“Hey, Asshole!”: How To Capture An Obnoxious Drunk In His Natural Habitat
As many of you have pointed out, one of the biggest challenges with our “Hey, Asshole!” feature–in which we ask you to document obnoxious concert-going behavior–is figuring out how to get a good picture in a dark club. As a primer, we offer one tipster’s fine example of duplicitous lenswork, which resulted in this amazing shot from a NYC Queensrÿche show a few weeks back:
Right next to me is a gentleman I’ll call “Guido” (and you’ll see why from the attached pic), drunk out of his mind, who spent all of the first half of the concert doing one of two things:
1. Metal screaming lyrics that didn’t fit into the song at full volume. 2. Counting off rock-drummer style (you know, like the beginning of every Ramones song) at random points in the music. I think he was so drunk that he couldn’t figure out where in the song the band was and he was expecting the tempo to pick up or something.
Not only did this keep killing the mood, but he was so loud that my left ear hurt afterwards – and I was wearing earplugs…I followed Guido out to the lobby during the intermission between sets, watched him do yet another metal scream and then asked him to do it again so I could take a picture, “because it rocked so hard.” I still chuckle evilly over THAT little lie.
You see? Sometimes, you just have to lie. How do you think Diane Arbus got all those people to frown on cue?
Also, a reminder: We’ll be publishing a round-up of “Hey, Asshole!” stories later today, so if you have any egregious concert-goings on to report, be sure to send it to asshole@idolator.com.
