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Pit Stories: Flipping Off And Getting Off

You know what Tuesday means: time for some more Pit Stories from metal shows!

In recent weeks we've covered acquiring some interesting scars, making a fool of yourself in front of guys who would later be your band mates, getting crushed by a wall of death, and an ill-fated train ride to see The Misfits.

Today we've got a tale of the odd ways people behave at shows, from hating on the band to straight up getting it on in the pit rather than just heading home for the hanky panky.

Shawn Pelata of U.S. power / thrash metal band Final Sign tells the story like this:

Back in the very early 1990s, I was in a band called Oracle. We did what a lot of bands did at the time. We played a lot of shows, wrote a lot of songs, did some recording and basically tried to be rock stars. We played kind of a blend of power metal and thrash. We slugged it out in the clubs in the area like any other metal band, and we saw our fair share of strange things. At one of our shows in particular, I saw two.

One evening in Winston-Salem, NC, as we played our sets (we would play two sets of all original material back then), periodically I would see a man pacing back and forth, from one side of the stage to the other and back again. He was carrying a beer...and he was flipping us off. Now, it wasn't uncommon to see a bunch of middle fingers in a rowdy crowd back then. It was almost a salute. However, this guy, seemed to really hate what we were doing. He slowly, intentionally, made his way back and forth behind the crowd, his middle finger raised high and aimed directly at the stage, and was just glaring at us. I saw him 3 or 4 times throughout the night, but never saw him once we were off stage.

That same evening, as we played our song "Valley Of Sadness," one of my guitar players and I noticed a man and woman in the crowd just straight up "dirty dancing." Again, we played like a power metal/thrash hybrid and here are two people, obviously feeling zero pain, just grinding away, holding drinks, to a song about finding your way out of the valley of sadness before your life fades away. Although they were fully clothed, I truly believe she went home pregnant.

Final Sign's latest album "Hold High The Flame" is out now via Divebomb Records / Tridoid Records.