THE SCARIEST THING

Rita: Scary? Those dudes aren’t scary. Okay, Jeff can be a little unpredictable, but they’re all very lovable. Let’s ask all the rockers we know what’s the scariest thing they have ever seen. Look, look, there’s Dana, another local icon, with his baritone sax—if you’re not too scared, Lolita, go ask him. DANA COLLEY (A.K.A.C.O.D./ Twinemen): The scariest thing I have ever seen was with out a doubt 9/11. My daughter had just celebrated her first month on earth on the Monday the 10th. Tuesday morning I was at my sister-in-law’s on the Vineyard and I had India on my lap and the TV was on.  At first I thought this had to be some new trailer for a movie but it just didn’t register what was happening. Then it became all too real with the following events and the aftermath. The most frightened I have ever been thinking this was the world our children were inheriting. She is six now and it still scares the shit out of me. *** KAREN DeBIASSE (Girl On Top): We were eating in the North End one evening when the waitress entered screaming, “There’s a dead lady out there!  There’s a dead lady out there!”  Of course we all went out look.  Parked in front of the restaurant was a fancy white Cadillac, engine running, doors locked, with a dead woman, mouth wide open, white as a ghost hunched over in the passenger seat dead.  The cops couldn’t get in because the doors were all locked.  Strange and eerie. *** DICK TATE (The Prime Movers/ Middle East): Ace Frehley up close without his makeup on—OUCH! *** TIM FARRELL (Miskatonic): Scariest thing I ever saw? Dick Cheney in a thong. Wait, I haven’t seen that. Thank God! *** MIKE LANGLIE (Twink): Watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV for the first time. Seeing the animated abominable snowman peer over the mountain sent me screaming and gave me nightmares for weeks. Pretty silly now but it blew my five-year-old mind. I really expected it to climb out of the TV like in The Ring. *** STIX SIGMA (The Allstonians/ The Hammond Group): The scariest thing I’ve ever seen was the sight of several Allstonians including yours truly drinking grappa with our Italian tour manager, Chico, until he got sick in the parking lot of a communist youth center in Modena, Italy. Pavarotti didn’t show up that night. *** RUBY BIRD (Bird Mancini): I have never seen more scary, red-necked, boneheaded people than when I played in a band in Omaha. We played a club called The Alibi every Sunday to a room full of Hell’s Angels... these are the original Hell’s Angels, not the second shifters out in L.A. Oddly enough, they weren’t as scary as the farmer townies who would hang around in gangs after our gigs and swing mic stands at us just for kicks. One night they split our friend’s head wide open. Glad those days are far behind me! *** JOSE DE LARA (Protokoll): Well, morbid curiosity once got the best of me and I saw one of the Iraqi jihadist beheading videos. It was one of the most frighteningly macabre things I have ever seen human beings do to an individual. We live in an age where information is mostly free and available to the masses online. We can see things that happen in the world that normally we would be ignorant to because of the availability of the Internet. I strangely find justification in viewing these videos however, because I think that it’s a heavy way of personally finding some sense of visual awareness of the sheer human brutality that is happening in that particular part of the world. *** MJ QUIRK (Hixx/ Last Ones): The scariest thing I’ve ever seen was the Screen Gems closing logo that they used to show after Bewitched. That music creeped me out big time when I was a kid. The flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz are a close second. *** TIM MUNGENAST (…& His Preexisting Conditions): The scariest thing I ever saw (besides the view from the back-seat window of my big brother’s car as it spun, slid off the road, and rolled down an embankment) was when I was driving behind an ambulance. Through the window I saw a pair of bare feet thrashing up and down. It really freaked me out as I tried to imagine what this fellow was going through. Twenty years later it still gives me the willies... I hope the EMTs were able to save him. Lolita: Tim, it sounds like you should avoid automobiles and not look through their evil windshields.