his shaved head like he was at a Jefferson Airplane ahow. Heee-haw. Rock on. It didn’t save the night, and it sure didn’t make it any less merciful when Grinder finished after an hour and only played a single-song encore before returning to McCarty Township out in the parking lot, but it kept the railroad spikes out of my ears. Current Grinder dates are scheduled all the way into May, but who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and the golf courses will be too enticing this spring for any extensive touring to go down. Until then, I guess Grinder’s just one more reason to fold our hands over the corpse of the NHL and pray for a miracle.