Puscifer – Existential Reckoning Tour: The Greek Theatre 2022

Los Angeles, California — Under open sky
Jesus kissed an alien and I liked it!

I got a call.

“Do you want to go?”

That was it. No plan. No sales pitch. Just free tickets and the kind of question that already had an answer built into it. A few minutes later I was on the road from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, driving four hours on short notice because sometimes the dumbest decisions are the cleanest ones.

Still early.

Of course.

Front of the stage again. Poster secured. A 1 of 125 foil by Jermaine Rogers, depicting Jesus and an alien locked in a kiss like this was a completely reasonable image to carry home under your arm. It was ironic. It was funny. It was also weirdly perfect. Spirituality and absurdity pressed into the same frame until they stop fighting and start making sense.

That image ended up explaining the whole night better than anything else.

The Greek is one of those venues that doesn’t need help from anybody. It already has a reputation, already has ghosts, already has the residue of bigger names and earlier decades baked into the wood and stone. Open air, carved into the hills, surrounded by trees and the feeling that a lot of famous people have stood there trying to matter. Some of them still do.

You walk into a place like that and immediately understand that you are not arriving fresh. You are joining something already in progress.

The crowd had that look too. Not casual. Not random. People weren’t there because they wandered into the wrong amphitheater. They were there because Puscifer asks for a certain kind of commitment from people and, to their credit or disgrace, those people keep showing up.

Then the other layer started revealing itself.

Wes Borland of Limp Bizkit drifting through the crowd like it’s just another night off tour. Danny Lohner of Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle blending into the edges like part of the wiring. Billy Howerdel of A Perfect Circle standing still, watching like he’s studying the architecture of the whole thing. And Danny Carey of Tool walking around, one of the most technically revered drummers alive, just another body in the crowd.

That is the kind of thing that makes a night tilt a little.

Not because celebrities matter in the usual sad Hollywood way. Nobody cares about that. It matters because suddenly you are standing in an open-air theater in the hills, surrounded by faces you’ve only seen on stages, album art, liner notes, magazine pages, glowing screens, and now they are just there with you, waiting for the same thing. It is absurd. It is a little funny. It is also quietly exclusive in a way that can’t be faked. No one is announcing it. No one is selling it. It just is.

Then the lights shifted.

Before the band even came out, the screen kicked on and there she was: a pretty blue-haired woman, just her face, counting down. Ten minutes. Calm. Clinical. Too perfect. Every so often the image glitched, just enough to suggest something was wrong with the signal or wrong with her or wrong with all of us for sitting there calmly while a floating head counted down our remaining civilian minutes. The closer it got to zero, the more it twitched. Then the final ten seconds went clean. No distortion. No warning. Zero.

And that was the opening move.

The stage itself was built for motion, all platforms and movement lanes and elevated angles, but outdoors it behaved differently. The fog didn’t linger and trap everything the way it had indoors. It rose. It escaped. It drifted into the night like it wanted no part of whatever was about to happen. Above all of it was the open sky, black and wide enough to make the whole production seem less like theater and more like a signal finally getting enough room to breathe.

Maynard came out and stayed out front.

That matters.

People who only know Tool don’t always understand the difference. Tool Maynard disappears, retreats, weaponizes distance. Puscifer Maynard steps directly into the frame. Here he is front and center, committed, playful, precise, carrying himself like some deeply dry alien cabaret performer who knows exactly how absurd the material is and insists on treating it seriously anyway. He doesn’t hide from the theatricality. He leans into it. That is why Puscifer works. It allows him to be fully visible without becoming ordinary.

Then Carina Round enters and the whole thing lifts off the ground.

She doesn’t just add to the show. She changes its altitude.

Her voice is sultry where it needs to be, grounded enough to give the songs weight, and then suddenly it rises into these strange, beautifully unnatural high notes that seem too clean for the physical world they’re happening in. Not operatic. Not showy. Just exact. Like a transmission. Like the voice you hear right before the ship lowers itself into frame. In an open-air venue, those notes don’t bounce back from the walls because there are no walls. They go up. They hang there. They drift. She sounds less like a person singing than a message being broadcast through a person.

