Review: MTV Canada’s Steve-O Don’t Try This At Home Tour @ The Cocamo
Upon exiting the Cocamo after MTV Canada’s Steve-O Jackass Tour, I was speechless. The show was nothing more than a twisted display of masochism, which left me utterly dumbfounded.
However, before Steve-O took the stage, the audience was treated to two opening bands, Loganseed and Social Code. An unfortunate drawback for both bands was the horrible sound system at the Cocamo. Despite being plagued by problems with microphone sound levels and perpetual , both bands made a valiant effort to play through the problems and for the most part, the audience seemed to be taking it in stride.
When Loganseed, a Kingston-based band, hit the stage, most people were generally disinterested in the screaming, flailing lead singer, Carl Murray, and his band’s extremely loud sound. A small group of people were into it, but most just sauntered around scouting out prime locations to watch Steve-O’s act.
The highlight of the set was the brief, but surprisingly refreshing moments when Murray stopped screeching and simply crooned into the mic.
Social Code was up next. These guys stopped off in Kingston in June as part of the Naked Aggression Tour headlined by Bif Naked, so they’re no strangers to the city. But there was a noticeable difference to their sound this time around, which the band attributed to Chris Ruddy, who recently replaced guitarist Dave Hesse. They now have a harder edge and Ruddy is heavier on distortion, while vocalist Travis Nesbitt has kicked up the screaming factor. Officially, Ruddy is a temporary addition—on loan from another band called Drive By Punch—but drummer Ben Shillabeer told the Journal that they’re working on bringing him over to the band permanently.
Social Code seemed to be straddling the genre fence during their last performance, but have now narrowed their focus. More than anything else, these guys are great at packing the floor and whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Nesbitt had people jumping and singing along in no time.
Opening with the angst-ridden, energetic “Whisper to a Scream,” Social Code commanded the audience’s attention and kept the energy throbbing with “Gone Away,” “Everything’s Fine,” “No One to Save,” and rounding out the set with “Beautiful,” the first single from their album A Year at the Movies.
What followed was the most horrid display of human indecency I have ever seen.
Steve-O entered the stage to the deafening roar of the audience, crushing unopened beer cans on his head, spraying beer in all directions. He then put the mic in his mouth and hit himself in the head—apparently some major feat—and soon after, he and CKY’s Ryan Dunn squeezed lime juice into their eyes. Next up, the so-called ‘Canadian Roadie’ chugged an almost-full bottle of tequila, which Steve-O quickly smashed. With a piece of the broken glass, Steve-O cut his own tongue and let the blood drip onto his chest, stomach and arms, and using his fingers, he smeared some of the blood on his face like warrior paint.
As if that wasn’t enough pain for him, he proceeded to spring a mouse trap so that it snapped on his tongue. After removing the trap, he poured salt on his tongue, then added some lime juice for a little more kick.
After urinating in a cup, Steve-O had his Canadian Roadie drink the contents down, and it didn’t take long for that and the tequila to come right back up. Another member of the cast, Darcy, came out and was soon kicked in the groin by an all-too-willing girl, Anna, who was plucked from the audience.
Steve-O then balanced a butcher knife on the tip of his nose. This was closely followed by his efforts to balance an extremely heavy iron-based table on his chin.
Three more males were plucked from the audience and brought on stage for a contest; the winner would get to keep his eyebrows. The challenge: punch yourself in the face repeatedly and the first one to bleed wins. What drove them to furiously punch themselves, I’ll never know. One guy drew his own blood first, so off went the brows of the losers.
Then, Steve-O turned to the guy with blood dripping down his face and said there are really no winners in the contest and off went his brows as well. When the bloody-faced, brow-less dude took a running leap off the stage into the crowd, Steve-O, at the very last minute, yelled out “nobody touch him.” The guy hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud. He was then invited back on stage by the almighty Steve-O himself, who shook his head and told him “you’re a professional if I’ve ever seen one.” After that little debacle played itself out, Dunn rode a small bicycle into a make-shift clothesline which predictably caused him to land flat on his back with a loud thump. It was at about this time that the crowd was told that Wee-Man, a popular character in Steve-O’s videos, wouldn’t be appearing. The reason given: “Wee-Man’s stuck in Vancouver … we tried to Fed Ex his ass here [laughs],” said Steve-O.
Finally we arrived at the finale, in which Steve-O used an industrial stapler to staple each of his testicles to his legs. As the audience watched he dropped his pants, grabbed his right testicle and stapled it to his right leg and repeated the process for the left. Then he pulled the staples out.
As I watched Steve-O and company live out a masochist’s dream, I was dumbfounded by the roar of the crowd as the audience cheered with each act of idiocy. What makes people pay $35 to see general stupidity in action? It’s not just in Kingston—this show has been selling out around the world.
At one point in the show Steve-O said, “It’s like you can’t read a fucking magazine without reading I’m a moron.” He might be more than a tad crazy, but he also recognizes there is a market for this kind of “entertainment”—making him, in a twisted way, somewhat clever.
At worst, Steve-O and his compadrés are simply insane; at best, they have one hell of a scam going.
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Cara Smusiak sustained 45 vicious paper cuts while writing this review.
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