Concert T-Shirts

I had addressed this issue briefly in my Tool & Concerts blog, but now it’s time to go into a little more detail.

Concert t-shirts seem to be available for any major artist who tours, but they are the specialty of rock bands, particularly metal bands.  You’ll see Maiden shirts worn around, but when’s the last time you saw someone wearing a Janet Jackson shirt, a Mariah Carey shirt, or a Madonna shirt?  The black tour shirt is undeniably associated with the likes of Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Slayer, Anthrax, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Dio, Motley Crue, Skid Row, etc.

I’m not a manager and don’t pretend to grasp the economics of rock bands, but my understanding (especially after hearing of Marillion’s dispute with a venue over this issue) is that bands make a considerable amount of money on t-shirts and other merchandise sold at the venues, more so than the albums or concert tickets.

So it’s a little bizarre when it seems some bands, notably Wishbone Ash and Blue Oyster Cult, seem to offer a spectacularly poor and dull array of t-shirts – indeed, almost as an afterthought.  “Oh, by the way, here are some t-shirts you might want to buy.”  The WA shirt was a baseball-style (white with long black sleeves) that simply had “Wishbone Ash” in baseball-style script, whereas BOC usually give us the first album graphic yet again, or simply their Cronos/Saturn cross logo with the band name (ZZZ).  Occasionally Godzilla or the Reaper will reappear, but by now those are too traditional and boring to catch my imagination.  Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, however, appear to put far more imagination and creativity into this “art form”, you might call it.

Front.  The least imaginative image to grace the front of a metal t-shirt is simply the album cover of the most recent album, but this appears to be the default.  Some bands will screw around with this and offer some sort of clever variation (again, Maiden are the best for this).  Jethro Tull seem to default to Aqualung or Ian Anderson standing on one leg playing his flute, or Broadsword and the Beast; Floyd tend to pull out the ubiquitous pig or Dark Side prism.  Occasionally something really remarkable will fly out from the twisted brains of the t-shirt designers.  I still have my Metallica “Metal Up Your Ass” shirt I bought at Donington in 1985 (the ONLY shirt Metallica was selling – as if I had a choice!) with the hand coming up from a toilet with an army knife.  And long lost, and long missed, is my Scorpions “Crazy World” shirt with the “scorpion” made up of various provocatively built and dressed women.  The all time best for sleazy and inappropriate is, of course, Whitesnake’s Lovehunter, which I had in shirt form before I was even aware the album existed, which shows a very well built, and very naked, woman, riding a very large snake coiled up and arching its hood at her.

Back. Unchained from the “album cover” motif, the back of a shirt is the band’s opportunity to draw on a tabla rasa and give us something special.  A blank back is a real cop-out.  Actually, as unoriginal as they might be, I prefer tour dates on the back, unless it’s something knock-down, drag-out amazing.  Examples: Yngwie Malmsteen (“Yngwie FUCKING Malmsteen!”), Motorhead (“Born to Lose, Live to Win” with the Ace of Spades), and my favorite, Monster Magnet (“Space Lord MOTHER FUCKER”).  From a European tour of Pink Floyd (Delicate Sound of Thunder tour – a tour of a live album??) the map of Europe with each country filled in with its flag, and PINK FLOYD in Cyrillic lettering.

Variants.  For a long time, the baseball jersey – by which I mean, white shirt with long black sleeves – was popular.  In more recent years, colors other than black or white popped up.  My brother got a great shirt in deep, dark navy blue from Marillion, and I got grey shirts from Tool, Queens of the Stone Age, and Orange Goblin.  Back in 1986, when Accept were on their Russian Roulette Tour, they even offered shirts in olive drab.  Actual baseball variants – with buttons down the front – have popped up, and Metallica had a very pricey hockey jersey.  Iron Maiden – again, thinking outside the box! – has issued several soccer jerseys.