And the movement matters too. She doesn’t dance in the lazy, decorative way rock singers sometimes “move.” She moves like part of the mechanism. Fluid, deliberate, integrated into the structure of the set. Maynard grounds the thing. Carina gives it altitude. Between them, the entire show hovers.

Around that center, the band does exactly what it needs to do. Mat Mitchell remains the quiet architect, subtle on guitar, accenting and coloring instead of crowding the songs, never stepping on the atmosphere he’s helping build. Gunnar Olsen brings a different kind of pulse on drums, not just rhythm but texture, strange little off-beat choices and pieces of hardware that make you stare for a second and then give up trying to reverse engineer it. The low end keeps the whole thing from floating away completely.

Then the aliens show up.

And outdoors, under that sky, they stop reading like costumes.

They move through the fog, across the stage, in and out of the structure, and the whole thing shifts from theatrical to weirdly observational, like somebody didn’t create this so much as finally document it properly. The men in black drift in and out too, half agents, half handlers, maybe government interns on their first bad assignment.

The skits land better in that environment too. Dry. Slightly mean. Funny in the way Puscifer is funny, which is to say funny like a deadpan warning label. The spam bit comes in, ridiculous and committed and unnecessary in exactly the right amount. That’s the balance the whole show keeps finding: not seriousness versus comedy, but spirituality and nonsense occupying the same room without canceling each other out.

That tension runs through the songs. Bread and Circus opens the night with accusation and control. Postulous, Fake Affront, The Underwhelming, and Grey Area build that cool detached mood. Theorem and A Singularity don’t so much move forward as widen, like they are stretching the room. Apocalyptical doesn’t feel like a warning. It feels like a matter-of-fact update. Bullet Train to Iowa slices through with that sideways grin Puscifer does better than anybody. The Humbling River changes the scale of everything, shrinking the night for a few minutes until the whole crowd seems to inhale at once. And by the time the final stretch arrives, time stops behaving in any normal way.

You are no longer checking songs off a mental list.

You are just in there.

Then comes Bedlamite.

“Everything will be alright.”

Under that open sky, in that ridiculous beautiful environment, with aliens, agents, celebrity musicians, Jesus making out with extraterrestrials on a foil print tucked under my arm, the line landed exactly the way it was supposed to. Not as a promise. Not even as comfort. More like a brief, suspicious truce with the world.

Walking out of the Greek didn’t feel like leaving a concert. It felt like being set back down after a controlled abduction in the Hollywood hills. You look around and there are still faces you know from stages and screens and records, still people filing out as if any of this was normal, as if this kind of thing happens every weekend and we all simply agree not to discuss it too loudly.

That’s what made the night work.

It was indulgent. It was absurd. It was exclusive in the least obnoxious way possible. It was dark without being joyless, funny without becoming a joke, spiritual without pretending to be holy.

And that poster made even more sense by the end.

Jesus and an alien.

Not opposites.

Not a punchline.

Just the right image for a night where the sacred and the ridiculous were not competing for room. They were dancing together.

No plan. No hesitation. Four hours on the road because the call came and saying yes was easier than pretending I had a better use for the night.

And somewhere in the back of all of it, one thing settled in for good:

once was not enough.

There was one more stop left on the tour.

One more night.

One more chance to follow the signal

Field Notes

Arrived early
Front of stage
4-hour drive
No plan
Left with proof something happened

Setlist Highlights

Bread and Circus
Theorem
Apocalyptical
The Humbling River
Bullet Train to Iowa
Bedlamite

Poster

Jermaine Rogers – Foil Edition (1/125)
Jesus and an alien in an embrace

Continue Reading

Puscifer – Las Vegas Opening Night
Coming Next – Final Show in Prescott

Kris West
Spiral Out Podcast
www.spiraloutpodcast.com

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Sunday, June 12, 2022