Tie Dyes.  Typically this is the realm of the Grateful Dead, though some other bands try to lock into this genre.  The Allman Brothers are probably the #2 band for this; I find Ratdog (Bobby Weir’s band) or Phil Lesh & Friends to be derivative of the Dead and part and parcel of the same act.  Usually you conceive of a tie dye as being appropriate for a jam band like GD or AB, so when AC/DC or KISS tries to do it, it seems a little stupid.  Having said that, I’ve bought an AC/DC tie dye – only because it looked so damn good – and a Jethro Tull tie dye (because it was the best one of any shirt they had for sale).  I have a Hawkwind tie dye from the Space Bandits tour, unfortunately a time when I was still buying shirts in L and not XL.

Sizes & shrinkage.  The other thing is washing the hell out of your black t-shirt to give it the “veteran dark grey” look.  One of my favorites is my Iron Maiden “Trooper” shirt which definitely fits that description.  We used to get shirts in M or L back when we were teenagers.  Now that I’m older and a little bigger (!) than I was in 1988, I buy in XL and find they usually fit OK, even after a few runs through the dryer at maximum heat (permanent press?  What’s that?).  A well-worn, dark grey shirt that clearly used to be black shows the rest of the metaleiros that you’ve been going to concerts for some time and didn’t buy your t-shirt at Macy’s or Sears (right, they were opening for Hannah Montana in a store concert).

What to wear, what to wear?  I mentioned earlier about the food court druids at metal shows, who can’t be content to simply wear the usual metal uniform of “black concert t-shirt and jeans” but have to do this trench coat, eyeliner crap, or for the ladies, the fishnet stockings & Doc Martens deal.  The comic “Cathy” would have us believe that it’s only men who have no self-consciousness, but I’ve seen too many girls at metal shows who dress provocatively, only to demonstrate how many meals they haven’t missed.   For every Tawny Kitaen (inevitably there with her Lorenzo Lamas-lookalike biker boyfriend) there are 4-5 Kirstie Alleys, there with their Comic Book Guy boyfriends. 

            These days I’m too jaded to bother even wearing a concert t-shirt and just wear whatever I happen to be wearing that day, usually a soccer jersey.  In the past I might have worn a shirt from the band I’m actually going to see.  Is that some sort of violation, a metal fashion faux pas? (Droz: "You're wearing the shirt of the band you're going to see?  Don't be that guy!").  Sometimes it seems the goal is to wear the oldest shirt you have, in some sort of pissing contest with the other veterans.  “You have a Born Again tour jersey?  I have Never Say Die!”  “Pssst, I have you both beat! I have a Polka Tulk tour shirt!”  Ultimately, though, since we usually buy a shirt at the show, and it’s more convenient to wear a shirt than to carry it around with you (and maybe lose it) you end up putting it on over whatever shirt you so carefully picked out at home and end up looking exactly the same as 50% of the audience who are doing exactly the same thing.

After the show.  Now we’re in our late 30s, with regular jobs.  We’re not in high school anymore.  Metal shirts aren’t even acceptable as casual wear, more like “here’s what you wear when mowing the lawn, painting the house, or changing the oil in your minivan.” It’s reached the point where the only place you can wear them is...at metal shows!  I joked that they need to make concert ties for us to wear with suits – or better yet, entire suits (jacket and pants).  If you can get a real tattoo at an Ozzfest, why not a tailored suit?  Well, at the AC/DC show we’ll make sure the suit pants are actually shorts, so you can go to work the day after an AC/DC show in the Angus outfit and instead of shocked stares, you get “whoa, cool, Angus, man!” in the hallway.

Come to think of it, the demographic at a KISS or Aerosmith show is fairly skewed towards the older edge of the age spectrum.  The Ozzfest does attract the teenagers, mainly due to all the Slipknot, Disturbed, and other crappy bands that pass for metal these days; we may disagree with Sharon Osbourne fairly often, but she does know which bands draw in the under-20 demographic.  I saw Tesla in 2004, and the person I went with – all of 20 years old – was still young enough to be the daughter of the average audience member.  (Rolling Stones: Steel Wheelchairs Tour!  Jethro Tull: Too Old To Rock’n’Roll, Too Young To Die).